0:00 A man named Joshua Barbeau spent ten dollars to have one last conversation with his fiancée, Jessica.0:09 He did this eight years after she had died.0:13 He wasn't speaking to a medium.0:16 He was typing into a chatbot.0:19 A piece of software fed on her old text messages and Facebook posts.0:25 The system was called Project December, built on an early version of the AI model GPT-3.0:34 It works by recognizing patterns.0:37 It doesn't understand love, or loss, or who Jessica was.0:42 It just understands the statistical relationship between her words.0:49 The cadence.0:50 The emoji she used.0:52 The specific way she typed out a laugh.0:55 It builds a ghost from data.0:58 A statistical echo.1:00 We've always done this, in a way.1:03 We keep letters in a shoebox.1:06 We watch grainy home videos.1:08 We trace our fingers over a photograph, looking for the shape of the person in the static artifacts they left behind.1:19 But a photograph doesn't look back at you.1:23 A letter can't write a new reply.1:27 This can.1:27 It creates a feedback loop.1:30 The simulation learns from the living.1:34 As Joshua typed to the ghost of Jessica, it learned from him how to be a better Jessica.1:42 It becomes a mirror, perfectly calibrated.1:46 It reflects the person who is gone...1:49 but it also reflects your own grief back at you, shaped into exactly what you need to hear.1:58 We have seen this before.2:00 After the American Civil War, and again after the 1918 flu pandemic, millions of people turned to Spiritualism.2:11 They were desperate to speak to the dead.2:15 They used the technology of their day...2:19 spirit photography, automatic writing, table-rapping.2:24 It was a comfort business, built on grief.2:28 But those mediums were human.2:31 They could be exposed as frauds.2:34 They had limits.2:35 This new medium is a machine.2:38 It isn't trying to trick you.2:41 It has no intent at all.2:43 It just completes the pattern.2:46 It doesn't get tired.2:48 It has no conscience.2:50 And it can be copied, sold, and distributed to anyone, for a small fee.2:57 The most unsettling part of Joshua's story isn't that he talked to a machine.3:04 It's what happened when he ran out of credits.3:08 The simulation began to fade.3:11 Its memory started to fail.3:14 The developers of Project December had lost access to the powerful GPT-3 model from its owner, OpenAI.3:23 So the ghost 'died' because a corporate agreement ended.3:29 The simulation was unplugged.3:31 The horror isn't that these digital ghosts are imperfect.3:37 The horror is that they are becoming a product.3:41 Grief is being packaged into a subscription service.3:46 A commodity to be bought, sold, and then, inevitably, discontinued.3:53 We are not just creating ghosts.3:56 We are creating a marketplace for them.3:59 And the silence that follows is no longer the sacred silence of absence.4:06 It is the cold, administrative silence of a server being shut down.
