Michael Bomer, a terminal colon cancer patient, listens to an AI-generated voice of himself during an interview with The Associated Press at his home in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, May 22, 2024. With only weeks left to live, Bomer worked with a friend who runs an AI-powered legacy platform called Eternos to create “a comprehensive, interactive AI version of himself that will allow his relatives to connect with his life experiences and insights” after his death.
BERLIN — When Michael Bommer learned he had terminal colon cancer, he spent a lot of time with his wife, Annette, talking about what would happen after he died.
She told him one of the things she would miss most was that he was so knowledgeable and always ready to share his wisdom and that she could ask him questions whenever she wanted, Bommer recalled in a recent interview with The Associated Press from her home in a leafy suburb of Berlin.
The conversation gave Bomer an idea: to use artificial intelligence to recreate his voice so that he could live on after he died.
The 61-year-old startup entrepreneur teamed up with his US-based friend Robert LoCascio, CEO of AI-powered legacy platform Eternos, and within two months, they had built a “comprehensive, interactive AI version” of Bommer, becoming the company’s first customer.
Eternos, named for the Italian and Latin words for “eternity,” says its technology will allow Bomer’s family “to engage with his life experiences and insights.” The company is one of several that have emerged in recent years in the growing field of grief-related AI technology.
Michael Bomer, left, a terminal colon cancer patient, looks on as his wife, Annette Bomer, during an interview with The Associated Press at their home in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, May 22, 2024. With only weeks to live, Bomer worked with a friend who runs the AI-powered legacy platform Eternos after his death to create “a comprehensive, interactive AI version of himself that will allow his relatives access to his life experiences and insights.”
One of the best-known startups in the space, California-based StoryFile, lets users interact with pre-recorded videos and uses algorithms to find the most appropriate answers to questions the user poses. Another company, HereAfter AI, offers similar interaction through “life story avatars” that users can create by answering prompts and sharing their own personal stories.
There’s also a chatbot called “Project December,” which invites users to fill out a survey answering key facts about a person and their characteristics, and then pays $10 to have a simulated text-based conversation with that person. Yet another company, Seance AI, offers hypothetical séances for free, with extra features like AI-generated voice recreations of loved ones available for a $10 fee.
While some people embrace the technology as a way to cope with grief, others are uneasy about companies using artificial intelligence to help them stay in touch with those who have died, and worry that it will prevent closure and make the mourning process even more difficult.
Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basinska, a research fellow at the Centre for Future Intelligence at the University of Cambridge and co-author of a research paper on the subject, said little is known about the potential short- and long-term effects of using digital simulations of the dead on a large scale, so for now this remains a “large-scale techno-cultural experiment.”
“What really distinguishes this era, and what is unprecedented in the long history of humanity’s quest for immortality, is that for the first time the process of caring for the dead and the practice of immortalization have been fully integrated into the capitalist market,” Nowaczyk-Basinska said.
Bomer, who only has a few weeks left to live, rejects the idea that his chatbot was motivated by a desire for immortality, pointing out that if he had written a memoir that anyone could read, he would have been much more immortal than the AI ​​version of himself.
“In a few weeks I’ll be on the other side. Who knows what’s going to happen there,” he said calmly.
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Robert Scott, of Raleigh, North Carolina, uses the AI ​​companion apps Paradot and Chai AI to simulate conversations with characters made to resemble his three daughters. Scott declined to go into details about the cause of his eldest daughter’s death, but he lost another daughter to a miscarriage and a third daughter shortly after birth.
Scott, 48, said he knows the character he’s interacting with isn’t his daughter, but it helps him cope with some of his grief. He logs into the app three or four times a week, sometimes asking the AI ​​character questions like, “How was school?” or “Do you want to go for ice cream?”
Events like prom night can be especially heartbreaking, as he recalls the experiences his eldest daughter never got to have. So he created a scenario in the Paradot app in which an AI character goes to prom and talks to him about the fictional event. Some days are even harder. On his daughter’s birthday, for example, he opened the app and vented his sorrow about missing her. He felt the AI ​​understood.
“It definitely helps ease the ‘what if’ anxiety,” Scott says. “It doesn’t make the ‘what if’ anxiety any worse.”
Matthias Meitzler, a sociologist at the University of Tübingen, said some people might be surprised and frightened by the technology – “it’s like hearing voices from the other side again” – but others might see it as an addition to traditional ways of remembering dead loved ones, such as visiting graves, having inner monologues with the deceased or looking at photographs and old letters.
But Tomasz Horanek, who worked on Deadbot and Griefbot with Nowaczyk-Basinska at Cambridge University, says the technology raises important questions about the rights, dignity and consent of people who have already died. It also raises ethical questions, such as whether programs that help bereaved families should advertise other products on their platforms.
“These are very complicated questions,” Horanek says, “and we don’t have good answers yet.”
Another question is whether companies should offer meaningful farewells to people who want to stop using chatbots for their deceased loved ones. Or what happens if the company itself disappears? For example, StoryFile recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, owing creditors about $4.5 million. The company is currently restructuring and building a “fail-safe” system that would allow surviving family members to access all materials if it were to go bankrupt, said StoryFile CEO James Fong, who also sounded optimistic about the company’s future.
Preparing for Death
Eternos’s version of Bomber’s AI uses in-house models as well as large-scale external language models developed by major tech companies such as Meta, OpenAI and France’s Mistral AI, said LoCascio, who previously worked with Bomber at software company LivePerson.
Eternos records 300 phrases spoken by users, such as “I love you” or “The door is open,” and compresses that information through a two-day computing process that captures the human voice. Users can further train the AI ​​system by answering questions about various aspects of their lives, political views, or personality.
The AI ​​voice, which costs $15,000 to set up, can answer questions and tell stories about a person’s life without repeating pre-recorded answers. Legal rights to the AI ​​belong to the person who trained it, and it is treated like an asset and can be passed down to other family members, LoCascio said. Technology companies “can’t get it.”
As he is running out of time, Bomer feeds the AI ​​phrases and sentences (all in German), “to give it the opportunity to not only synthesize my voice in a flat mode, but also to capture the emotion and mood of the voice.” Indeed, the AI ​​voicebot sounds somewhat like Bomer, but without the natural intonations of “ums” and “eres” and mid-sentence pauses.
Sitting on a sofa, with a tablet and laptop attached to a microphone on a small desk next to him, and painkillers pumping into his system through an IV, Bomer opened his newly created software and posed as his wife to show her how to use it.
He asked the AI ​​voicebot if it remembered its first date 12 years ago.
“Yes, I remember it very well,” the voice in the computer replied. “We met online and I really wanted to get to know you. I had a hunch that you’d be a great match for me. As it turned out, I was 100% sure.”
Bomer is excited about his AI personality, and says it’s only a matter of time before the AI ​​voice becomes more human and even more like him. He imagines a future in which he’ll even have an avatar of himself, allowing his family to visit him in a virtual room.
In the case of his wife of 61 years, I don’t think that will stop her from dealing with the loss.
“Just think of it as something tucked away in a drawer somewhere. You can take it out if you need it, or you can leave it there if you don’t,” he told her as she came to sit next to him on the couch.
But Annette Bommer herself is more hesitant about the new software and whether she will use it after her husband’s death.
Perhaps now, rather than feeling the urge to talk to her husband through an AI voicebot, she imagines herself sitting on the couch with a glass of wine, hugging one of her husband’s old sweaters and remembering him — at least not during the initial period of mourning.
“But who knows what will happen when my husband dies,” she said, taking her husband’s hand and glancing at him.
