Digital Necromancy
or, shame is not enough
I said I’d be taking a break until my dad dies but I came across something so upsetting and deeply fucked that I felt I must say something.
Jim Acosta, a very famous CNN talking head who has now gone independent, hosted an interview with a child murdered in the Parkland shooting in 2018. How is that possible, you ask, good intentionedly.
Well, they used AI to create a digital ghost of this boy so that he could talk about the need for gun control1.
I believe I’ve made my view of Generative AI pretty clear ever since it first entered the market and our lives, but I’ll lay it out as clear as I can here for anyone new:
I find it offensive, not as an artist, but as a human
It revolts me
People who use it should be ashamed of themselves2
But rather than turn this into yet another AI rant, I’ll stick to what Acosta did here.
This is the most abominable thing I’ve ever seen.
This gross digitized necromancy should become a cultural taboo in line with necrophilia. You should feel revulsion at the mere mention of someone creating ghosts of the dead to talk to.
And I understand that the family did this and they’re grieving, will always be grieving, for their son taken senselessly and too soon. But the family should find a priest or a therapist. They should not create simulacrum of their child and talk to it, shove it full of words so that it can respond back.
This freak frankensteined perversion is monstrous and, frankly, I think it should be illegal.
But more than that, we should consider it an absolute horror. I’m not a spiritual or religious person, but I feel the demons in this. If ever I was to believe in hell or the devil, it would be through this necromantic vision.
And perhaps you think I come on too strong, that I’m too harsh, but I fear I am not harsh enough. That I cannot hammer my point home violently enough. That I will spend years watching this necrophilia invade culture and our lives.
Death is sacred.
Not only to me, but it is something that I hold dear and important. Death is at the very heart of who I am, and you can take that however you wish, but death has always been in me, a part of me, shaping me. My morbid obsession with death and dying has crafted me into the strange goblin who spends hours of his days typing away in dark rooms.
Even if the family believed they needed this to grieve, for closure, they have violated their son in unspeakable ways.
He died.
You did not.
His death will shape you always, but it is his.
It belongs to him.
To reach through the veil, to dig up his corpse and animate it with a language spewing machine, is the foulest betrayal of a life and a death I can conceive of.
If your son still lived, he would be ashamed of you. He would feel disgust and horror.
And I hope Jim Acosta’s career ends because of this ghoulish parade, this public corpse fucking burlesque.
This family is not alone in this use, sadly. If you scroll through social media, you’ll see people bringing their dead to life with AI. I am somewhat shocked and dismayed to see this accepted, ignored, or even simply mocked.
This is necrophilia and it’s happening in public, shared widely for all to see, without shame. And I do mean to condemn this in the harshest possible manner. It is unspeakable, unbelievable. It is abhorrent, nauseating, and so full of loathing for the living and dead, so deeply and wretchedly disturbing that I find myself finally speechless in the face of such horror.
My sincerest hope is that this deranged, perverse, disgusting behavior ends or is made illegal or becomes such a cultural taboo that no one will even consider doing something like this in a year or a decade, but if I die before that’s done, I want you to murder anyone who tries to do this to me.
And then, instead of flowers on my grave, I want you to plant a bomb at a data center.
I don’t think the politics are worth discussing, given the vehicle
There are, I think, fine uses of AI and even generative AI, but these are quite narrow and specific, and I’d argue they are outweighed by 1) the environmental cost, and 2) the human misery these massive server warehouses create.
"And I hope Jim Acosta’s career ends because of this ghoulish parade, this public corpse fucking burlesque."
I hope so too. You're right on the mark with all of this. It's truly disgusting.
I did digital necromancy on my father who ran a blog for a long time before dying and tried to turn him into a text only chatbot (I considered going further as I have enough audio and video to do so). I didn't talk to it for very long and shared some responses with people who knew him. They liked the responses and thought they sounded like him.
I did not like the responses. It felt weird to have done, and I couldn't see many beneficial uses. I'm sure there's a few, but I agree with everything you said here after having performed the ritual once myself. I also take no offense as I did it out of curiosity, and am relatively confident my father would have done the same to his father, had he the opportunity.