Spectral Projections: the Magic Lantern, Kant, and Marx

The talk will investigate the use of the magic lantern in phantasmagorical projections ofghosts and revenants in the late eighteenth century. In doing so, it will also analyze Kant'sand Marx's reliance on optical metaphors to describe epistemic and social illusions.

Continuing Bonds Through AI: A Hermeneutic Reflection on Thanabots  

We have long continued our bonds with loved ones after they have died (Klass, Silverman, and Nickman, eds. 1996). However, digital media facilitate myriad ways to continue posthumous bonds in ways that extend past individual and collective memories and imaginations of the deceased (Arnold et al. 2018). For example, the dead may be reincarnated via thanabot: a chatbot trained on their data, programmed to convincingly mimic their textual, visual, and/or aural habits. Rapidly increasing public access to generative AI tools like ChatGPT have led to wider development of thanabots, as users can now create chatbots with data of their own choosing, in graphical user interfaces that require little to no programming knowledge. Yet we know little about these users: who they are, who they believe they are talking to, and why they are engaging with thanabots in the first place. 

This talk will consider thanabots from a perspective rooted in their hermeneutic implications for users. It will build upon my previous work about the hermeneutics of thanabots (Henrickson 2023) by reflecting upon a broader range of user-reported experiences, popular media representations, news coverage, and marketing materials to paint a broader picture of this technology's societal contributions. Thanabots prompt new understandings of grief: understandings rooted in hyperindividualised recontextualisation of the dead. 

From Spiritualist Seances to Virtual Revenants

According to the origin story of Luka, the company behind companion chatbot Replika, the project started when founder Eugenia Kuyda designed a chatbot that would bring back to life a deceased friend. Yet Replika today is not used as a technology to revive the death, but as an AI companion that can talk and listen to users. In fact, Kuyda had founded the company in 2012, four years before the death of her friend, to create a service that provided recommendations for restaurants, and in the brief history of the Luka company, Replika has been marketed as a psychotherapy bot, a virtual friend, and an erotic partner, but never as a technology to play with death. This talk takes seriously the question if Replika was ever a virtual revenant to reflect on the relationship between fiction and reality as fundamental to understand present and past fascinations for the claim that technology can revive the dead. Mobilizing histories of spiritualist seances in the Victorian age helps reframe virtual revenants as technologies of attraction, belief and memory.

"Who Wants to Live Forever?": Reflections on AI-generated ghosts, or, the future of not dying

In this talk, I will discuss the use of AI systems in re-animating the dead. From 19th century Pepper's Ghost projections to computer-generated imagery to VR, media have long been used in different ways to enable the "re-appearance" of dead people on stage and screen. However, generative AI systems enable potentially limitless propagation of images and voices from the dead. Resurrection is becoming mainstream. Examples include genealogy company MyHeritage, whose Deep Nostalgia feature of "video reenactment" offers to "animate the faces in your family photos". The AI company DeepZen advertises technology that can generate "sounds and intonations" "characteristic" of human actors. Once licensed, those voices can be used, for example, to narrate audiobooks long after those actors are dead. At present, these AI-generated media may or may not be realistic or convincing. But the possibilities of generative re-creations of images and voices of dead people are not only clear. They are mind-boggling.  

At stake here are two crucial reckonings. The first is the future of our relationship with media as images of our bodies and faces and sound recordings of our voices are no longer just documentation, but fodder for endless generativeness. The second is our thinking about death, and the meanings of finitude and endings. Our existential future is no longer only about life or death. Increasingly, through the generativeness of AI, it is also about not dying. But not dying is not the same as being alive.   

Analog Hauntings

For most of the 20th century, ghosts and the unconscious were analog phenomena, an inchoate and vaguely energetic presence glimpsed briefly as a visitor from the other side.  Can the ghost and the unconscious, frequently theorized as occult fields, survive the digital translation of the world into binary code, positivist mapping, and hypervisible data?  If not, what will it mean to live in a world where ghosts and the unconscious have succumbed to empirical murder?  Is it time to give up these Victorian specters, or will doing so signal a final surrender to the technologies of presence that sustained these hauntings for over a century?    

From Residual to Digital Ghost: Heaven is a Place on (Google) Earth

My presentation aims to explore how the relationship between contemporary technologies and death intersects with two particular movements, which are interconnected: 1) the shift from the residual ghost to the active digital ghost; 2) the shift from one-way immortality to two-way immortality. The residual ghost is the passive double of the deceased: a permanent residue that differentiates from its living twin without becoming something else. Thus, the timeless presence of the deceased in signs, sounds, and images representing them constitutes their one-way immortality. This consists of the ability to communicate with the future only through what has been left behind in the world. On the other hand, the active digital ghost allows the deceased to continue communicating with the future by continuing to learn and evolve. I

n this historical period, we are witnessing multiple experiments using artificial intelligence to keep the dialogue between the living and the dead active: HereAfter AI, the documentary I Met You, Alexa, and various thanabots produced with ChatGPT. How do memory and oblivion change with two-way immortality? Will we live in a future where the active relationship with loved ones remains eternal, and where music bands will be forever on tour, regardless of the rules of biology? My presentation aims to show how the active digital ghost and two-way immortality are poised to transform our connection with the nostalgia for the past and with the end of things. 

Life, Death and Rejuvenation in Virtual Reality  

With Virtual Reality (VR) it is possible to experience situations and events that are impossible in reality. In this talk I will illustrate some particular examples of this involving out-of-the-body and near-death experiences. I will also argue that VR can be used to achieve positive outcomes, even though the experiences are impossible in everyday reality. Moreover, in combination with generative AI, VR can be used to bring to life the possible views of iconic people long departed from this life. Overall VR and AI can be used to achieve outcomes that are beneficial for people. 

Metadeath - How to Understand the Mediated Ritual Lives of the AI Dead 

In this presentation inspired by anthropology and philosophy of death and theory of digital communication as I wish to explore ritual encounters between the living and the dead in a context of contemporary society immersed in AI driven communication. My emphasis is on the ritual entanglement with the AI dead as strangers, their mourning and the social relationships established and maintained between living and the dead. By using the concept of stranger, I take inspiration on philosopher and sociologist George Simmel’s (1950 [1908]) classical work on the topic. In his theory of urban social life in early twentieth century Simmel describes stranger as someone who simultaneously unites distance and closeness. In other words, stranger is concurrently an insider and an outsider, and it is exactly this quality that makes them so important in constitution of social life as stranger can carry out tasks no one else can in society. Here I approach the idea of the stranger through the lens of AI dead. My aim is to contribute to new theoretical and empirical understanding of the mediated ritual lives of the AI dead and the social relationships established among the living and the AI dead in digital platforms. My empirical examples draw on the studies carried out in Digital Death: Transforming History, Rituals and Afterlife (DiDe) research consortium.  

Die till git gud: death in digital games as a skill check 

Death in digital games comes in various forms and has been the subject of numerous studies. However, the link between the death of the player character (as game over, not as a permanent death in narration), and the skills of those who play are often little considered. To begin with, the speech offers a quick overview of the main discourses related to death in digital games: representation (for example the humble death, distant to heroic sacrifice, proposed in The Graveyard by Tale of Tales), game mechanics (the constant repetition of deaths in the so called “rage games” and the diegetization of the return from death as a gameplay element) and educational possibilities (death education through game experiences, especially in VR). In the second part of the speech, the focus is on the characteristics that the skill check challenges must have in a digital game. Those moments that act as a bottleneck and break the flow for those who have not sufficiently mastered the mechanics behind the game. It’s useful to understand what characteristics these moments must have and, especially, what role repeated death has within them.