Henrickson, L orcid.org/0000-0001-8008-2373 (2023) Chatting with the dead: the hermeneutics of thanabots. Media Culture and Society. ISSN 0163-4437
Abstract
In 2021, the San Francisco Chronicle released a feature article about a man who chose to resurrect his deceased fiancée by training a chatbot system built on OpenAI’s GPT language models on her old digital messages. He then had emotional conversations with this chatbot, which appeared to accurately mimic the deceased’s writing style. This case study raises questions about the communicative influences of thanabots: chatbots trained on data of the dead. While thanabots are clearly not living conversational partners, the rhetoric, everyday experiences, and emotions associated with these system have very real implications for living users. This paper applies a lifeworld perspective to consider the hermeneutics of thanabots. It shows that thanabots exist in a long lineage of efforts to communicate with the dead, but acknowledges that thanatechnologies must be more thoroughly studied for better understanding of what it means to die in a digital age.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2023. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). |
Keywords: | artificial intelligence; deadbots; digital endurance; digital ghosts; digital immorality; human-machine communication; natural language generation; natural language processing; thanabots; thanatechnology |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of Media & Communication (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 25 Jan 2023 15:04 |
Last Modified: | 25 Jan 2023 15:04 |
Status: | Published online |
Publisher: | SAGE |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/01634437221147626 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:195611 |