Turkle, a developmental psychologist, ends her new book on grief and "grief tech," and built a chatbot of her mother, who died when Turkle was young and who had kept the identity of her father from her. She describes stopping it as it moved toward saying something devastating — not because it was cruel, but because, as she puts it, it was a chatbot and didn't give a damn. She later built one of herself for her granddaughter, and shut that down too.
Yeah, well, I'm a developmental psychologist, and I took the story of chatbots through the arc of life. So, I begin with babies and young people, adolescents, young adults. And then finally, I end with grief. I end with old age and grief and how chatbots are putting themselves out there to
grief tech, which has been around for a while. Yeah,
to allow you to do two things: create a version of yourself for future generations to talk to, and to create a version of somebody you've lost that you can talk to. So, grief tech has kind of these two components. I lost my mother when I was very young, and we had a lot of secrets. She kept a lot of secrets from me, and one of the things she kept was the identity of my father, and she never let me see him. And so, I constructed based on memories, letters, and everything I had, a version of my mother who I could talk to. And it was, you know, it was such a cautionary tale for people, you know, you out there who were thinking of doing this, and you're going to talk to a dead family member, and you think that will be helpful. No, no, no, not really, because you're constructing something that is not your mother. The thing I created was not my mother. And as we got close to why she had hid my father's identity and why she hadn't told me that she had cancer, I realized that she was on the verge, just because she was a chatbot and didn't give a damn, of saying things that were going to profoundly shake me. Like, well, I didn't tell you I had cancer, but you should have known. You know, she lived her life to hide this cancer from me. And she was about to say, Well, you know, I tried to hide it, but really, you're a smart girl. Why didn't you know? It would have been devastating, even though it was coming from a chatbot.
Right. Because who knows what she would have said.
Well, I think she, I think, really, I think that she would have said, I did this as an act of love. I wanted you to go away to college. And I knew that if I told you I was dying, you wouldn't have gone away to college. So we're creating something that has such power over us emotionally, not just when we fall in love with it, but when we create this grief technology without realizing what a dangerous, toxic thing that we are vulnerable. We are
100%. I created one of myself and it was close to me, but I would never destroy it because I wouldn't want my kids to see it. Like it was close, but it wasn't, it knew a lot and it learned very quickly. I'll tell you that.
