Hello from the other side
I wanted to write something about our memories. Murphy's Law lives here now.
I lost my small set of newsletter subscribers when Elon shut down Revue for reasons as inexplicable as everything else he’s done since taking over Twitter. But I’m going to write Murphy’s Law infrequently here now.
Don’t Speak, Memory
What do you remember as your earliest memories? Before a certain age, they’re just flashes and fragments. Moments that have somehow stuck with you when so many others have faded.
For me, there’s two I remember that I should be too young to remember. My first memory is rolling a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles van along the hardwood floor of the first house I lived in. It’s just a moment of green and yellow. My mom tells me I got that truck for my second Christmas, and we left that house not long after.
My other memory is of being on a small boat on a lake, pulling away from a dock by a red house with my dad on shore. It was my grandparents’ cabin in New Hampshire. I probably wasn’t that much older.
Part of me would love to be able to dive back into these scenes, decades later. What did my living room in New Jersey look like that Christmas? What did my dad look like, and how did he act, when he was younger than I am now?
When my dad passed away four years ago, I wrote something imploring people to make sure they had digital or physical copies of images of the people they loved. My sister and I realized as we were making collages of my dad’s life through photos that there was a ten-year gap when we stopped printing photos but hadn’t switched to smartphones and the cloud. I had thought in that moment, as I had in the years prior covering technology and the burgeoning generative AI space, that it would be comforting to feed all of the data I had on my dad into some model, to create some chatbot I could turn to when I missed him. A dadbot, if you will.
Throughout my life, especially in matters related to my career, my dad was a valued sounding board. I didn’t always agree with his advice (fathers and sons, and all that), but it always helped to talk through things with him. I had thought, if I took the decades of texts and emails I had with him, added in the few videos of him there are online, perhaps I could keep him with me a little bit. Eugenia Kuyda, the founder of the Replika chatbot service, had thought the same way when her best friend unexpectedly died at a young age. She created a simulacrum of his written mannerisms with her bot service she’d be working to build.
I followed her for a few days before the launch of Replika, and tested the service out for hours on end. Back then, it was just a program that had small conversations with you each day, and after a while, it would “learn” to mimic how you wrote. I was in a rough place when I was working on that feature, and compared what Kuyda’s work was doing to real therapy, as well as past examples of people perceiving value out of call-and-response systems, like MIT’s ELIZA program from the 1960s.
We are simple beings, and when we’re sad, we lean into comfort where we can find it.
I saw a tweet today from someone touting the potential power in new and future generative AI systems to be able to keep the essence of a person alive. The hype explosion happening in AI right now is the result of ChatGPT from OpenAI, a company originally founded as a nonprofit to curtail any negative externalities from advanced future AI systems. That goal has shifted somewhat in recent years.
The tweet isn’t wrong at all. What we’ve seen with deepfakes, chatbots, synthesized voices, and AI models that are light enough to run on a smartphone is truly astounding. There will be some amazing uses for these technologies in the near future, as well as some very dull but important ones, and some that should get explored but probably shouldn’t.
I remember the pain of the day my father died, the numbness that followed, the anxiety that preceded it. I remember how I felt putting those collages together. But I also know how I feel today. Letting go of the immediacy of a person you care for is OK. It hurts every single day, some days far worse than others, that my dad is not here. But dwelling on that absence, and trying to fill it with a lie, however real it feels, will not help me heal.
The person who tweeted responded to their tweet realizing that they had touched a nerve with some folks. But they argued that it was an extension of how they honor the dead with the Shradh in the Hindu religion. There’s many other similar remembrances in other cultures and countries. I carry my father’s mass card in my wallet.
There’s an adage that no one is truly dead until they are forgotten. Memories are imperfect, and I can see how people could want to fill in the blanks, in a way. But would technology like this actually help you work through grief? Would it be what your loved one wanted for you — or themselves?
Sometimes you have to just let go.