Nothing’s Ever Lost: Can AI Help Us Remember Our Departed Loved Ones?

A few years ago, my mom gave me print-outs of emails we traded in the 1990s, when I was a freshman in college. She was clearing out her closet, I realize now, and redistributing keepsakes she’d gathered over a lifetime. The emails from me are terse, needy, sad; a young person searching for a path. Emails from her evoke the mother I remember: orderly, chatty, eager to get things done.

I used to call my mom the curator of the family museum: growing up, all photos got annotated and dated, she kept each report card, cataloged heights, stowed soccer jerseys and Star Wars bed sheets in labeled boxes. Her penchant for archival order means I have a remarkable record of my life as a child.

She died a year ago, after years of declining health. A sudden, unsurprising, but still shocking event that I can’t quite describe as historical as it still feels current, still snags emotions. I spoke to her for the last time three days before she died. Texted her a funny photo the night before, to cheer her up. I learned later, after I got access to her phone, that she never opened the message. It felt like I’d just missed her.

This September, my debut novel comes out, a happy event to be sure; but also, if I’m honest, a bittersweet one, as there was no greater booster during my long endeavor to become a novelist. I wrote this book while my mom was alive—she read a late draft and quite liked it—but I sold it a month after she died. Another near miss.

If she were alive, she’d put a copy of the hardcover in her personal archives for safekeeping. And then she’d call me on the phone to tell me that she was proud of me. I know how her voice would swell, just a touch, not too much—she was a Midwesterner, small inflections signaled deep feeling. I want that phone call so badly, you have no idea.

I have read of late about a new kind of chatbot, built to simulate a loved one who has died or been otherwise lost. A simulacra based on photos, videos, recordings, whatever records exist of the person who’s gone. Exactly the kind of materials my mom so carefully preserved. Obviously–someday soon it will be possible, maybe even easy to create a simulacra of her. Think of it: I could snip a sample of her voice from a video, select a few photos, cut and paste her words from a few emails, then click, pause, and the phone rings–and there she’d be. But it wouldn’t really be her.

Yet, would I care—if this machine using her voice told me she’d heard I finally published a book after 20 years of effort? If it could reproduce her particular laugh, after I made some stupid joke? Hearing or seeing such a ghost would not be the same as seeing or hearing her again. But for a little while, it would be good enough.

My mom would hate the idea of becoming a griefbot—such a creation is an affront to the facts, to life as it is. Just as she would dislike deepfakes, false photos, and counterfeit news. All such materials are blasphemous to memory keepers, to people who process the present in the context of artifacts from the past. For her, artifacts were proof that life happened and had value; emails from 30 years ago testify that what we remembered of my bumpy first year of college was not an illusion. To use proof of the past as it was to create an illusion in the present? I can see her shaking her head, lips pursed. No.

On the first anniversary of my mom’s death I flew from New York to Michigan and then drove an hour to the town where I grew up, a place I hadn’t visited since her funeral. I came to see her ashes because I felt the need to make a gesture, however futile, to step out of my daily life for a day or two—to alter my orbit by the gravity of her for a little while. I don’t want the universe to forget her. I say the universe, but I mean me.

The trip was important, cathartic, even; but it did not bring me closer to her. Did not conjure up her presence. Dust and atoms in a wooden box with her name on it—that’s all I saw. Far more useful for remembering her are objects that I keep in my apartment: like her familiar cursive handwriting on an old card. Or my email archive, where hundreds of old messages from her sit–even the messages that are just about logistics for holidays, quick notes about the weather. She’s there, on the other side of the messages, the saved papers, the old photos; the original impetus remains, even if the person is gone.

Love—and basic human connection—are all based on a shared history, shared truths. Not the best case, or the preferred past—the real one, the things we really lived while we lived them together. And the truth is, all things have endings; but nothing’s ever really lost, if we can remember it.

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In Our Likeness by Bryan VanDyke is available from Little A.