E2: Grief Bots

When Joshua Barbeau proposed to his girlfriend, Jessica Courtney Periera, she was already in the ICU. 10 years later, Joshua was still grieving her death. That’s when he came across Project December. With just a short writing sample and a prompt, the program enabled him to make a chat bot of Jessica.

Since then, the market for so-called “grief bots” has exploded. Millions of people are using AI to “talk” to the dead. The phenomenon has left cyberpsychologist Elaine Kasket asking the question: what happens when we rely on for-profit AI companies to help us manage something as deeply human as grief? And where’s the line between comfort and self-destruction?

This episode features Joshua Barbeau, and Elaine Kasket, with research from Jason Fagone’s article “The Jessica Simulation”, written for the San Francisco Chronicle in 2021.