“Dear sensibility! Source inexhausted of all that’s precious in our joys, or costly in our sorrows! Eternal fountain of our feelings! ’tis here I trace thee and this is thy divinity which stirs within me…All comes from thee, great-great SENSORIUM of the world!”
― Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey
Sure, I have thought about it. Those of us who hardly ever get to have our say have all thought about it. What little remains of us after we are gone. A continuity of sorts, not through our genes but our deeds. Anything of worth? I am not sure. Such is the intent, at least, and it is subjectively a good one. So yes, I have thought about what might be after I’m medically pronounced dead. Would anybody care to read? Will fragments of my half-formed ideas and thoughts laid bare find a little corner in someone else’s mind? Through you, will I endure? You see, at a gravestone, it is the living who get to speak, while the dead keep their silence. This silence I refer to is their absence made tangible; a heavy burden that grief, in time, teaches us to bear somehow. Then again, I rarely get to experience said silence, on account of how seldom I visit the cemetery in Tutrakan. On those rare occasions, it is always in the company of my parents, tending to the plots where family is laid to rest.
But what if it is possible for the dead to have one final say, long after they are gone? And what if there is money to be made out of such a possibility? Recently our machines “learned” to hallucinate a facsimile of humanity quite well. To the point, in fact, where even some of our most experienced representatives of the thinking primates suspect an embodiment of consciousness might be taking place. While not a novel idea, for the first time in the recorded history of humankind, we can use the text, sound, and images of someone who is no longer on this side of the vale of tears to simulate an interactive digital character of uncanny likeness. Much to my dismay, businesses built around commodifying loss already exist, with China one of their biggest markets. Their products, dubbed Griefbots, are made to order and sometimes paid for quite handsomely by the bereaved. It makes me wonder about this all-too-human need to hold on to things near and dear to us. More often than not, at a price too heavy in retrospect. For while I don’t yet know what it feels like to truly miss someone no longer alive, I am intimately familiar with the silence that follows a difficult breakup. It’s true that on some days I wish certain public figures were able to see and comment on the state of the world at present, or be made into video game characters. I guess to someone out there, said individuals meant so much more than the public persona did to us, the observers. While using characters and real-life or fictional events in a narrative feels downright natural, obtaining someone’s past chatter, voice snippets, and likeness to use in a digital Etch A Sketch imitation feels off to me. Never mind that impersonating others without their consent can lead to a private legal dispute. The dead, I am sure, won’t object, but a sense of moral wrongness still lingers.
Oh, I have thought about it a lot. As long as I get the right string of words in writing, someone, someday, somehow will bring me back to life, albeit through an artifact. I’d imagine myself more visible after I am gone. But I don’t think an LLM should be made to impersonate me. I am all right with likeness and voice, I suppose, but my inner world… this is shaped by my transience. What richness there is, it is as much a by-product of what we know as it is of what we’ve forgotten. Shared experience, then, is the piecing together of these bits, of reminiscing in company. An LLM has no such capability at present. Each new conversation is a blank slate, while recollection is literally reading logs and replying with rephrases. We don’t function in that way; incompleteness is our true nature. And maybe that’s all right. Maybe that’s the one domain unmistakably human. Or maybe I am being insensitive to those who need continuity, where previously only thoughts and prayers were available to us.
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