In 2012, Canadian freelance writer Joshua Barbeau tragically lost his fiancée, Jessica, when she succumbed to a rare liver disease.
Eight years later, still struggling with his grief, Barbeau came across a curious website called Project December, billed as “the world’s most supercomputer.”
Powered by an early version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Project December let him recreate an AI version of Jessica for just $5 if he typed in details about what she had been like.
After saying “Jessica?” had typed, the AI version of his dead girlfriend said to him, “I miss you every day” and “I’m the girl you’re madly in love with.”
In a new BBC documentary ‘Storyville: Eternal You’, Barbeau, now 36, discovered that the creepy technology looked ‘creepy’ to his lover.
He says, “It really felt like a gift, like a burden lifted from my shoulders that I had been carrying for a long time.”
Now Project December is one of many AI-powered online services that can create “replicas” of lost loved ones.
Experts warn that the controversial Black Mirror-style technology does not help the grieving process, but instead plays on the emotions of people who find it difficult to say goodbye.
In 2012, Canadian freelance writer Joshua Barbeau tragically lost his girlfriend Jessica when she succumbed to a rare liver disease. The couple is in the photo
‘Storyville: Eternal You’ interviews the people who try to bring their dead loved ones back to life to talk to them
Project December was created by video game designer Jason Rohrer, who gained access to a then virtually unknown AI platform called ChatGPT-2.
This was the precursor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3, which took the world by storm last year.
Rohrer initially didn’t expect people to use Project December to revive deceased loved ones.
But since then, the site has rebranded itself as allowing people to “simulate the dead.”
Jason tells the BBC: ‘You kind of connect to this computer system and as you interact with it you slowly discover that there are conscious entities lurking around that you can talk to via text.’
Now, anyone who goes there the Project December site must submit a slew of information about their deceased loved one.
This includes, but is not limited to, name, year of birth, year of death, cause of death, final residence, personality traits, and a quote that describes themselves in their own words.
After completing the form below and submitting payment, the ‘custom personality’ will be generated and sent by email.
Project December was billed as “the world’s most supercomputer.” The selling point now is that people can ‘imitate the dead’
Project December is one of many online services powered by AI that can create ‘replicas’ of lost loved ones
For $10 (almost £8), the user gets more than 100 back-and-forth exchanges – meaning they’ll have to keep paying if they want the conversations to continue.
Another Project December user, Christi from New York, had lost her good friend Cameroon to liver failure in 2020.
Due to Covid, she could only attend his funeral via FaceTime, so she entered Cameroon’s details to have another ‘conversation’ with him.
But Christi was left saddened when the conversation took a dark turn.
Her dearest friend’s AI approach told her he was ‘in hell’ and threatened to ‘pursue’ her, leaving her terrified.
She said: ‘I just pushed the computer back because it scared me. I believe in God, I’m a Christian, so I believe people can become possessed.’
The eerie experience has drawn comparisons to an episode of the British TV series Black Mirror, in which a woman uses a mysterious new AI service to impersonate her deceased partner.
As it stands, real-life technology isn’t as advanced as it is in the episode, where an AI-powered humanoid played by Domhnall Gleeson appears invisible to the real-life boyfriend.
Experts warn that the controversial Black Mirror-style technology does not help the grieving process, but instead plays on the emotions of people who cannot say goodbye. In the 2013 Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back,” a woman brings her boyfriend “back to life” with the help of a creepy AI service. As it stands, real-life technology isn’t as advanced as the Black Mirror episode, where an AI-powered humanoid robot looks indiscernible from the real thing.
Another Project December user, Christi from New York (pictured), lost her good friend Cameroon to liver failure in 2020
‘Storyville: Eternal You’ also explores HereAfter AI, another service that uses generative AI to approximate the voice of a dead person.
It shows an American family gathered around a computer as a synthesized version of their grandfather Bill’s voice comes from the speakers, speaking new words.
In one of the more disturbing scenes, a woman in South Korea sees a digital avatar of her young deceased daughter as tears drip from beneath her VR mask.
American sociologist and psychologist Sherry Turkle called the so-called AI ‘grief technology’ an ‘experiment on ourselves about the most intimate, important matters’.
“Where social media was ten years ago, that’s where we are now with artificial intelligence,” she told the BBC.
‘We have great technology and we are all ‘gee whiz’ about it.
“But we have the opportunity to ask ourselves the questions that engineers typically don’t ask, which is, ‘What are the human goals and values that this serves?’
‘Storyville: Eternal You’ can be viewed on BBC iPlayer