- When Michael Bomer learned he had terminal colon cancer, he teamed up with Robert LoCascio, CEO of AI-powered legacy platform Eternos, to create an interactive, artificially intelligent version of himself.
- Eternos is partnering with other grief-related AI companies, including StoryFile and HereAfter AI, to help people get through the mourning process, though it’s unclear what impact such technology will have on users.
- While some are open to AI technology as simply a tool to help people cope with grief, others are skeptical, arguing that AI simulations of loved ones could delay the process of coming to terms.
When Michael Bomer learned he had terminal colon cancer, he spent a lot of time with his wife, Annette, discussing what would happen after he died.
She told him one of the things she would miss most was that he was so knowledgeable and always ready to share his wisdom and that she could ask him questions whenever she wanted, Bommer recalled in a recent interview with The Associated Press from her home in a leafy suburb of Berlin.
The conversation gave Bomer an idea: to use artificial intelligence to recreate his voice so that he could live on after he died.
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The 61-year-old startup entrepreneur teamed up with his US-based friend Robert LoCascio, CEO of AI-powered legacy platform Eternos, and within two months, they had built a “comprehensive, interactive AI version” of the company’s first customer, Bommer.
Eternos, named for the Italian and Latin words for “eternity,” says its technology will allow Bomer’s family “to engage with his life experiences and insights.” The company is one of several that have emerged in recent years in the growing field of grief-related AI technology.
One of the best-known startups in the space, California-based StoryFile, lets users interact with pre-recorded videos and uses its algorithms to find the most relevant answers to questions posed by the user. Another company, HereAfter AI, offers similar interaction through “life story avatars” that users can create by answering prompts and sharing their own personal stories.
Michael Bommer (left), who is terminally ill with colon cancer, looks on as his wife, Annette Bommer (right), at their home in Berlin, Germany, on May 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
There’s also a chatbot called “Project December,” which invites users to fill out a survey answering key facts about a person and their characteristics, then pays $10 to have a simulated text-based conversation with that person. Yet another company, Seance AI, offers hypothetical séances for free, with extra features like AI-generated voice recreations of loved ones available for a $10 fee.
While some people embrace the technology as a way to cope with grief, others are uneasy about companies using artificial intelligence to help them stay in touch with those who have died, and worry that it will prevent closure and make the mourning process even more difficult.
Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basinska, a research fellow at the Centre for Future Intelligence at the University of Cambridge and co-author of a research paper on the subject, said little is known about the potential short- and long-term effects of using digital simulations of the dead on a large scale, so for now this remains a “large-scale techno-cultural experiment.”
“What really distinguishes this era, and what is unprecedented in the long history of humanity’s quest for immortality, is that for the first time the process of caring for the dead and the practice of immortalization have been fully integrated into the capitalist market,” Nowaczyk-Basinska said.
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Robert Scott, of Raleigh, North Carolina, uses the AI companion apps Paradot and Chai AI to simulate conversations with characters made to resemble his three daughters. Scott declined to go into details about the cause of his eldest daughter’s death, but he lost another daughter to a miscarriage and a third daughter shortly after birth.
Scott, 48, said he knows the character he’s interacting with isn’t his daughter, but it helps him cope with some of his grief. He logs into the app three or four times a week, sometimes asking the AI character questions like, “How was school?” or “Do you want to go for ice cream?”
Events like prom night can be especially heartbreaking, as he recalls the experiences his eldest daughter never got to have. So he created a scenario in the Paradot app in which an AI character goes to prom and talks to him about the fictional event. Some days are even harder. On his daughter’s birthday, for example, he opened the app and vented his sorrow about missing her. He felt the AI understood.
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“It definitely helps ease the ‘what if’ fears,” Scott says. “And they don’t really make the ‘what if’ fears worse.”
Matthias Meitzler, a sociologist at the University of Tübingen, said some people might be surprised and frightened by the technology – “it’s like hearing voices from the other side again” – but others might see it as an addition to traditional ways of remembering dead loved ones, such as visiting graves, having inner monologues with the deceased or looking at photographs and old letters.
But Tomasz Horanek, who worked on Deadbot and Griefbot with Nowaczyk-Basinska at Cambridge University, says the technology raises important questions about the rights, dignity and consent of people who have already died. It also raises ethical concerns about whether programs that help bereaved families should advertise other products on their platforms.
“These are very complicated questions,” Horanek said, “and we don’t have good answers yet.”
Preparing for Death
Eternos’s version of Bomber’s AI uses in-house models as well as large-scale external language models developed by major tech companies such as Meta, OpenAI and France’s Mistral AI, said LoCascio, who previously worked with Bomber at software company LivePerson.
Eternos records 300 phrases spoken by users and compresses that information through a two-day computing process that captures the human voice. Users can further train the AI system by answering questions about different aspects of their lives, political views or personality.
The AI voice, which costs $15,000 to set up, can answer questions and tell stories about a person’s life without repeating pre-recorded answers. The legal rights of the AI belong to the person who trained it, and it is treated like an asset and can be passed down to other family members, LoCascio said.
These days, Bomer spends most of his time feeding the AI phrases and sentences, “so that it’s not just synthesizing my voice in a flat mode, but also capturing the emotion and mood of my voice.” Indeed, the AI voicebot sounds somewhat like Bomer’s voice, but without the natural intonations of “ums” and “eres” and mid-sentence pauses.
Bomer is excited about his AI personality, saying it’s only a matter of time before AI voices become more human-like and even similar to his own.
In the case of his wife of 61 years, I don’t think that will stop her from dealing with the loss.
“Just think of it as something stored in a drawer somewhere. You can take it out if you need it, or you can leave it there if you don’t,” he said as she came to sit next to him on the couch.
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But Annette Bommer herself is more hesitant about the new software and whether she will use it after her husband’s death.
Perhaps now, rather than feeling the urge to talk to her husband through an AI voicebot, she imagines herself sitting on the couch with a glass of wine, hugging one of her husband’s old sweaters and remembering him — at least not during the initial period of mourning.
“But who knows what will happen when my husband is no longer with us,” she said, taking his hand and glancing at him.
