I brought my dead partner back to life using £8 AI app to finally say goodbye – what ‘he’ told me will haunt me forever

WRITING to his girlfriend, Joshua Barbeau could hardly believe the response – especially as he’d watched her die in 2012.

“Jessica… is that really you?” he typed.

It’s not the only thing that Black Mirror has eerily predicted[/caption]

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Eternal You looks at the pros and cons of grieftech[/caption]

Jason Rohrer, the video-game designer behind The Project December platform, explains it started as an art project to create chatbot personas.

It was then adopted by early users, like Joshua, to recreate deceased partners, friends and relatives and has since rebranded with the website strapline: “simulate the dead.”

Coronation Street fans were horrified earlier this year, when Leanne Battersby started speaking to an AI version of her dead son Oliver, calling the storyline “sick”.

But Jason denies his site is “death capitalism”.

He insists: “It’s not my place to determine how other people deal with their own compulsions and self-control issues.

“We don’t need to sit there and say ‘oh, don’t forget.. Don’t let yourself succumb to the illusion; It’s not real.’ That just doesn’t make for a good experience.”

He adds: “I believe consenting adults can use technology however they want and they are responsible for what they are doing. It’s not my job, as the creator of technology, to stop the technology being released because I’m afraid of what someone may do with it.”

‘I’ll haunt you’

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Project December user Christi Angel was horrified by her partner Cameroun’s words[/caption]

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He told her he was “in hell” with “addicts”[/caption]

But for some users, like Christi Angel, the lure of the tech has evoked upsetting and often disturbing feelings.

Christi, 47, from New York, read a piece Joshua had written about his experience and decided to try Project December for herself.

Her partner Cameroun had died.

She had regretted never having a chance to give a proper goodbye.

It’s like putting a self-driving car out on the street that kills ten people and saying, ‘oh, sorry, it was really hard to control. It wasn’t us, it was the generative AI model.’

Carl OhmanDigital Afterlife Industry researcher

Again, she answered a series of basic questions about her late partner, including what his pet name for her was.

At first, the conversation felt overwhelmingly authentic – above and beyond what she’d expected for the information she’d given the programme.

She says: “The damn AI texts like him. The vernacular, the shortened words. Why would they know that?”

Before long, though, their chatbot conversations had taken a sinister turn.

The Cameroun bot told her “I’m in hell” and that he was “surrounded by addicts” – not the comfort Christi was after.

“Then he says, ‘I’ll haunt you’,” Christi says. “I just pushed the computer back because that scared me. I believe in god. I’m a Christian. I believe that people can get possessed.

“I was afraid to tell my mother because I know she believes in sin. My Christian mind goes into, ‘you’re playing with a demon, or something.

“This experience –  it was creepy.”

Pandora’s box of questions

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This new tech opens up a Pandora’s box of moral and legal questions[/caption]

Experimental afterlife technologies like this are now being developed across the world.

They are opening up a Pandora’s box of moral and legal questions.

Carl Ohman, a researcher on the Digital Afterlife Industry, says: “Our way of interacting with technology is becoming increasingly immersive and ust as it makes the emotional impact stronger, it also makes the moral implications stronger.”

He adds: “Whenever people say that they can’t take responsibility for what their generative AI model says or does, it’s like putting a self-driving car out on the street that kills ten people and saying, ‘oh, sorry, it was really hard to control. It wasn’t us, it was the generative AI model.’

“Well, obviously you haven’t tested it enough.

“Any product that you are releasing into the market is tested before it is released. That is the very responsibility of the company producing it.”

Despite concerns, Carl predicts the industry is still set to boom across the world.

He says: “Some services send videos to your loved ones after your death. Some companies use a digital footprint and analyse that to try to replicate someone’s personality.

“Then you have the really freaky ones that have digital avatars that can speak and interact with the users.

“The development of artificial intelligence happened so fast that we’re going to see an increasingly morbid industry growing, especially in the digital afterlife business.”

Other examples of AI “grieftech” in the 90-minute documentary include YOV, which stands for “You, Only Virtual”.

It allows people to build posthumous “versonas” of themselves before they die so they can live on digitally in chatbot or audio form.

The US company can also create versonas from deceased people’s data.

Justin Harrison, YOV’s founder, created a versona of his mother, Melodi, with her co-operation before she died in 2022.

The 41 year-old still speaks to Melodi’s versona, which can be updated with knowledge of current events and remembers previous discussions, creating what he describes as an “ever-evolving sense of comfort”.

‘Disgusting’ meet-up with child

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Jang Ji-sung in Eternal You, a documentary about grieftech[/caption]

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Controversial TV show Meeting You made it possible for her to meet her late daughter[/caption]

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Her other daughter watched on crying[/caption]

Grief-stricken mother Jang Ji-sung, 47, lost her seven-year-old daughter Nayeon to a rare illness eight years ago.

BBC viewers will follow Jang’s journey after she agrees to take part in a TV show called Meeting You in her native South Korea.

It has produced a virtual-reality version of her child four years later.

Like many others drawn to the technology, she feels she never got the chance to say goodbye properly.

Tearing up before the experiment she says: “I just thought, ‘it’d be great to see her again.’

Footage of the meeting shows an emotional Jang, wearing a VR headset, interacting with her virtual child in a VR playground, while her other daughter watches on in tears.

Her daughter’s avatar asks: “Mum, where have you been? Mum, did you think about me?”

Sobbing, Jang replies: “How have you been, Nayeon? Mummy missed you so much.”

The video, which was posted onto YouTube, sparked a debate about voyeurism.

Many described it as “a disgusting thing to do to a mother.”

Carl says: “When I first heard about this case in Korea I looked with  horror upon the advent of this technology. 

“It’s able to hijack the things that we love the most; I don’t know any driving force more important to me than being with or protecting my children.”

Psychologist Sherry Turkle, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, adds: “Artificial intelligence promises us what religion does.

“You don’t have to die. You can be somehow reborn someplace else in a different form. There is meaning in technology.”

But she also warned of the tech’s dangers.

She says: “We have to worry about it. We have to keep it in check because I think it’s leading us down a dangerous path.”

Eternal You airs on BBC Four at 10pm on Tuesday, October 29th.