Woman ‘chats’ to dead mother using AI – with ‘spooky’ results
After her mother’s death, Sirine Malas was desperate for an outlet for her grief.
“When you’re weak, you accept anything,” she says.
The actress was separated from her mother Najah after fleeing Syria, their home country, to move to Germany in 2015.
In Berlin, Sirine gave birth to her first child – a daughter called Ischtar – and she wanted more than anything for her mother to meet her. But before they had chance, tragedy struck.
Sirine’s mother Najah
Najah died unexpectedly from kidney failure in 2018 at the age of 82.
“She was a guiding force in my life,” Sirine says of her mother. “She taught me how to love myself.
“The whole thing was cruel because it happened suddenly.
“I really, really wanted her to meet my daughter and I wanted to have that last reunion.”
The grief was unbearable, says Sirine.
Sirine and her daughter Ischtar
“You just want any outlet,” she adds. “For all those emotions… if you leave it there, it just starts killing you, it starts choking you.
“I wanted that last chance (to speak to her).”
After four years of struggling to process her loss, Sirine turned to Project December, an AI tool that claims to “simulate the dead”.
Users fill in a short online form with information about the person they’ve lost, including their age, relationship to the user and a quote from the person.
Sirine says her mother was the ‘guiding force’ in her life
The responses are then fed into an AI chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT2, an early version of the large language model behind ChatGPT. This generates a profile based on the user’s memory of the deceased person.
Such models are typically trained on a vast array of books, articles and text from all over the internet to generate responses to questions in a manner similar to a word prediction tool. The responses are not based on factual accuracy.
At a cost of $10 (about £7.80), users can message the chatbot for about an hour.
For Sirine, the results of using the chatbot were “spooky”.
“There were moments that I felt were very real,” she says. “There were also moments where I thought anyone could have answered that this way.”
Imitating her mother, the messages from the chatbot referred to Sirine by her pet name – which she had included in the online form – asked if she was eating well, and told her that she was watching her.
“I am a bit of a spiritual person and I felt that this is a vehicle,” Sirine says.
“My mum 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.”
Sirine’s mother and father
Project December has more than 3,000 users, the majority of whom have used it to imitate a deceased loved one in conversation.
Jason Rohrer, the founder of the service, says users are typically people who have dealt with the sudden loss of a loved one.
Jason Rohrer founded Project December
“Most people who use Project December for this purpose have their final conversation with this dead loved one in a simulated way and then move on,” he says.
“I mean, there are very few customers who keep coming back and keep the person alive.”
He says there isn’t much evidence that people get “hooked” on the tool and struggle to let go.
However, there are concerns that such tools could interrupt the natural process of grieving.
Billie Dunlevy, a therapist accredited by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, says: “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.”
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In the aftermath of grief, some people retreat and become isolated, the therapist says.
She adds: “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.”
Therapist Billie Dunlevy
There are currently no specific regulations governing the use of AI technology to imitate the dead.
The world’s first comprehensive legal framework on AI is passing through the final stages of the European parliament before it is passed into law, when it would enforce regulations based on the level of risk posed by different uses of AI.
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The Project December chatbot gave Sirine some of the closure she needed, but she warned bereaved people to tread carefully.
“It’s very useful and it’s very revolutionary,” she says.
“I was very careful not to get too caught up with it.
“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.
“I wouldn’t recommend people getting too attached to something like that because it could be dangerous.”
Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former “thug” and “pit bull”, has been accused of lying about a phone call he says he made to the former US president about payments to ex porn star Stormy Daniels.
Cohen, a lawyer who worked for the Trump Organisation from 2006 to 2017, has been giving evidence in the case about hush money payments to Ms Daniels – in an attempt to cover up an alleged sexual encounter in 2006.
Trump’s lawyer, Todd Blanche, called into question an important detail – a phone call made by Cohen to Trump’s assistant, Keith Schiller, on 24 October 2016.
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Cohen, 57, has maintained that during that call he spoke to Trump (who was either given the phone by Mr Schiller or placed on loudspeaker – we don’t know which) and told him he had paid Ms Daniels $130,000 in hush money on his behalf.
But Mr Blanche called this into doubt – showing the jury a number of interactions suggesting Cohen was in contact with Mr Schiller about a different issue at the same time, namely that he was receiving harassing phone calls and texts from a 14-year-old child.
“That was a lie – you did not talk to President Trump on that night, you talked to Keith Schiller about what we just went through,” Mr Blanche said.
Cohen said that, based on his records, he believes he spoke to Trump about the Stormy Daniels matter.
“We are not asking for your belief,” Mr Blanche said. “This jury does not want to hear what you think happened.”
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Donald Trump in court on Thursday. Pic: Reuters
That exchange was part of several hours of questioning which apparently sought to paint a picture of Cohen as someone who is eager to see his former boss behind bars.
Mr Blanche played jurors audio clips of Cohen saying the case “fills me with delight” and that imagining Trump and his family in prison made him feel “giddy with hope and laughter”.
“Does the outcome of this trial affect you personally?” Mr Blanche asked.
“Yes,” Cohen replied. He is due to return to the witness stand on Monday.
Michael Cohen (right) was Donald Trump’s fixer. Pic: AP
Cohen worked as the former president’s fixer. He once described himself as Trump’s “spokesman, thug, pit bull and lawless lawyer”.
He once said he would take a bullet for his boss and admitted at the end of questioning on Tuesday that he “violated my moral compass” while working for Trump.
Hush money payouts are not illegal, but Trump is accused of falsifying business records to hide it – a claim he denies.
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