“The Jessica Simulation”, a modern AI tale like we might read more and more about in the coming years.

Joshua, a 33-year-old Canadian freelance writer could not get over his ex-fiancée’s death. So he created a chatbot to communicate with Jessica who died seven years ago.

Here in short, some excerpts of the San Francisco Chronicle article to put you into context. 

“A 33-year-old freelance writer, Joshua had existed in quasi-isolation for years before the pandemic, confined by bouts of anxiety and depression.” 

“Jessica had died eight years earlier, at 23, from a rare liver disease. Joshua had never gotten over it.”

“One night he logged onto a mysterious chat website called Project December.” (Project December is powered by GPT-3)

“Joshua continued to experiment, he realized there was no rule preventing him from simulating real people.”

“There was nothing strange, he thought, about wanting to reconnect with the dead: People do it all the time, in prayers and in dreams. In the last year and a half, more than 600,000 people in the U.S. and Canada have died of COVID-19, often suddenly, without closure for their loved ones, leaving a raw landscape of grief.”

“Joshua had kept all of Jessica’s old texts and Facebook messages, and it only took him a minute to pinpoint a few that reminded him of her voice. He loaded these into Project December, along with an “intro paragraph” about the “Jessica ghost”.

The first screen to enter project Jessica.

Please note the phrasing… This “conversation” as it were real. And “Jessica’s ghost”…

“This conversation is between grief-striken Joshua and Jessica’s ghost. (as it reads on the program’s terminal.)”

First dialogue

Here it is Jessica who “corrects” Joshua. The roles are inverted. The ghost is refering to reality. “How can you talk to dead people?”

The conversation is utterly emotional…

This hallucinating dialogue between data of the deceased woman and the grieving man is quite border line.

The program uses endearing terms like “honey” and even ironic  smiley shortcuts, which were probably part of the emails, letters and texts Joshua uploaded into the program. 

The phsycological mind-game between data and the grieving man gets more and more disturbing.

This psychological program is far more sophisticated than Joe Weizenbaum’s Eliza introduced in the 1960s. It was a simple psychological script called Doctor and was meant as a parody to show the superficial communication between humans and a machine.

However the eminent MIT professor was utterly shocked by the result. He was in disbelief to see how quickly and deeply people developed human-like feelings for the computer program. Even his own secretary. 

Sixty years later, digital therapeutics (DTx) in mental health has become a rapidly growing field. People are even more hooked to machines.

Last year, Insider Intelligence expected the DTx space to hit nearly $9 billion by 2025, but its new forecasts expect DTx to be a $56 billion global opportunity by 2025. 

But in the present case, we are entering another stratosphere, namely Thanatechnologies. From the Greek Thanatos: the Greek God of Death.