- Brandon, where are you?
- We are at StoryFile,
and they're about to turn me into a hologram.
This is my second attempt at achieving immortality.
To do that, I'm experimenting with 'Grief Tech,'
a growing industry dedicated to creating "digital ghosts."
And the three digital ghosts I'm making
are of me.
The first is an AI text chat bot.
The second, an interactive hologram.
And the last, is an avatar clone
that can live forever in VR.
I wanna know if these technologies can truly
preserve the people we love,
and offer support to those who grieve them.
- I think that that's what humans want:
they want to say all the unfinished stuff to the dead.
- If they do work,
it asks some complex questions like:
Are humans just inputs of data?
Is this a digital version of the afterlife?
And to what lengths are people willing to go
to have one more chance to say goodbye?
- I don't like thinking about you dying,
and I just don't know if a bot could really
encompass every little thing that you are to me.
- This is "Just Might Work,"
a show about surprising solutions to our biggest problems.
Last year, I turned 30, got engaged,
and someone I care for became sick.
Hey, Siri.
All of which made me ask the question,
"How will I be remembered when I die?"
- On it.
Still working.
Something went wrong, please try again.
- 166,324 people, on average, die a day.
Death and grief are inevitable parts
of the human experience.
It's ordinary, yet it feels wrong to talk about,
and to disrupt it with technology is certainly taboo.
How do the mediums-
text, video, and VR-
inform the message of,
"Please, remember me."
First up:
- Hello, this is Jason.
- This is Jason Rohrer,
creator of Project December.
- In a very plain way, Project December is
the world's first machine with a soul.
People are using it to talk to a variety
of different characters that are built into the system,
and they've also been using it to simulate their
dead relatives and have conversations with them.
- Using a combination of technology created
by Jason and OpenAI,
Project December was created to simulate
a text-based conversation with anyone.
The AI could be built
and customized based on prompts fed by the user,
and after the development of GPT-2,
could simulate people pretty well.
- Okay, Samantha's telling me a joke now.
"What's black and white and red all over?"
I don't know, what?
Come on.
"A newspaper."
Let's see if she can explain it to me.
Project December was not particularly successful at first.
There were only a few hundred people who got
into it and were experimenting with it,
and some of them went extremely deep.
People did all kinds of things I was not expecting.
They simulated conversations with Sigmund Freud,
they simulated conversations
between Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock.
They simulated conversations with me,
like they were simulating me.
And then this guy named Joshua Barbeau came along.
He realized it worked so well
that he might try simulating his fiancee,
who had died eight years ago.
- Joshua met Jessica, and they fell in love-
but she was sick and died young.
Joshua was destroyed.
He struggled with his grief and eight years passed.
Then Joshua found Project December.
And on Jessica's birthday, to remember her,
he plugged in her description
and created an AI clone of her.
Over the course of the night,
Joshua talked to his lost love.
By the time the sun rose,
he said what he needed to feel closure.
Joshua's story ended up going viral through Reddit,
and overnight, Project December changed.
- Project December went from
being a system that only a few hundred people had used,
to basically experiment and to mess around with,
to being a system that thousands of people were
now trying to use to simulate their dead relatives.
- I decided to test out Project December for myself.
First name, Brandon.
They were a... director.
Year of their death?
Shit.
I made my Project December clone,
but now I needed someone to talk to it.
So with the help of some wine, I recruited my fiancee Sarah,
who as an added benefit also helped me feel
a bit more comfortable on camera.
My no-chin chin.
- You have a chin.
- All right, so you know that I've been working on this.
I can make my own clone,
and I can plug in all the information,
but when it comes to understanding, like,
"Is this actually me,"
I don't know if I'm the best judge.
- There is some trepidation, but I'll do it.
Am I worried to talk to my fiance but in a chatbot?
I guess, yeah I am a little bit worried.
- You going to flirt with my clone?
- It's so weird 'cause it's like you're right here.
I'm really trying to pretend like you're not,
but that's a scary place to go.
On my side, "I wish this didn't happen."
"I'm so sorry I wasn't there."
"I love you so much."
And it responded with, "I love you too."
You know, it pulled out the old, "I love you," and-
it got me.
I mean, I did cry during a "Bob's Burger" episode
earlier this week,
so you know, I don't know what this says about me right now,
my emotional state, but you got me, AI bot.
- I myself am not an expert in grief therapy:
Grief is sort of, in a way, sort of an unsolvable problem.
It's often something that just stays with you
for the rest of your life in one form or another.
One of the common grief therapy techniques is to
write a letter to this person,
obviously a letter that the dead person will never read.
It's more about your own process really, right?
Talking out loud to the person or writing a letter to them
or talking to a simulation of them
isn't really that strange of a thing.
- We said goodbye.
You're trying the hologram tomorrow?
- I'm trying the hologram tomorrow.
- I saw Tupac hologram at Coachella.
- How am I gonna top Tupac?
- Of course, it's gonna be more impressive
than Tupac, to you.
- I don't know, Tupac has a better jawline.
- Get out of here.
- This is StoryFile.
Hello.
What's your story?
A company that combines video
and Conversa AI to interview people.
And for a change, I'm the one being interviewed.
I really hope I give good answers.
My impression with Project December is it's subjective:
The user injects personal emotions and meaning
into the text-
kind of like a memory.
All right, taking the hot seat.
I wanted to try the opposite and see how the objectivity
of video would function when it comes to grieving.
- Good to go.
- This is Stephen Smith, the CEO of StoryFile.
- Let's do this.
How can we think differently about
how we pass our stories forward and be good ancestors?
A StoryFile is a platform that allows us to be able
to create conversations and capture them for the future.
So one question I will ask you is, "What's your story?"
- By sitting down with StoryFile
and answering up to 2000 curated questions,
a subject can document their life.
A file is then created that can be shared
with people for generations to come.
What makes StoryFile unique is how it takes
a spoken question, feeds it through an AI language model,
and finds an answer through all the recordings
to respond accordingly.
- Let's say that I interview my mother:
two generations from now,
her great-great-grandchildren can come along and say,
"Hey great-great grandma,
tell me about your earliest memory."
And she will then recount that memory from her StoryFile.
- And for Stephen, that's not a hypothetical.
He created a StoryFile for his mother Marina,
and then she actually spoke at her own wake.
- Because my work here is completed.
- What was your hometown like?
- And these are her grandkids asking her questions
about her life after she died.
- We got there-
this is such a small island.
- Okay, scene one, take one.
- As the interview started, I wondered what advantages
does a hologram give my loved ones after I eventually pass?
- We don't need video or holograms to communicate ideas.
In fact, we've learned really successfully how
to communicate ideas through writing systems.
What video does,
it brings a more deeply connected way to communicate.
- And at StoryFile,
that communication takes a lot of cameras.
One, two, three, four, five,
six, seven, eight, nine,
10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 cameras-
are all pointing at me right now.
Why so many?
- When we talk with one another,
the vast amount of communication that's taking place is
through body language, through our physiognomy, our face,
through our expressiveness and our emotions.
It comes with emotion and intonation and pace and aspects
that we are very good at reading as human beings.
Add that then to a hologram, and now what happens is you're
in front of a life-size replica of that human being,
and you get that sense of presence.
We're not trying to replace the human being.
What we're trying to do is create the deeper sense
of connection that will allow us to be able to converse,
ask questions, and engage with them as a full person.
- I have a fiancee here.
- Oh, hi!
Sarah arrived just as we were wrapping up.
- Very good. Let's go next door and have a look.
- Thank you.
- Sarah, welcome.
- All right.
- So as I- Sarah talked to my AI chat bot last night,
and now she's going to talk to my hologram.
Unfortunately, we didn't have time to
make a life-size hologram that StoryFile usually makes-
that takes weeks.
So imagine this, but big and three dimensional.
- What's your favorite color?
- I'm partial to a deep blue.
- You are?
- It's really cool.
I already told you before that I'm like superstitious
and I just think that it's weird, 'cause you're alive,
and I'd like to keep you that way, thank you.
- I think we all have a fear of death,
and it's like,
"Well if I tell this story, I'm bringing on death."
Quite the reverse is true.
It's creating time to pause and to reflect,
and to celebrate the life that they have had.
- How did you meet Sarah Gray?
- I have to admit, I was skeptical when I came in.
- Sarah and I met actually
at a job that we both shared.
- I thought that because StoryFile answers
forever repeat the same way,
with the same clothes, same stare, same tone,
that it would feel like a freeze frame of a movie-
a moment that is dead.
And it did feel that way,
but perhaps that's a good thing.
It's not trying to trick the viewer
into believing the person is still alive.
- The few differences we have,
but we have a lot more in common I think than differences.
- But what surprised me is how much personality is
captured when someone tells a story.
And while watching Sarah get swept
into all the small details,
I get the sense that she would continue to find new meaning
in this story every time she listened.
So what do you think?
- It's you captured in time.
You know, I tried interviewing my grandparents
before they died, especially Papa.
I wish I had something like this for them
because there's so many times where I don't
remember what the story was.
I knew that Papa had these crazy stories,
and I couldn't remember and I can't ask him.
So, it made me a little teary.
But it's really interesting technology.
It just captures a different moment
or a different feeling or a different thing that you want
within the grieving process.
Like the chatbot, I feel is when you're like,
you're in it, you're sad, you're bargaining
because you really wanna be able to talk
to that person and you can't.
And this might be for when you're further along
and you're like,
you've maybe accepted that they're gone, but you just,
you know, you wanna hear that voice one more time.
You wanna hear them tell that story one more time.
You know?
- So, Holo-Brandon,
is this the future of Grief Tech?
- I don't have an answer for that right now.
- Maybe someone else can provide some insight.
- If you think about it right now:
first were paintings, then were pictures,
now we have videos-
it's kind of the same.
You try to preserve the memory, the voice,
the movements of the person, but it's 2D.
In VR, you can do that in a much more complex way.
I'm Artur Sychov.
I'm the founder and CEO of Somnium Space.
Somnium Space is highly immersive virtual reality platform
with decentralized ownership and economy
based on the blockchain.
- So, I've actually never used VR before,
but that's me with the afro.
I didn't know how to change my avatar
but at least this guy has a good jawline.
Artur and I met in Somnium Space,
where we watched some fireworks, went on a hike.
And I have to admit, I really liked flying.
Am I flying?
Oh, I'm flying!
We also ran into some, let's say, interesting characters.
- Gary, meet Mr. Tyson.
Tyson, meet Mr. Gary.
- Hello, Mr. Gary. - Nice to meet you.
- I like your avatar.
- Thank you.
- What are you?
- You know, everyone has a little bit different
explanation about what the Metaverse is-
I don't think Metaverse is one company.
It's the whole cyber space.
- I met Oly who had a perspective on VR
I hadn't thought about.
- I have family members who are disabled so they
can't just go wherever they want, whenever they want-
and some days are harder than others.
But in VR they're- they can just be just like everyone else.
- Because it's VR, because it's so social,
because it's so immersive,
you feel the presence of the person,
you feel the non-verbal communication, you know with hands.
You can see, right now, the same sunset as I do.
We experience this moment together,
and that's what persistent Metaverse is.
We can talk about this moment.
We live through it right now-
that's very cool.
My father was diagnosed with cancer,
and the illness was progressing quite fast.
I was just thinking about how can VR be helpful to
preserve some memories about any person?
It's such a powerful technology,
you have full body tracking: your head movements,
the eye tracking, face tracking.
With a Tesla suit you can record full biometrics.
By recreating that back onto the avatar,
you can touch the chest
and feel the heartbeat of that person.
If you combine the amount of data we have about a person
with AI and apply that AI on the avatar,
we might actually recreate someone who would be lifelike.
- That's how Artur came up with Live Forever Mode.
Live Forever doesn't exist yet,
but the idea is if I paid Somnium Space to record my data,
within a year I could create a digital clone
that mirrors how I move and talk
so that I could live forever in Somnium Space.
This clone is different than the AI chatbot and hologram,
because this one could have agency
within its own virtual life,
interacting with people in the Metaverse without me.
And as technologies advance,
this clone will continue to evolve,
becoming more and more realistic.
But can this really help people grieving?
- We know by studies that VR helps
in post-traumatic situations, but VR has much more potential
over our bodies and our minds than we think.
Being able to ask things which you are not able to ask
could be something very helpful.
When it came up with this idea, I thought,
will people actually be interested in that?
And it turned out they are.
- Once the Live Forever feature happens, you wanna do it?
- Absolutely.
- I would love to have myself performing
when I'm not around,
like a DJ that's going all the time.
Your personality and it made your judgment calls
on what songs next and how to mix it in-
that would be so amazing.
- Grandkids, great grandkids, you know, just down the line
being able to come kick it and see what the,
our personality was like in the time we were around.
- Sure, it's not for everyone;
to say, "Oh my God,
do I want to live forever?"
"Do I want to meet my grandfather who is an AI?"
"I don't know."
But those who will want to have that, they will be able to.
It's incredible to even think what will be possible,
to be honest.
- So we're both gonna go in VR now.
Bye.
I can't test Artur's idea yet,
so all I can do is imagine it.
It's just clouds and pods of whales.
It's kind of nice.
I could see this being a nice digital afterlife.
- I'm staying with you.
- Maybe we'll have a home where we live
with our clone family,
where our future descendants come to visit for the holidays.
And far into the future,
maybe our digital avatars will go out on their own quest
to figure out what will happen at their end.
- Oh my gosh, it's so cool in here.
I don't know how to climb this rock though.
- And hopefully those descendants will learn
how to climb rocks.
- Hi.
- Just hold me.
- Okay. Just gonna slow dance in the clouds.
- These technologies can't turn back time
or heal you.
What they offer is simple:
A private, unjudgemental space to allow yourself to
say what needs to be said.
Not to get through it, but to work at it.
By going through this process, it's less frightening
for me to think that after someone I love is gone,
that I can still hold on to some part of them
outside of memories.
With these technologies
I can ask for advice when I'm scared about the future,
hear them tell a story again, or say goodbye one last time.
Okay.
As for what they say back...
That's a wrap.
It doesn't really matter.
- Brandon, have a look.
He has full body tracking on,
so his movements in real life are-
- That's my body,
that's my body.