Two years after Andy O’Donnell’s father died of Alzheimer’s in 2021, O’Donnell decided he wanted to hear his voice again. He downloaded some videos of his father from Facebook, edited out other voices, and then uploaded to an A.I. voice platform the pure audio of his father talking. Then he copied in the text of the Lord’s Prayer — something he’d heard his father recite hundreds of times in his life — and “The Night Before Christmas,” and asked the artificial intelligence to create an audio file of his father reading both poems.
“After getting over the initial shock of hearing the incredibly accurate representation of his voice, I definitely cried,” he said, “but it was more of a cry of relief to be able to hear his voice again because he had such a comforting voice.”
There was no feeling of eeriness one might associate with hearing voices from the dead, he said. And when he shared his recording with his siblings, they all had a similar reaction. “It definitely aided us in our grieving process in a positive way.” O’Donnell, who lives in Montgomery, Ala., then experimented with recording A.I. speaking in his father’s voice with simple words of encouragement for his family members.
O’Donnell, now 50, was raised Catholic and believes in some form of life after death, but not necessarily the traditional conception of heaven that he was raised with. But even though he knew this was not his father speaking to him from beyond the grave, it remained a powerful experience. “I don’t know that it brings closure but it definitely brings a measure of comfort to hear his voice again,” he said.
A belief that our loved ones are still accessible in some form after death is one that’s found in nearly every culture around the globe, from Japanese Buddhists to the Gullah people of South Carolina. In the Hebrew Scriptures, Saul tried to outlaw the practice of employing mediums to speak to the dead, but in time, he violated his own prohibition, secretly visiting a medium to contact Samuel, who had anointed him the first king of Israel.
The desire to reach out across the divide between life and death remains one of the most primal desires we have. The A.I. “griefbot” is just the latest iteration of that desire, often involving technology in some form, and based on a fundamental belief in life after death. According to a Pew Research report from 2023, over half of American adults said they had been visited by a dead relative, and 30 percent said they had talked back.
The modern version of the phenomenon gained public attention in 1848, in the upstate New York hamlet of Hydesville. Two teenage girls, Kate and Maggie Fox, announced that not only was their house haunted by a ghost, but that they also could communicate with it: When they asked questions, it would make a rapping noise — one for yes, two for no.
Though decades later, Maggie Fox would admit the haunting was a hoax, what grew out of the story became known as Spiritualism, a movement that quickly gained enormous popularity. Soon communities across the country hosted table sessions and séances.
This excitement in the possibility of reaching the dead went hand in hand with new and exciting communication technologies, as the name of a leading publication on the subject, the Spiritual Telegraph, made clear. If telegraphs could carry the voices of the living across oceans and continents, who’s to say that some similar technology might yet cross the divide between life and death? Even Thomas Edison, near the end of his life, appeared to dabble in the idea, suggesting he was at work on an “apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us” using entirely “scientific methods.” He called it a “spirit phone.”
But Spiritualism was not without its detractors. Religious leaders quickly condemned the movement as heretical, and intellectuals saw how it could prey on the emotionally vulnerable. Ralph Waldo Emerson called Spiritualism “the rat hole of revelation,” and complained in 1859: “I hate this shallow Americanism, which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study.”
However dubious it might have seemed at the time, what Spiritualism reliably offered was a means of coping with sudden, unexpected death. It’s why it became increasingly important during and after the Civil War, and after World War I and the influenza pandemic in 1918, as a way for participants to make sense of the seemingly endless loss of human life.
Spiritualism as an organized movement no longer holds the sway on popular culture that it did in the second half of the 19th century. And yet, we have never stopped trying to speak to the dead. In the late 1960s, the Ouija board was one of Parker Brothers’ best-selling products, behind only Monopoly. In the 1980s and ’90s, self-proclaimed psychics like Sylvia Browne and John Edward became national celebrities after regular appearances on daytime talk shows.
A YouGov study in 2017 found that while half of Americans believe psychic mediums to be frauds, another 22 percent of American adults reported having visited one. Another study found that the number of people who have tried to communicate with dead loved ones is even higher among the recently bereaved.
The hunger for such closure is certainly there. The Covid-19 pandemic was another sudden, mass casualty event in which many people lost loved ones. To compound matters, people often could not even be with them by their hospital beds when they died or were obliged to participate in socially distant funerals over Zoom.
This hard-wired impulse may also account for the recent rise in A.I. programs that seem to speak in the voices of dead loved ones. Griefbots offer a promise of a benevolent deepfake who can assure you they are no longer in pain, and that they love you — an interaction predicated on the belief that a computer algorithm can give us the closure, or something close to it, that we might have been denied.
The disruption of our traditional grief rituals has also led people back to psychics and mediums, who have reported a surge in clients since the Covid-19 outbreak.
“The interest in outreach in scheduling for me has been much higher than I’ve seen in a long time,” Michael Diamond, a medium based in New York, said in an interview in 2020. Indeed, numerous psychics reported record business in the second half of that year. Diamond was also working as a full-time nurse and saw firsthand the desire to reach out to loved ones after they were gone. “Working with a medium helps in terms of the grieving process for a lot of people,” he said, “and/or deal with the anxiety of the unknown that we’re all dealing with.”
Karen Gregory, a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Edinburgh and author of the forthcoming book “Enchanted Entrepreneurs: Media, Work, and Meaning in the Spiritual Marketplace,” noted that even now, years after the lockdown, a medium “may be able to provide comfort in the grieving process that is unique and overlooked in our general understanding of mourning.”
Betsy LeFae, a medium based in New York, said that clients were increasingly coming to her with fewer “psychic” questions (that is, fortune telling) and more with a focus on connecting with the dead. “There’s a running streak of people wanting mediumship and having less questions,” she said.
As for O’Donnell, he hasn’t yet given up the idea of using A.I. to create more conversations with his father. Despite reservations about making a more interactive chatbot with his father’s voice, he continues to see the potential value for others in his family. “I have mixed feelings about it,” he said. “My mom might like it, though. I know she misses hearing his voice and his corny Irish jokes.”
The post Why Do We Still Need to Talk to the Dead? appeared first on New York Times.
