1,000th Article
AI
Creed
Death & life
Digital
6 min read

AI deadbots are no way to cope with grief

The data we leave in the cloud will haunt and deceive those we leave behind.

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A tarnished humaniod robot rests its head to the side, its LED eyes look to the camera.
Nicholas Fuentes on Unsplash.

What happens to all your data when you die? Over the years, like most people, I've produced a huge number of documents, letters, photos, social media posts, recordings of my voice, all of which exist somewhere out there in the cloud (the digital, not the heavenly one). When I die, what will happen to it all? I can't imagine anyone taking the time to climb into my Dropbox folder or Instagram account and delete it all? Does all this stuff remain out there cluttering up cyberspace like defunct satellites orbiting the earth?  

The other day I came across one way it might have a future - the idea of ‘deadbots’. Apparently, AI has now developed to such an extent that it can simulate the personality, speech patterns and thoughts of a deceased person. In centuries past, most people did not leave behind much record of their existence. Maybe a small number of possessions, memories in the minds of those who knew them, perhaps a few letters. Now we leave behind a whole swathe of data about us. AI is now capable of taking all this data and creating a kind of animated avatar, representing the deceased person, known as a ‘deadbot’ or even more weirdly, a ‘griefbot’. 

You can feel the attraction. An organisation called ‘Project December’ promises to ‘simulate the dead’, offering a ghostly video centred around the words ‘it’s been so long: I miss you.’ For someone stricken with grief, wondering whether there's any future in life now that their loved one has gone, feeling the aching space in the double bed, breakfast alone, the silence where conversation once filled the air, the temptation to be able to continue to interact and talk with a version of the deceased might be irresistible. 

There is already a developing ripple of concern about this ‘digital afterlife industry’. A recent article in Aeon explored the ethical dilemmas. Researchers in Cambridge University have already called for the need for safety protocols against the social and psychological damage that such technology might cause. They focus on the potential for unscrupulous marketers to spam surviving family or friends with the message that they really need XXX because ‘it's what Jim would have wanted’. You can imagine the bereaved ending up being effectively haunted by the ‘deadbot’, and unable to deal with grief healthily. It can be hard to resist for those whose grief is all-consuming and persistent. 

Yet it's not just the financial dangers, the possibility of abuse that troubles me. It's the deception involved which seems to me to operate in at a number of ways. And it's theology that helps identify the problems.  

The offer of a disembodied, AI-generated replication of the person is a thin paltry offering, as dissatisfying as a Zoom call in place of a person-to-person encounter. 

An AI-generated representation of a deceased partner might provide an opportunity for conversation, but it can never replicate the person. One of the great heresies of our age (one we got from René Descartes back in the seventeenth century) is the utter dualism between body and soul. It is the idea that we have some kind of inner self, a disembodied soul or mind which exists quite separately from the body. We sometimes talk about bodies as things that we have rather than things that we are. The anthropology taught within the pages of the Bible, however, suggests we are not disembodied souls but embodied persons, so much so that after death, we don't dissipate like ethereal ‘software’ liberated from the ‘hardware’ of the body, but we are to be clothed with new resurrection bodies continuous with, but different from the ones that we possess right now. 

We learned about the importance of our bodies during the COVID pandemic. When we were reduced to communicating via endless Zoom calls, we realised that while they were better than nothing, they could not replicate the reality of face-to-face bodily communication. A Zoom call couldn't pick up the subtle messages of body language. We missed the importance of touch and even the occasional embrace. Our bodies are part of who we are. We are not souls that happen to temporarily inhabit a body, inner selves that are the really important bit of us, with the body an ancillary, malleable thing that we don't ultimately need. The offer of a disembodied, AI-generated replication of the person is a thin paltry offering, as dissatisfying as a virtual meeting in place of a person-to-person encounter. 

Another problem I have with deadbots, is that they fix a person in time, like a fossilised version of the person who once lived. AI can only work with what that person has left behind - the recordings, the documents, the data which they produced while they were alive. And yet a crucial part of being human is the capacity to develop and change. As life continues, we grow, we shift, our priorities change. Hopefully we learn greater wisdom. That is part of the point of conversation, that we learn things, it changes us in interaction with others. There is the possibility of spiritual development of maturity, of redemption. A deadbot cannot do that. It cannot be redeemed, it cannot be transformed, because it is, to quote U2, stuck in a moment, and you can’t get out of it.  

This is all of a piece with a general trajectory in our culture which is to deny the reality of death. For Christians, death is an intruder. Death - or at least the form in which we know it, that of loss, dereliction, sadness - was not part of the original plan. It doesn't belong here, and we long for the day when one day it will be banished for good. You don’t have to be a Christian to feel the pain of grief, but paradoxically it's only when you have a firm sense of hope that death is a defeated enemy, that you can take it seriously as a real enemy. Without that hope, all you can do is minimise it, pretend it doesn't really matter, hold funerals that try to be relentlessly cheerful, denying the inevitable sense of tragedy and loss that they were always meant to express.  

Deadbots are a feeble attempt to try to ignore the deep gulf that lies between us and the dead. In one of his parables, Jesus once depicted a conversation between the living and the dead:  

“between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.”  

Deadbots, like ‘direct cremations’, where the body is disposed without any funeral, denying the bereaved the chance to grieve, like the language around assisted dying that death is ‘nothing at all’ and therefore can be deliberately hastened, are an attempt to bridge that great chasm, which, this side of the resurrection, we cannot do. 

Deadbots in one sense are a testimony to our remarkable powers of invention. Yet they cannot ultimately get around our embodied nature, offer the possibility of redemption, or deal with the grim reality of death. They offer a pale imitation of the source of true hope - the resurrection of the body, the prospect of meeting our loved ones again, yet transformed and fulfilled in the presence of God, even if it means painful yet hopeful patience and waiting until that day. 

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Article
Creed
Migration
7 min read

I wrote Jesus was a child refugee, I got called crazy

Digging into history uncovers uncomfortable truths.

Joan is Professor Emerita of Christian Origins and Second Temple Judaism, King’s College London. 

A red sandstone statue of Jesus as a child.
A Victorian statue of Jesus as a child.

As a historian of Jesus, I have sometimes been asked to comment on the question 'what would Jesus do today?'. I have sometimes responded. In September 2015 I wrote a guest post for the Jesus Blog, titled Jesus was a Refugee. It was on the story of baby Jesus’ escape to Egypt with his parents, as written in the Gospel of Matthew, which I conclude is historically true. It is interesting to me, because I want to understand what informed Jesus’ teaching as an adult. 

I am not a theologian, a priest or a pastor. I have spent my academic career carefully working out what is true or false in terms of the many stories of the ancient past. So, when I discuss anything, it is after years of study, collegial discussion and discernment. Historians like me know that our ancient accounts come from particular people at different times, telling things with particular points of view. They don’t seek to tell the whole truth, but they shine a light on what is important to them. They can tweak, spin, modify or drop what is not essential to them, and we see this process unfold in retellings. In what I do, I am as analytical about biblical stories as I am about anything else, recognising that I too am located in a particular time and place, with my own capacity to see or not see. With biblical stories this is both rewarding and challenging because to me they are also Scripture, in that they inform my faith, spirituality and practice. 

But this is a world in which sharing of expertise can go up in a puff of public pushback. 

I wrote at the height of scaremongering about Syrian refugees who were fleeing to Europe to escape the dangers and devastation in their country and, given its relevance, the post was picked up on other sites. On Bible History Daily, there was a furious reaction in comments. People asked whether – even if Jesus was a refugee – his experience could be mapped on to issues of the contemporary world, which are so very different. Some commenters insisted that Jesus and his family could not be aligned with economic refugees like Mexicans or bogus refugees who were actually Muslim terrorists. More stingingly, I was told I was crazy, a professor of b******t and I was blaspheming for even suggesting that Jesus was a refugee.  

That Jesus was a refugee has actually been recognised as part of his life from the very beginning of Christian tradition, and contemporary theologians like Barnabas Asprey can well explore what this means for faith. But it seems that some people were alarmed that I was diminishing Jesus by associating him with people they considered reprehensible.  

My job is to understand Jesus in his own world. If I do it properly, people may well find resonances with today. But I do also understand that it is a tricky thing to map Jesus onto contemporary circumstances, especially contentious ones. Over a hundred years ago the philosopher and physician Albert Schweitzer critiqued the 'quest of the historical Jesus' as a whole as covertly creating a liberal model of Jesus. He commented that the 'historical Jesus will be to our time a stranger and an enigma'. If we met Jesus today, he would seem completely alien to us. So, we do have to be careful when we look to him in our arguments concerning current issues. Yet, Schweitzer also put a lot of trust in the words of Jesus, because his 'spirit, which lies hidden in his words, is known in simplicity, and its influence is direct. Every saying contains in its own way the whole Jesus.' 

So where do we go with this? What did Jesus say? Frankly, Jesus’ ethos was utterly uncompromising. "Woe to you who are rich … woe to you who are well-fed now" (Luke 6:24-25), he said. There are a decent number of Jesus’ statements that suggest people who were economically struggling should be fed and welcomed, and those with wealth should share what they have with the have-nots. Jesus said to a rich man that he should "go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, and come, follow me" (Mark 10:21). Following Jesus was not about becoming destitute, but about joining a community of disciples who saw each other as one big family of siblings. In this group resources were shared (Acts 2:44-45 and 4:32-37). This is beyond philanthropy. And Jesus didn’t talk about the worthiness of the poor; the problem was not with the poor, it was with the rich.  

There’s a big question then in how to use Jesus as a model for ethics. To use Jesus as a model, you have to see the bigger picture of the whole movement he created, within an ancient context, a movement that does not exist any longer in its original form. Was Jesus a refugee? By calling anyone a refugee, in antiquity, I mean someone who flees their home to a place of refuge, to escape danger or disaster. As for my particular 'blasphemy', I reiterate it. Jesus was a child refugee: Jesus’ family fled from the danger of the Roman client king in Judaea, Herod, and escaped to Egypt. In classical Christian doctrine, this is not at all thought of as diminishing Jesus. It made Jesus one of us, in all our human hardships. 

I think he turns things around, radically, so that the life of the wandering refugee is actually a paradigm for action. 

Curiously, the fears expressed by the commenters on my post mirror ancient attitudes to poor, foreign people. Later apocryphal stories of the holy family in Egypt present them facing continual hostility from Egyptian townsfolk and attacks by robbers. These tales reflect an actual situation in which incoming foreigners, for whatever reason, were not welcome. For refugees, it could be a life of vulnerability.  In the second century, the anti-Christian writer Celsus scoffs that child Jesus in Egypt worked for hire because of his poverty (Origen, Contra Celsum 1:28). 

Egypt itself was not a totally safe place to be Jewish. Under the Roman prefect Flaccus (38-39 CE), soon after Jesus, there were riots and pogroms against the Jewish population of Alexandria, as the historian Josephus records (War 2:487-98; Ant. 18:257-60). In 41 CE the Roman emperor Claudius cautioned the long-settled Jewish population of Alexandria that they lived in 'a city not their own', and they were 'not to bring in or invite Jews who sail down to Alexandria from Syria[-Palestine]' (CPJ I:151). Later in the first century (70-73 CE), there were many Jewish refugees fleeing dangers in Judaea by going to Egypt (War 7: 407–419). Hundreds of these men, identified as troublemakers by the Romans, were killed, along with their families. I explore this and much more in my new book, Boy Jesus: Growing Up Judean in Turbulent Times. The life of a refugee was hard, and Jesus would have been told his parents’ stories about what they endured. 

This is what is so interesting to me, because we know from contemporary studies of trauma that this would have had an impact on Jesus. There is received trauma resulting from the suffering, persecutions, hardships and distresses of parents and grandparents. 

So how are these experiences reflected in Jesus’ sayings? I think he turns things around, radically, so that the life of the wandering refugee is actually a paradigm for action. Jesus, in his mission as a teacher and healer, identified himself as a displaced person: "Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the son of humanity has nowhere to lay his head" (Matt. 8:20), he said. Jesus was itinerant, and he entered villages with nothing, offering healing and looking for kindness (food, shelter). He asked those who acted in his stead to go out without money or extra clothing, essentially to walk along the road like destitute refugees who had suddenly fled from home, relying on the generosity and hospitality of the ordinary people whose villages they entered (Mark 6.8-11). And it was precisely the villagers’ welcome or not to such people that showed what side they were on when it came to divine justice: "And if any place will not receive you and refuse to hear you, shake off the dust on your feet when you leave, for a testimony to them" (Mark 6.11).  

If the sayings of Jesus show his spirit, time and again this spirit rests with the experience of the marginalised, the displaced, the persecuted, the sick and the poor. I say this as a historian, thinking of Jesus in his own time. How that sits with contemporary issues remains a question. To what extent can people of modern times, with all our baggage of private ownership, debts and anxieties about our jobs and livelihoods, share in Jesus’ ethos? In answering it, I suspect few of us will feel comfortable, whatever side we think we are on.  But taking out the logs in our own eyes, rather than the specks in someone else’s, has never been easy. 

 

Boy Jesus: Growing Up Judaean in Turbulent Times, Joan Taylor, SPCK Publishing.

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