Good morning. The late rock singer Ozzy Osbourne’s son, Jack, spoke recently about the fact that the family have worked with an AI provider to make a digital version of his father a year after his death. Digital Ozzy, an AI generated life-sized avatar, will be able, from beyond the grave, to talk, laugh, answer questions from and tease whoever wants to speak with him; just as Ozzy Osborne did when he was alive. The CEO of the AI company making this, commented that the avatar’s created from ‘authenticated source material, consented and controlled by those who love him most’. His choice of language is striking. Love and control. Living and consent. There is a growing market – estimated at more than £100 billion worldwide for the ‘grief tech’ industry, including what are called griefbots: an AI tool that recreates the dead as a comfort for the living.
Organised religion, until recent decades, exercising a near-monopoly on the rituals and processes around death, might reasonably be supposed to be against this. But as evidenced by Pope Leo’s first encyclical released on Monday, which addresses humanity’s relationship with AI, the need for public debate about the ethics and morality of the use of AI is urgent, given the speed of change in its capabilities. The starting point for the consideration of a grief bot is that the inalienable dignity of a human being who’s lived, according to Christian teaching, as someone created in the image of God, continues after death. But we know too that at the point of death, we no longer have any control over how we’re spoken about, how our past actions are interpreted. We’re no longer able to explain ourselves or surprise even the ones who love us best and miss us most. We are, in a curious way, at our most vulnerable, to exploitation or misuse by anyone who might make money from our memory. In this way, dying is the ultimate act of trust - not only in God - but in the people we leave behind. We can ask them to promise us that they will say certain things, scatter our ashes in certain places, live a certain way themselves. But we can’t make them, we have to trust them. Perhaps we begin by recognising that the messy, contradictory, heartache of grief is tender territory whenever it’s invaded by commercialising forces. And in the use of a griefbot, the inalienable dignity of a person is under question at precisely the time when the person who’s died has no voice to contest what’s being done in their name. Love and control. Living and consent.
The choices of individuals who have the funds to do this for the people they’ve lost raise fundamental questions not just for them but for all the rest of us in society – who, inevitably, will die one day too.
