Abstract
Contemporary and emerging chatbots can be fine-tuned to imitate the style, tenor, and knowledge of a corpus, including the corpus of a particular individual. This makes it possible to build chatbots that imitate people who are no longer alive — deathbots. Such deathbots can be used in many ways, but one prominent way is to facilitate the process of grieving. In this paper, we present a framework that helps make sense of this process. In particular, we argue that deathbots can serve as affective scaffolds, modulating and shaping the emotions of the bereaved. We contextualize this affective scaffolding by comparing it to earlier technologies that have also been used to scaffold the process of grieving, arguing that deathbots offer some interesting novelties that may transform the continuing bonds of intimacy that the bereaved can have with the dead. We conclude with some ethical reflections on the promises and perils of this new technology.
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Notes
In this paper, we address contemporary deathbots, as well as ones that can be envisioned in the near future (within the next three years). We do not speculate beyond the next few years, however, as developments in this space are too fast and unpredictable to allow for meaningful speculation.
This claim about the realisation base of many mental phenomena has a strong methodological implication. Specifically, proponents of philosophical accounts of scaffolding are committed to the view that many mental phenomena, ranging from emotion regulation (Colombetti and Krueger 2015) to narrative practices (Fabry 2021), can only be explained if the causal dependence relations holding between an agent’s embodied processes and environmental resources are taken into account. For this reason, scaffolded mind theorists reject the internalist view that the brain is and should be the only relevant unit of analysis for explanations of mental phenomena (for details, see Varga 2019). Scaffolding accounts are thus inconsistent with weak embodied and embedded accounts (Goldman 2012; Rupert 2004), according to which extra-cranial bodily and environmental states and processes are only causally relevant insofar as they enable physiological, somatosensory, and kinaesthetic states and processes that are represented in the brain.
In earlier models, only the preceding text was used to make predictions. Allowing the model to look both forward and backward significantly enhances performance.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Marc Cheong for helpful and constructive feedback on an earlier version of this paper.
Funding
Fabry’s work has been funded by a Discovery Early Career Research Award granted by the Australian Research Council (DE210100115).
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Fabry, R.E., Alfano, M. The Affective Scaffolding of Grief in the Digital Age: The Case of Deathbots. Topoi (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-023-09995-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-023-09995-2