Beware the Diabolic App That Seeks to Resurrect Your Dead Grandmother

Against the Digital Necromancers

Last week I witnessed something profoundly disturbing.

“Evil” is really the only word sufficient. I think the emerging backlash against the use of AI in the creative arts has been slow to develop because, while it unsettled many of us on an instinctive level, we’re no longer accustomed to speaking in moral categories. We’ll say a thing made us uneasy, that it risks perpetuating oppression against marginalized groups and so forth—but the language of good and evil strikes us as a bit too religious, a bit too redolent of snake-handlers in backwater churches.

But then you see something that is demonstrably, nauseatingly evil.

Case in point: a viral video by 2wai, the “avatar social network,” posted to Twitter on November 11. In the video, a pregnant young woman chats via phone with a genial but sassy old lady with thatched hair whom we assume to be the woman’s living mother. Over the course of the next two minutes, the woman gives birth and we watch as her son matures from a child to a teenager. As he ages, he continues to converse with the old lady in the phone, a woman who, unnervingly, never seems to get any older.

“How was school today?” she asks as he walks home, aged ten.

“It was really cool,” he says. “I made this crazy shot in basketball—”

Gran cuts him off. “I don’t really care that much about basketball. What about the crush?”

The video then skips ahead twenty years. We see the young man, now thirty, holding up an ultrasound picture while the old lady, still wearing the same clothes, cries out in joy and disbelief.

Then comes the twist. In a flashback, we learn that Gran has been dead all along, and that her daughter and grandson have, for three decades, been chatting with a digital avatar made in her image. Prior to her death she spent three minutes taking footage of herself which she then uploaded to 2wai; this footage was then used to create a perfect replica of Gran, one that resembled her and spoke in her voice.

I shouldn’t have to say this, but in case you read the above description or saw the video and were tempted to download 2wai: do NOT, under any circumstances, use the digital necromancy app. The thing in the phone may look like your grandmother; it may wear her skin like a suit, but that is not your grandmother. And if your grandmother is dead, I’m sorry, but there’s no bringing her back.

I’ve mentioned before how philosopher Erik Voegelin said the Book of Genesis contains the two oldest truths in the world: one, that all living things are mortal, finite; and two, that the mystery of existence is impenetrable. Abominations like the aforementioned app violate both of these core truths. They operate under the false assumption that the fullness of a person’s existence can be captured, and uploaded to the cloud, in just a few minutes. And they teach that in so doing, they can banish humanity’s most durable foe, death. You thought your Aunt Lisa died and was buried, but no—there she is, in your phone, asking about your tuna casserole. You no longer need to grieve, because she is with you always (assuming that Cloudflare stays running, and you don’t cancel your subscription, in which case—farewell, Lisa!).

Look: there’s a reason religions and mythologies have spent millennia warning us against contact with the dead. Scholars are divided over the question of whether the Witch of Endor in the First Book of Samuel was a charlatan or a genuine medium, but the story leaves no doubt that attempting to summon the dead is misguided, at best. On the rare occasions in folklore when a living person manages to bridge the chasm between the dead and the living—as in the Flemish tale “The Mermaid”—they’re either prevented from speaking to the souls of the departed, or they communicate and later come to regret it.

We need a strong moral taboo against attempting to conjure the dead using technology. I see people online calling the 2wai video “demonic.” I don’t know about that (though it’s worth noting that in the Book of Revelation, the Beast, a figure traditionally linked with the Antichrist, causes an image to both come alive and speak). Personally, I think the real danger of an app like this is that you will never have to confront death. You will never experience the friction of losing a loved one and being transformed by that experience. You will lose an essential piece of yourself. You will never become the person you could have been.

I think Edna St. Vincent Millay showed the better approach to death in her poem “Dirge without Music:”

“I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

“Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

“The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

“Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.”

“No spell can re-awaken the dead,” says Dumbledore to Harry, near the end of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. The dark wizards of Silicon Valley may succeed in capturing a shade, a flicker, of the departed. But the best is lost.