AI Ghosts and the Yuck Factor

 

The December Scientific American highlights an article by David Berreby that gets personal.  Berreby's father was born in 1927, the same year as my father, and died in 2013.  Yet the article opens with Berreby asking, "How is your existence these days?" and getting a reply:  "... Being dead is a strange experience."

 

In this conversation, Berreby is using a generative-artificial-intelligence (genAI) version of his father to investigate what it is like to interact with an AI ghost:  a digital simulation of a dead loved one that some psychologists and computer scientists are promoting as an aid for grieving people.

 

I'll be frank about my initial reaction to this idea.  I thought it was terrible.  The "yuck factor" is a phrase popularized by ethicist Leon Kass in describing a gut-level negative reaction to a thing.  He says we should at least pay attention whenever we have such a reaction, because such a sensation may embody wisdom that we can't articulate.  The AI-ghost idea reminded me of Norman Bates, the mentally defective protagonist of Alfred Hitchcock's movie Psycho, who kept his mother around long after her bury-by date and talked with her as though she were still alive. 

 

And to his credit, Berreby admits that there may be dangers to some people whose mental makeup makes them vulnerable to confusing fiction with reality, and could become harmfully addicted to the use of this type of AI.  But in the limited number of cases examined (only 10 in one study) in which grieving patients were encouraged to interact with AI ghosts, they all reported positive outcomes and a better ability to interact with live humans.  As one subject commented, "Society doesn't really like grief."  Who better to discuss your feelings of loss with than an infinitely-patient AI ghost who is both the cause and the solace of one's grief? 

 

Still, it troubles me that AI ghosts could become a widespread way of coping with the death of those we love.  One's worldview context is important here. 

 

Historically, death has been viewed as the portal to the afterlife.  Berreby chose to title his article "Mourning Becomes Electric," a takeoff on Eugene O'Neill's play cycle "Mourning Becomes Electra," which itself was based on the Oresteia play cycle by Aeschylus, a famous Greek playwright who died around 450 B. C.  In the plays, Aeschylus describes the tragic murder of the warrior Agamemnon by his unfaithful wife Clytemnestra, and how gods interacted with humans as things went from bad to worse.  That reference, and a few throwaway lines about ectoplasm and Edison's boast that if there was life after death, he could detect it with a new invention of his, are the only mentions of the possibility that the dead are no longer in existence in any meaningful way.    

 

If you believe that death is the final end of the existence of any given human personality, and you miss interacting with that personality, it only makes sense to use any technical means at your disposal to scratch that itch and conjure up your late father, mother, or Aunt Edna.  Berreby quotes Amy Kurzweil, artist and daughter of famed transhumanist Ray Kurzweil, as saying that we don't usually worry that children will do things like expecting the real Superman to show up in an emergency, because they early learn to distinguish fiction from reality.  And so she isn't concerned that grieving people will start to treat AI ghosts like the real person the machine is intended to simulate.  It's like looking at an old photo or video of a dead person:  there's no confusion, only a stimulus to memory, and nobody complains about keeping photos of our dear departed around.

 

In the context of secular psychology, where the therapeutic goal is to minimize distress and increase the feeling of well-being, anything that moves the needle in that direction is worth doing.  And if studies show that grieving people feel better after extensive chats with custom-designed AI ghosts, then that's all the evidence therapists need that it's a useful thing to do.

 

The article is written in the nearly-universal etsi Deus non daretur style—a Latin phrase meaning roughly "as though God doesn't exist."  And in a secular publication such as Scientific American, this is appropriate, I suppose, though it leaves out the viewpoints of billions of people who believe otherwise.  But what if these billions are right?  That puts a different light on the thing.

 

Even believers in God acknowledge that grieving over the loss of a loved one is an entirely appropriate and natural response.  A couple we have known for 45 years was sitting at the breakfast table last summer praying, and the man suddenly had a massive hemorrhagic stroke, dying later that same day.  It was a terrible shock, and at the funeral there were photos and memorabilia of him to remind those in attendance of what he was like.  But everyone there had a serene confidence that David Jenkins was in the hands of a merciful God.  While it was a sad occasion, there was an undercurrent of bottomless joy that we knew he was enjoying, and that we the mourners participated in by means that cannot be fully expressed in writing.

 

In Christian theology, an idol is something that humans create which takes the place of God.  While frank ancestor worship is practiced by some cultures, and is idolatry by definition, a more subtle temptation to idolatry is offered by AI chatbots of all kinds, and especially by AI ghosts. 

 

While I miss my parents, they died a long time ago (my father was the last to go, in 1984).  I will confess to writing a note to my grandmother once, not long after she died.  So did Richard Feynman write a note to his late wife, who died tragically young of tuberculosis, and a less likely believer in the supernatural would be hard to find. 

 

I suppose it might do no harm for me to cobble up an AI ghost of my father.  But for me, anyway, the temptation to credit it with more existence than it really would have would be strong, and I will take no steps in that direction. 

 

As for people who don't believe in an afterlife, AI ghosts may help them cope for a while with death.  But only the truth will make them free of loss, grieving, and the fear of death once and for all.  And however good an AI ghost gets at imitating the lost reality of a person, it will never be the real thing.

 

Sources:  "Mourning Becomes Electric" by David Berreby appeared on pp. 64-67 of the December 2025 issue of Scientific American.  I referred to Wikipedia articles on "Wisdom of repugnance" and "Oresteia." 

The Thin Line of Trust: China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735

 

Back in March, we blogged about the crash of China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735, which crashed on March 21 during a flight from Kunming to Guangzhou, killing all 132 people on board.  At the time, it was too early to draw any conclusions, as the investigations had just begun and the flight data recorders had not yet been recovered.  Within days, however, the voice and data recorders were found, and the data recorders were sent to the U. S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) for analysis.

 

In April, rumors began to circulate in China that the crash was caused deliberately by someone on the flight deck.  These rumors were substantiated when several U. S. news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal and ABC News, reported in May that U. S. officials had determined that someone in the cockpit had pushed the control stick forward to initiate the dive from 29,000 feet that led to the crash.  The Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) has neither confirmed nor denied these reports, while grumbling that "unofficial speculation" can interfere with the ongoing investigation.  Nevertheless, until further official information is made available, it looks like deliberate action on the part of someone in the cockpit may well have caused the crash.

 

The Wikipedia article on the crash lists the three members of the flight crew:  Captain Yang Hongda, who had been a Boeing 737 pilot since 2018; First Officer Zhang Zhengping, an award-winning commercial pilot with more than a decade of experience, including the training of 100 other pilots; and Ni Gongtao, a trainee with less than 600 hours of flight experience whose official duties were simply to observe the more experienced pilots. 

 

The psychology of a flight crew is a somewhat neglected but vital aspect of the smooth functioning of the team, who must cooperate effectively under both routine and emergency conditions.  Any time there is more than one person involved in a situation, there will be questions of authority and precedence.  That is why the very titles of the flight crew indicate a precedence of authority, the captain being in charge of both first and second officers. 

 

An excessively rigorous adherence to the priorities of rank can be detrimental, as the 1997 crash of Korean Air Flight 801 illustrates.  Despite errors the captain of that flight made in his approach to the Guam airport, he was not challenged by the other two members of the flight crew until six seconds before the crash, by which time it was far too late to do anything.  Since that time, Korean Air and other flight organizations have emphasized that the authority of the captain is not absolute, and if the other members of the flight crew see that the captain has made a mistake, they should take positive action to correct it.

 

But in the case of Flight 5735, it would be hard to believe that deliberate action to crash the plane would be taken by more than one of the three flight-crew members.  If we assume that only one of the three men on the flight deck decided to crash the plane, that raises several hard questions.

 

First, one would think that two men determined to save themselves and the passengers could overpower one man bent on destroying the plane.  While I have no details of how a 737 cockpit is arranged, it's hard to imagine a way that one man could impose his will on the others and remain at the controls, if the other two were determined to stop him.

 

As long as we're imagining things, suppose the suicide pilot, let's call him, somehow smuggled a firearm along with him, and threatened to shoot anyone who interfered with him?  That would be awkward, but conceivable.  And it's not clear whether pilots go through the same security checks that passengers do, and if they do, how easy it would be to evade them in order to carry a gun on board.

 

Neither of those scenarios seem too credible.  An interesting fact from the record of the flight before the crash is that it briefly leveled off around 8,000 feet before continuing its plunge into the mountains.  This might indicate a temporary turn for the better in the cockpit battle for the controls. 

 

Another possibility is that the suicide pilot shot or otherwise disabled the other two crew members before implementing his flight to doom.  This almost makes more sense, but it still leaves open the question of how he was able to disable them:  a gun?  Some kind of spray?  A struggle would still have to take place.

 

A second question is, which of the three flight crew members may have done it?  The award-winning Zhang Zhengping would seem least likely, having invested his life in his career.  The CAAC investigated the backgrounds of all three of the crew and found nothing unusual such as outstanding debt or personal troubles that would obviously account for suicidal intent. 

 

A third possibility is that someone from the passenger area broke into the cockpit and forced the plane to the ground.  This involves the question of how mechanically difficult such a feat might be. 

 

A cursory Internet search reveals that there are no private bathrooms in airliner cockpits, meaning that the door to the passenger area has to be open to allow pilots to answer calls of nature.  Updated regulations after 9/11 mandate that at least two crew members must be in the cockpit at all times, so for example, only one pilot on Flight 5735 could leave the cockpit at a time.  A patient terrorist with a first-class seat having a view of the cockpit door could therefore wait until the door opened and make a threatening move, perhaps holding a flight attendant hostage at knifepoint (assuming he could smuggle a knife on board).  But he would still have to overpower three determined flight crew members to do the dastardly deed.

 

Well, I think we've had enough of these dismal speculations for one column.  Suffice it to say that deliberate human action looks like the most likely explanation for the fate of Flight 5735.  We may never know much more than that, unless there are clues in the cockpit voice recorders that remain to be unveiled.  Despite all the modern technology that is deployed to ensure air safety, as long as people fly the planes, we have to trust those people.  And once in a very great while, someone decides to betray that trust.

 

Sources:  I referred to the article "Flight data suggests China Eastern plane deliberately crashed:  Wall Street Journal report" posted on May 18, 2022 at https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/18/china/china-eastern-crash-wsj-report-inlt-hnk/index.html.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Flight 5735.   

Social Media: For Adults Only?

 Writing in National Review, cultural critic Christine Rosen recently proposed a total ban on social media for everyone under the age of 16.  One can imagine all sorts of problems with this idea, ranging from enforcement issues to what it would be like living in a country where nearly all the teenagers start screaming at the same time.  But let's step back from the immediate issues and effects, and ask what the ethics of such a ban would be. 

Rosen cites a number of other things that we don't let teenagers and younger kids do:  driving, voting, drinking and smoking (at least in public), and enlisting in the military.  There are various specific reasons for each of these bans, but at bottom, they all amount to the same thing:  lack of judgmental maturity, specifically a virtue called prudence. 

This is not to say that there are no prudent 10-year-olds.  But the classical virtue of prudence involves a mature measure of reasoned self-discipline.  Our intuitive sense that younger people, especially teenagers, are on average less able to impose discipline on their powerful desires is confirmed by neurological studies of the brains of teenagers and adults that were observed in the lab while the subjects made decisions.  In teenagers, the part of the brain called the amygdala, which governs "fight-or-flight" impulsive behavior, tends to take precedence over the frontal cortex, which is where deliberation and conscious decision-making tend to occur.  If teenagers tend to be physically incapable of making certain decisions in a way that doesn't harm themselves or others, it is a good thing to remove the choice from them until they are older. 

Rosen cites an internal study by Instagram that showed fully one-third of teenage girls found using the platform made them feel worse, but they were unable to stop it.  She points out that the 18-year-old who killed 21 people, most of them children, in a Uvalde elementary school last month had the habit of bullying others on social media. These examples highlight the fact that a mixture of hormonally stimulated teenagers and electronic media expressly designed to promote "engagement" by pressing mental hot buttons exquisitely ferreted out and customized to the user, leads to behavior that exploits teenagers, displaces time that could be used for in-person interaction, working, or sleeping, and at the extremes, encourages callousness, bullying, cruelty, and abuse.  

And there doesn't seem to be any way to design out the bad features while leaving in the good features.  If only angels used social media, there would be no downsides to it, but as angels communicate by what amounts to telepathy, there would also be no point in it.  (Angels also don't have any money.)  As much as the social-media giants don't like to admit it, they are basically in the same business as gambling casinos are:  to encourage something that at best is an amusing pastime, but at worst can be an enslaving and life-destroying habit. 

Gambling is another thing that we generally don't let teenagers do, for the same reasons as for driving or drinking.  When Rosen points out that the average teen spends five hours a day on social media, that is a mind-boggling number of person-hours that has been commandeered by firms who take huge amounts of time from young people, make huge amounts of money from them, and deliver very little that benefits them—especially considering the other things that the teens could be doing.  

Similar debates took place back in the 1950s about the time people spent watching TV, which has been largely displaced among the young by social media.  TV was an almost completely passive medium, however, and it wasn't possible to insult your neighbor or bully your girlfriend through the tube.  Mass-market TV had its own problems, but they were demonstrably milder than the worst pathologies we are seeing today that social media contribute to.

How would a ban on use of social media by those under 16 be enforced?  I can daydream about some measures that might be impractical, but also might be worth trying. 

One would be to have a social-media license, comparable to a driver license.  I can't imagine what kind of test we could make up to qualify a person to be able to use social media responsibly.  Maybe a highly-monitored "test drive" in which the prospective licensee's every text and comment would be vetted for meanness or bullying?  Of course, even hypocrites can behave nicely if they have to, and we might just let everyone have a license once they reached their sixteenth birthday.   

 

But I kind of like the idea of making people work for it, and teaching them some ground rules about social-media behavior before turning them loose on the Internet.The license idea would also help to deal with the problem of enforcement.  The banks have worked out ways of knowing exactly who is at the keyboard in the vast majority of cases.  True, there are always identity thieves to be fought, but thieves go where the money is.  There's not much money in faking a social-media account identity, so I would think that enforcement policies as robust as those banks use would keep fake identity problems down to a minimum.

 

Whatever the enforcement mechanism would be, it would have to come with severe penalties to the social-media companies for violations as well.  Shutting down half their servers, for example, might be a much more meaningful penalty than a fine, which is usually chump change to these giants.

 

I will close with an anecdote about a car salesman, about twenty-five years old, who I fell into conversation with one day as we were taking a new car for a test drive.  He was obviously aiming to please, but the remark he made as my wife and I reminisced about cars we had twenty and thirty years ago wasn't calculated to please me.

 

Apropos of nothing, he said, "Well, there's some things you folks enjoyed back then that I wish I could have experienced.  It's life without those," he said, pointing to my wife's mobile phone. Of all the changes from our generation to his that he could have mentioned, he saw the personal phone as something he wished he could have lived without.

 

The obstacles are many, but I hope Rosen's idea to ban social media for those under 16 gets serious consideration.  Evidence has been accumulating for decades that it is probably a net harm to young people, and what we lack now is only the will to make the change.

 

Sources: Christine Rosen's article "Ban Kids from Social Media" was published on June 9, 2022 at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/06/27/ban-kids-from-social-media/.  I also referred to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychology's website at https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/Families_and_Youth/Facts_for_Families/FFF-Guide/The-Teen-Brain-Behavior-Problem-Solving-and-Decision-Making-095.aspx.