One family is using AI to preserve their loved ones after their gone. Jason Gowin and his wife, Melissa Gowin, faced the sad idea of leaving their children orphans when they both received some serious health diagnoses.
Now, in an effort to make sure that they'll always remain with their children, even when they're not physically here, they've volunteered to test out "grief tech" chatbots, which can model a deceased loved one as if they were still alive.
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The couple's eldest son, Jayce, spends 30 minutes a week interacting with an AI version of his dad. On one particular morning, the 9-year-old wanted to know if the bot remembered his favorite stuffed animal, Bob.
"Yes, Jayce," the AI said in a voice that closely resembled his father's. "Bob is a mouse character in your bedtime stories. We've talked about him before and how he has a voice." An ecstatic Jayce replied, "I love you robo-dad."
The product is made by a startup company called You, Only Virtual. The Gowins agreed to test it in exchange for permanent access free of charge.
"There's a real need for many people to have an interaction that they can't have," Gary Marcus, an emeritus professor at New York University and author of the book Rebooting AI told ABC News. "Loneliness is a real problem. Grief can be very challenging."
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Some concerns regarding the product have come up, such as the privacy of data shared by users. "In some sense, everybody who's using it now is part of an experiment and not a very well-controlled experiment," Gary added. "The more people you have in that, the more you have to worry about: What are the consequences?"
But for the couple, they don't allow those concerns to hold them back. Jason acknowledged having some concerns about data privacy, but his family takes careful steps to avoid putting sensitive information into the chatbot. What does go into the bot is information he's shared publicly. "We're a very open book," he said.
He and Melissa, who have three children, decided the chatbot was a good route for their family after Melissa suffered a stroke in 2019, just days after giving birth to their twins. Shortly after, the doctor told her she had as little as two years left to live.
Four months later, Jason was diagnosed with an early stage of stomach cancer. "When you're in your 20s and 30s, you think you're invincible. This kind of thing is something you only hear about on the news," he said. "Turns out those stories on the news happen to real people — and it happened to us."
One day, while watching Man of Steel, the answer to the couple's fears was presented to them through the main character. "[Superman] goes into the Fortress of Solitude and talks to what is essentially an AI version of his father," Jason recalled. "I said, 'You know what, I bet somebody has come up with this technology.'" After doing some research, he found a website for the Los Angeles-based You, Only Virtual, and contacted Justin Harrison, the CEO, to get started.
"It's very simple," Jason said. "You take text messages, or video or audio clips, and you upload them into this portal. It gets turned into their algorithm that they have built for each personality."
Justin acknowledges that the company does encounter some people who are hesitant or uncomfortable with the idea of an AI version of their deceased loved ones. "I think it's pretty normal for people to feel uncomfortable with things that are new," he said. "This won't be for everybody, although I think it'll be for many, many more people than realize it. Ultimately, we're a tool. That's the cool thing about living in the world that we live in today: You can pick and choose what's out there."
