Woman Chats With Her Dead Mother Using AI

After her mother’s death, Sirine Malas was desperate for an outlet for her grief. “When you’re weak, you accept anything,” she says.

The actress was separated from her mother Najah after fleeing Syria, their home country, to move to Germany in 2015. In Berlin, Sirine gave birth to her first child — a daughter called Ischtar — and she wanted more than anything for her mother to meet her. But before they had chance, tragedy struck.

Najah died unexpectedly from kidney failure in 2018 at the age of 82. “She was a guiding force in my life,” Sirine says of her mother. “She taught me how to love myself.”

“The whole thing was cruel because it happened suddenly. I really, really wanted her to meet my daughter and I wanted to have that last reunion. The grief was unbearable, says Sirine.

“You just want any outlet,” she adds. “For all those emotions… if you leave it there, it just starts killing you, it starts choking you. I wanted that last chance (to speak to her).”

After four years of struggling to process her loss, Sirine turned to Project December, an AI tool that claims to “simulate the dead”.

Users fill in a short online form with information about the person they’ve lost, including their age, relationship to the user and a quote from the person.

The responses are then fed into an AI chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT2, an early version of the large language model behind ChatGPT. This generates a profile based on the user’s memory of the deceased person.

Such models are typically trained on a vast array of books, articles and text from all over the internet to generate responses to questions in a manner similar to a word prediction tool. The responses are not based on factual accuracy.

At a cost of $10 (about Sh1,300), users can message the chatbot for about an hour.

For Sirine, the results of using the chatbot were “spooky”.

“There were moments that I felt were very real,” she says. “There were also moments where I thought anyone could have answered that this way.”

Imitating her mother, the messages from the chatbot referred to Sirine by her pet name – which she had included in the online form – asked if she was eating well, and told her that she was watching her.

“I am a bit of a spiritual person and I felt that this is a vehicle,” Sirine says.

Project December has more than 3,000 users, the majority of whom have used it to imitate a deceased loved one in conversation.

Jason Rohrer, the founder of the service, says users are typically people who have dealt with the sudden loss of a loved one.

-Sky News