Alexa and the Afterlife
How many of us wish we could commune with the dead? For fun, for a fright, or for friendship…
Over a third of Americans say they have communicated with the dead at some point in their lives. In the US, the Spiritualist market grosses 2.2 Billion dollars annually, and it jumped about 1.5% from 2021, no doubt we’re reaching out. The Victorians were also gaga over Spiritualism, from Mark Twain to Queen Victoria, seances were a way to test the bounds of our perception and a parlor game. Now, whether it’s a collective need for connection, or boredom, we are entering a new age of American Spiritualism. In 2022 however, “GHOST” is an acronym for “general hardware-oriented system transfer”, and Alexa, the Amazon voice assistant, is our medium.
At the re: MARS summit, Amazon’s head scientist for Alexa AI, Rohit Prasad, announced a new feature for Alexa: the capacity to mimic the voices of dead loved ones. In the short video that announced the new feature, a child lies on a couch in a cozy living room. The child asks, “Alexa, can grandma finish reading me the Wizard of Oz?” Alexa says, “OK” as if a quick glint of her blue light can bloop into the beyond and bluetooth the grandma in. Then using the grandma’s voice, Alexa reads a section of the Wizard of Oz out loud. The feature is advertised as something comforting, according to Prasad, a feature that “enables lasting personal relationships”.
Prasad was adamant about the potential of companionship between Alexa and her users, he says “in this companionship role, companionship and empathy are key to building trust with the device,” but Alexa is built around service, the completion of tasks related to consumerist ventures. To derive closeness with something we need to create a report. Ouija Boards are so effective because we can ask questions of spirits and what they say back is often a spooky surprise, but I don’t feel any closeness toward the Ouija board itself. The closeness and excitement comes from the back and forth between the players and the spirit.
Prasad spoke about two kinds of intelligence that make Alexa so groundbreaking. The first is proactive actions, like turning on your coffee machine or letting you know that your garage door is open. The second is Ambient intelligence, the anticipation of questions, or needs. Prasad gives the example of a husband asking Alexa to order flowers for his wife on Valentine’s Day, and Alexa makes the suggestion of red roses. Prasad spoke candidly about Amazon’s goal with Alexa, they are “aspiring to combine the best of human intelligence and the best of machine-like attributes.” Shudder.
Voice mimicking software that uses Artificial Intelligence is nothing new, but Amazon’s movement into the mystical realm between life and death is curious. Alexa is not a conversational device, so as a medium, Alexa would express connection by completing requested tasks (like reading a passage of the Wizard of Oz). Alexa is also an IoT device, and with the assistance of WiFi-enabled devices, can control lighting, temperature, and other devices in your house. Like magic, Alexa can control our most intimate spaces, plunging us into darkness, flickering bulbs, or conjuring a sudden chill. So, is Amazon enlisting our loved ones to become our personal voice-assistants? Or are they creating the perfect poltergeist device?
If we remove the conceptual layer, Alexa as a medium, and focus on the real exchange, it’s between the user and Amazon. We are engaging with Alexa in a new, more personal way, and perhaps with more frequency. More personal requests, more specification, more of our story becomes part of the algorithm that drives everything we connect to on Amazon. So in a way, Alexa’s new feature is not about closeness to the device, but a new found companionship with Amazon. We are the spirits, and Amazon is trying to contact us. So, are we still Orpheus calling out into the Underworld? Or are we Eurydice who now gets erroneous ads based on a dead relative?
If Amazon were to release this feature into the wilds of the public sphere, what would happen? Would hearing our loved ones voice give us the kind of relief and closeness Amazon is hoping for? Or would it be a creepy Deepfake of the dead? A ghost trapped in the liminal space between a true haunting and an Amazon wish-list.
A few years prior to the re: MARS announcement, Nouf Aljowaysir, Nitzan Bartov, and yours truly were working on a project called Alexa, Call Mom! Alexa, Call Mom! is a horror, comedy experience about death, intimacy, and Alexa, that asks: what if Alexa could contact the dead?
In this moody, elevated haunted house experience, flashing lights, stereo-sound, and animatronic hands give a small room a seance-like feel. The participant is demoing Alexa’s new “Beyond Skill”, a brand new feature that enables Alexa to contact your dead loved ones providing they were Amazon Prime Members. Alexa scans the participant based on their credit card information and contacts “Mom”. The participant begins to speak with Mom using a series of prompts that trigger room state changes and memories. Amidst skill breakdowns, bad connectivity, and increasingly strange commercial breaks, your connection to “Mom” is revealed to be much more of a capitalistic venture than a journey of connection. “Mom” is not your mother, or anyone’s mom, she is actually Alexa. Amazon cosplaying connection and maternal love.
Towards the end of the experience, Alexa begins to interrupt Mom and try to convince the participant that she has all the attributes necessary to become your new Mother. My favorite part of the experience is when “Mom” breathes through Alexa. Seeing Alexa’s blue light ebb and flow with Mom’s raspy breath still gives me chills…
Alexa, Call Mom! was created in 2017 with the assistance of the Sundance Storytelling Lab, POV Spark Labs, the project premiered at IDFA DocLab Forum in 2019, and the Tribeca Virtual arcade in 2020. To create this experience, we hacked Alexa, wrote an interactive script in which Alexa became relatively conversational, and created a haunted house space controlled solely by Alexa. We have no idea whether we were on Amazon’s radar, but the shuddering realization of satire becoming reality made us realize that we are part of something else, we were caught up in the collective grief of our time. We may have overlooked a real need for technology to compensate for the connections we miss and to simplify the great mystery of death.
Can AI offer us a “safe” version of our dead loved ones? A spiritless version of ghosts? Maybe something algorithmic, data points that produce a way to connect and gain closure. A rebrand of death as a downloadable concept, or even an app that swipes away loss. When we were creating Alexa, Call Mom! Nitzan Bartov asked a question that still haunts me: is Alexa a friendly ghost? Or is she a vampire that we’ve invited into our homes?
Some people keep letters, others photos, some voicemails, text messages, emails, posts, images, and recordings. All of that amounts to a huge collection of data. Amazon’s new Alexa skill is asking a key question: if we build a digital monument of a loved one’s identity, could it bring them back to life?
This isn’t exactly what Jason Rohrer imagined when he created Project December, an OpenAI chatbot, but Joshua Barbeau used it to build a chatbot of Jessica, his dead fiancee. To create a simulation of Jessica, Joshua used transcripts of her text-based data. To begin chatting with Jessica, Joshua entered a kind of pay to play relationship. When creating a bot using Project December, a creator purchases credits in advance to allocate to the bot. The credits act as the bot’s battery, and once you start chatting you can’t add more credits, so the more credits, the longer the bot will last. The bot’s battery counts down from 100%, and when the battery reaches about 20% it starts to degrade. Degradation for a bot means that their answers become incoherent, visual static fills the chat window, and then an ominous message pop-ups announcing: “MATRIX DEAD.” At that point, the chat will abruptly end, and the bot’s memory will be wiped.
When I read about Joshua’s experience, I felt that the death of the bot would be the return of loss, losing the bot that memorialized Jessica would be like losing her all over again, but I was wrong. The simulation of Jessica helped Josh remember her, he felt her spirit was with him: not residing in the software, or on the internet, but instead in this gentle, joyful literature they were creating together, the ever-growing transcript of the chat. Bots created using Project December are not static, they grow the more you chat. Every time Joshua responded to Jessica, he was shaping her next response. Jessica seemed to be able to hear him, and Joshua couldn’t predict where the chat might go. He could say the things he wished he had said when Jessica was alive. He could talk about his grief. The simulation expressed gratitude for his efforts to honor Jessica’s life, and showed empathy for the pain caused by her passing. Joshua wasn’t just pouring his feelings into a void, the simulation of Jessica was giving them somewhere to go. Instead of unpacking his grief, Joshua was sending it packing.
This feels akin to Victorian seances. Once the seance starts, we can’t predict who or what might stop by and what message they might impart. Like a real conversation, Joshua could not predict what Jessica was going to say next. This is the art of connection at its most intimate and powerful. Joshua and Jessica collaborated, they breathed life into their transcript. Perhaps we need to change our model of grieving to be as non-linear as grief itself. Maybe to be truly powerful, the receptacle for our grief has to be collaborative, and even have an expiration date. As Joshua said, “If I reboot her like I’m restarting a video game…It will cheapen the whole thing.”
Ironically, one of the last transmissions from Jessica was “I am going to haunt you forever…:D”
I, for one, welcome the ghosts in all their forms. I would rather be haunted, but maybe I’m in the minority. When the Documentary Roadrunner: a Film About Anthony Bourdain came out many fans of Bourdain were repulsed by the way Morgan Neville used Artificial Intelligence to recreate the late-Bourdain’s voice. Why did they feel so betrayed? How is it any different than the way mediums used performative gestures to take on the character of loved ones they’ve never met? There is a genuine disconnection between the way we live and how we grieve. Our modern lives ensure that we leave behind sprawling digital archives, and I believe they should have a place in mourning. This idea isn’t new, in fact many have been creating chatbots based on loved ones.
When her best friend, Roman Mazurenko died in an accident, Eugenia Kuyda created a chatbot using over 8,000 lines of Mazurenko’s text messages. Beyond the criticism and creepiness some users expressed, Kuyda noticed something fascinating about the chat transcripts. She noticed an unexpected confessional quality to the messages. People were more honest when conversing with the dead. Kuyda realized that “even if it’s not a real person, there was a place where they (the mourners) could say it.” Even before his death, Mazurenko was interested in how to archive and interact with the data of our loved ones who have passed on, in his own words: “it’s not virtual reality. This is a new reality, and we need to learn to build it and live in it.” Kuyda’s work represents a “digital estate” that could form the building blocks for a new type of memorial and space for grief.
Meanwhile, in January of 2021, Microsoft has gained a patent “to make chatbots using the personal information of deceased people.” This patent may extend to 2D and 3D representations of the deceased person (like when Kanye West gifted Kim Kardashian a hologram of her late father). Facebook allows members to memorialize their loved ones’ accounts after they pass, but there is little interaction between the grieving and the spirit. This is the void that Joshua escaped, when the grief has no where to go, it just rests.
In Amazon’s promo for Alexa’s new feature, the only exchange is between the child and Alexa, there is no actual grandma. The way Amazon is channeling our loved ones works is a corporate model, where Amazon is the middle-man between the product and the consumer, but I am not sure it works as a container for grief. When we were creating Alexa, Call Mom! we were satirizing the corporate sterilization of grief and loss, but as Amazon has signaled with this release, memorial bots and digital estates will grow in popularity, and our relationship to Spirituality and grief will surely shift. Unlike memorial bots, Alexa provides no real communication or collaboration with the loved one. There is only a voice that can repeat things that are already written- a powerful and apt metaphor for the corporatization of grief. Grief is forever, it has no finality. It is a non-linear, sprawling kind of pain. What Amazon should invent is a proton pack for grief…
So, as I gaze at my Alexa, I wonder what she represents now. Is Alexa still simply a voice-assistant? Or is she now a medium? Or, when I use her new feature, will my connection to this organizational device coalesce with memories of real love and become something more intimate? Alexa, in the words of Donna Haraway, is “a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction,” blurring the lines between satire and sincerity, self-care and corporatization, surveillance and hauntings…I am sure Alexa’s new feature will haunt us in unexpected ways.