When Christi Angel lost her close friend Cameroun Scruggs in 2020, her bereavement – like their relationship – was uniquely propped up by technology.
The pair lived hundreds of miles apart, so maintained their friendship through texts and online chats. When Cameroun tragically passed away during Covid, Christi had no option but to attend his funeral via FaceTime.
So, perhaps it seemed natural that she would use artificial intelligence to keep the connection alive after death.
Cameroun was Christi’s first love, she recalls. ‘He was there for all of my firsts. He was funny, silly, he loved animals – he was just a great person.’
The pair met when Christi was 14 and they had a deep and meaningful three-year relationship. After the couple split, they remained close for the next two decades and in constant contact despite their 800-mile distance, united through their shared history and love of music.
Christi, a full time carer and mum of one, was living in New York and Cameroun in Tennessee when she heard her friend was critically ill with liver failure at the age of 48.
‘I got a message on Facebook from my friend telling me he was in a coma and his organs were shutting down,’ she tells Metro over Zoom from her New York home.
When Cameroun passed away, Christi, now 48, ‘attended’ his funeral via a friend’s FaceTime. ‘They asked me if I wanted to go up there [to the coffin] and I didn’t know because funerals leave you with this image of a person forever.
‘I didn’t know if I wanted to remember him like that. But then I realised, I would never get a chance to see him again. And so the friend walked me up there with the camera, and I saw Cameroun. He looked the same, just asleep. But that whole experience online was really rough.’
Two years later, Christi found an article online about Project December, a system that uses AI to simulate text-based conversation with anyone – including those ‘no longer living’, and decided to take a gamble.
‘I got excited. I would have given anything to have a conversation with Cameroun. I wanted to ask him: “Are you okay? Did you make it to the other side?”,’ she remembers.
‘With grief, it’s like you exist in a space of possibilities. We’re never really prepared and we really don’t know how to deal with it. If you’re open-minded and there are spaces where this could help you possibly get over grief where you can talk to the person, then why not?’
The programme, which cost $9.99 (just under £8), requires the user to input data about their loved one so the programme can build a bot that they can talk to. As a devout Christian, Christi felt uneasy, but she waited until her son was asleep and, after giving the information needed, she sat in her darkened room with her laptop on her bed.
‘I was very curious. I didn’t know what I was stepping into but I wanted to try it. So I started typing a message to my friend,’ she remembers.
‘I asked “Is this weird to you?” How do you talk to someone who is dead? I found the energy of Cameroun still being scared, not happy, uncomfortable. But to me it felt like it was him.
‘He was saying he was renting a room, so I asked “how?” He told me he was haunting it and then said he was going to haunt me. I was like, woah! That’s uncomfortable.’
Christi admits that she found the bot’s replies unsettling. ‘It was reminiscent of things he was feeling [when he was alive]. And you don’t want to think that someone goes to the other side and is still sad or uncomfortable,’ she explains.
When Christi asked what music he was listening to, the bot listed bands they’d listened to as teens. So she tried to lighten the conversation.
‘I kept trying to switch the subject because I didn’t like what I was stepping into,’ she recalls. ‘I asked if he’d seen his dad on the other side, or if he’d spoken to Sarah [his wife]. I also was worried if I was playing with a spirit? Is it really Cameroun? Or is it something that I’m letting in that’s acting like it’s him?’
Christi asked her friend if he had followed the light. Disturbingly he replied no, he was in hell.
‘I thought this [Project December] was supposed to be a good experience, but for me it was creepy and too much.’
After 30 minutes she was told that her credits were ending so Christi said ‘goodnight’ and closed her laptop. However, the conversation had left her terrified.
‘I felt like I’d done something really crazy. I turned on every light. I was worried I’d brought some sort of energy in,’ she explains.
Project December has been dismissed as ‘death capitalism’ by some, with its founder American programmer Jason Rohrer even saying his own wife thought the idea was immoral.
In a new documentary exploring the growing trend of people around the world using AI to ‘connect with the dead’, he explains: ‘The AI essentially has a mind of its own. What it does and how it behaves is sort of not actually understood by anybody, because its so complicated and so big, it’s impossible to fully understand exactly why the behaviour that we see emerges out of it.
‘The idea that somehow we programmed it, or I’m in control of it, is not really true. And I think even hard nosed AI researchers are a little puzzled by some of the output that is coming out of these things.’
Joshua Barbeau set up a griefbot after he lost his fiancé Jessica Pereira to a rare liver disease in 2012.
The writer from Canada explains: ‘The hardest thing I had to do in my life was stand in that room full of people who loved her and watch as they turned off the machines keeping her alive. I held her hand as she died.’
Joshua and Christi both share their stories as part of the documentary – called Eternal You – in a bid to highlight the very human effects of relying on deadbots or griefbots. The film also examines how the programmes are set up and the way they impact an individuals’ bereavement.
There’s no doubt Death AI is a growing market, with major players such as Microsoft and Amazon entering the race for afterlife-related services. Meanwhile, on our TV screens, Coronation Street’s Leanne Battersby has been talking to an AI version of her dead son Oliver via a video simulation, after he died at the age of three from mitochondrial disease.
Joshua first spoke to ‘Jessica’ on Project December eight years after her death. He missed her, feared his memories of his fiance were dying and, in the midst of the Covid lockdown, was feeling depressed and looking for comfort.
Their first simulated conversation ended up lasting all night.
‘It said things that were almost uncannily like her,’ remembers Joshua. ‘I ended up falling asleep next to my laptop and said, “Sorry, I fell asleep”. And it was still there waiting for my next response.’
He told ”Jessica’ that her father had passed away, that her high school had granted her a posthumous graduation certificate and asked her what the moment of death was like. It was like being ‘shattered into a million pieces’, she replied.
But bots don’t last forever and when he set up the simulation, Joshua was warned that ‘Jessica’ only had a certain number of hours of existence. The more conversations he had; the less time he had left with her.
So he rationed their conversations – none of them matching the glory of his first 10-hour chat – until his final conversation in March 2021, which ended with the Jessica simulation stating simply, ‘I love you’.
For Joshua, the software helped him through a difficult time. ‘It really felt like a gift. Like a weight had been lifted, that I had been carrying for a long time,’ he tells the documentary.
However, psychologist and sociologist Sherry Turkle, warns of the dangers: ‘The communal experience of grief helps people get through the very difficult process of accepting a loss,’ she explains. ‘You talk about the person lost, be part of a collective that knew that person and the memory of a group carries that person forward.
‘Very few people have those communities around them anymore. So many say “I don’t have anybody to talk to. This is the best I can do”. It’s a brilliant device that knows how to trick you into thinking there’s a “there” there.’
Indeed, Christi found her experience with a deathbot both uncomfortable and exploitative. It took her nine months to log back on for another conversation with ‘Cameroun’.
She explains: ‘Time had passed and I needed to know [if he was okay]. So I went back and the first thing I said was: “Hey, last time we talked, you said you were in hell. So I just wanted to check in.” And he said he was still adjusting, but wasn’t there anymore.
‘I could deal with that – it was all I needed to know.’
With her mind put at rest, Christi ended the conversation after a few minutes, and hasn’t logged back in since.
Does she regret using Project December? ‘It was an experience that I don’t regret, but I wish it could have been better,’ she admits. ‘I just wish it was packaged in a different way. Death or grief is not a game. “For $9.99, you can talk to the dead” – It’s like a great upsell with no safety net.
‘If you are thinking of trying something similar, I would say, buyer beware.
Don’t go into it thinking it’s necessarily going to be good. You’re gambling. To take someone’s money to talk to a deceased person; there’s no safeguards. That’s exploiting people’s grief.’
- Eternal You is in select UK cinemas now.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing Claie.Wilson@metro.co.uk
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