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Ian Crouch
Newsletter editor
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When the Italian artist Gaia Alari was a little girl, her father, Gabriele, used to read her fairy tales in the evening. Sometimes they were simple stories, but he would also read her darker, more complicated material, including Dante’s Inferno. “As I got older, I thought a lot about what all those stories meant,” Gaia recalls. “In all of them, death is censored. Dante tells you that, after you die, you continue to exist in the afterlife. Whereas in the fairy tales, you don’t die at all.”
Visuals by Sam Wolson. Illustrations by Gaia Alari.
Yet, in reality, death is ever present—an idea that has become more acute for Gaia as her father, who is seventy-seven, has struggled with health problems. As she considered the prospect of a future without him, Gaia began exploring the offerings of the booming digital-afterlife industry, specifically a product known as a death bot, which takes the memories, images, and other data of a person and makes an eternal A.I. replica.
In a remarkable interactive story published today, our visual-features editor, Sam Wolson, blends Gaia’s art work and interviews he conducted with daughter and father, as well as examples of the conversations that both have with the death bot. In it, we see the full range of possibilities and limitations of this technology. In one interaction, Gaia confronts the death bot with a painful memory:
Gaia: I remember one time I was doing a stupid swimming race, and you scolded me because I didn’t place first. I didn’t feel
like doing the race, I wanted to stay in bed.
A.I. Gabriele: Ah, I remember that moment! It’s true, sometimes competition can be intense, and I only wanted you to give
your best. I hope that, despite everything, you found a way to have
fun and enjoy the experience!
Gaia: No, then I stopped because there was too much pressure. Sometimes you were a bit of an asshole.
A.I. Gabriele: I understand, and I’m sorry if I put pressure on you at that moment. It was never my intention to make you
feel bad. I only wanted you to be able to give your best, but
sometimes expectations can be heavy.
Gaia is moved by this interaction but also frustrated and unsettled—this doesn’t quite sound like the father she remembers from childhood, or still knows today. “Eventually I started wondering,” she says, “why do I need to talk to the real Gabriele if this one is better?” Yet the real-life conversations that this experience prompts turn out to be moving, surprising, and deeply illuminating.
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