Woman 'speaks' to dead mother using AI tool: 'It helped me move on'

The AI tool called Project December is powered by OpenAI’s GPT2 and simulates the dead.

A woman who lives in Berlin, Germany, used Artificial Intelligence (AI) to connect with her dead mother, New York Post reported. Sirine Malas lost her mother to kidney failure in 2018. She had given birth to her first child, Ischtar, before her mother’s death, but never got the chance to introduce them as she was separated from her mother in 2015 when she fled to Germany from Syria.

After her mother’s death, Malas was absolutely devastated. So, she turned to an AI toolcalled Project December to connect with her. “When you’re weak, you accept anything,” she said. “She was a guiding force in my life. She taught me how to love myself.”

The AI tool, powered by OpenAI’s GPT2 simulates the dead. The user has to fill out a form with some information about the deceased like their age, relationship and a quote. The tool then creates a profile based on the information provided. For $10 an hour, users can have a conversation with the AI chatbot. According to the app’s founder, Jason Rohrer, the app has over 3,000 users and most of them have used it to talk to a loved one.

“Most people who use Project December for this purpose have their final conversation with their dead loved one in a simulated way and then move on,” he said.

Malas described her experience as “spooky” and “strangely realistic”. She claimed that the chatbot called her by her nickname, that she had provided, and told her that her mother was watching over her.

“There were moments that I felt were very real. There were also moments where I thought anyone could have answered that this way,” Malas added. “My mom could drop a few words in telling me that it’s really me or it’s just someone pretending to be me, I would be able to tell. And I think there were moments like that.”

Malas said that the tool helped her to move on but also warned that users could get too attached to it which “could be dangerous”.

“It’s very useful and it’s very revolutionary. I was very careful not to get too caught up with it,” she explained. “I can see people easily getting addicted to using it, getting disillusioned by it, wanting to believe it to the point where it can go bad.”

Rohrer claimed that he hasn’t seen people getting hooked to the app. “I mean, there are very few customers who keep coming back and keep the person alive,” he said.

However, a British therapist named Billie Dunlevy thinks that the app could complicate the natural grieving process. “The majority of grief therapy is about learning to come to terms with the absence, learning to recognise the new reality or the new normal, so this could interrupt that,” she told Sky News.

“You get this vulnerability coupled with this potential power to sort of create this ghost version of a lost parent or a lost child or lost friends. And that could be really detrimental to people actually moving on through grief and getting better,” she added.