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Turkle has been observing and collecting evidence from children for more than thirty years, studying how they react to increasingly sophisticated digital toys, from Tamagotchi, Furby, and My Real Baby to Paro and Kismet. Children, as Turkle’s work suggests, are ready to build close, often intimate relationships with their interactive companions and... See more

This is the wrong way to view chatbots of the dead. Instead, the potential of these technologies would be better understood if they were thought of more like artworks – or, rather, like theatrical performances. Engaging with a chatbot is a lot like attending a participatory theatre performance. In these performances, audience members play active ro... See more

This theatre analogy is not perfect. Unlike human actors, chatbots are not physically present. They do not make conscious choices about how to portray characters or co-construct meaning with their audience. Nevertheless, this framework is useful because it clarifies and accentuates the relation between chatbots and the deceased. Actors are neither ... See more

Whether AI ghosts are helpful or harmful may also depend on a survivor’s age and culture. Complicated grief is the more likely outcome for children who, depending on the developmental stage, might see death as an impermanent state. A child who can see a parent’s AI ghost might insist that the parent is alive.

“Who cares if chatbots are sentient or not—more important is whether they are so fluent, so seductive, and so inspiring of empathy that we can’t help but start to care for them.”

even if we were not dabbling in virtual seances, the prospect of a reasonably capable conversational agent raises other questions worth considering. For example, might it p... See more

‘Fredbot’ is one example of a technology known as chatbots of the dead , chatbots designed to speak in the voice of specific deceased people. Other examples are plentiful: in 2016, Eugenia Kuyda built a chatbot from the text messages of her friend Roman Mazurenko, who was killed in a traffic accident. The first Roman Bot, like Fredbot, was selectiv... See more