Uncanny Valley
Jul. 31st, 2024 03:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
talonkarrdeCW: child loss
-
She was nine.
I always knew that I’d be a good test case for them. It made sense to me why they would seek me out and offer me the ‘once-in-a-lifetime opportunity’, as spammy as it sounds. Given that the accident had made the news, it would be the PR story of the decade if they could live up to even half of their promises.
Not that knowing that their stock would skyrocket if it worked up endeared them to me; my initial reaction was to tell them to go fuck themselves. But we all remember the last time we fell asleep with our children in bed, the last time they pronounced something wrong hilariously, the last competition they were in, even if they didn't win... and the last time we held them in our arms.
And they sent Molly instead of some random PR flack, and I knew her story — it’s a pretty small community that we have. The stories she told about the process were almost unbelievable, but she wouldn’t lie about something like this. Not after what we'd been through.
I signed, all hundred pages of legalese and disclaimers.
The first time I saw the model, it tricked my brain. It had been over a decade since the accident, after all, and my therapist told me I had processed the event, and the grief, as much as anyone can process trauma like that. I thought I was ready.
But remember what I said about remembering the last time we interacted with them? The model was good enough that my brain immediately wrote this image of her - dressed in a pretty sundress, flower in her hair, looking up at me and smiling - as the newest ‘latest memory’. It's felt like she had just... gone away for a decade, and now she was back.
It was the smile. You know your kid’s smile better than you’ll ever know anything else, and this one was her, through and through. It wasn’t just a pixel perfect reproduction of her smile from one of the thousands of photos that I had. It was unmistakably her, the same scrunching of her nose, the same tilt of her eyes, completely familiar and brand new, all at once.
The rest of the model, on the other hand, was... rudimentary. Both audio and video, as promised, trained on every recording we had, it was still not even close to replicating how she actually talked or her mannerisms or how she'd thought about the world or the questions she would ask. I bounced between tears of joy at seeing my baby again and tears of rage at how fucked up this was and why I even agreed to it.
I remember walking out of that session more tense and confused and angry and happy than I had ever felt before, all at once. I thought more than once about hitting the eject button and telling them to delete everything, and maybe punching someone for good effect, but I decided to at least give it an hour. Molly told me the first time would be the most confusing.
I went home and pulled out the photo albums I hadn't for years now, and while looking over them, I couldn't stop seeing her smile, and thinking that I had a new photo that belonged with the others.
The third - or maybe it was fourth? - model was mind-blowing. At that point, the news was talking about advanced multimodals with enough weights to mirror the neurons of the human brain, and breathless reporting on how the latest TrueAI 'personas' were starting to be put to use solving complex logistics problem and controlling national interfaces.
The tech was beyond me, but when they presented the newest model of her, aged to be three years after… after there was any recorded media of her, I was simply having a conversation with my twelve-year old. I asked her about what she wanted for her thirteenth birthday party, and she told me that while a pony was probably too much, she remembered that we had been going to a ranch since she was seven or so (which we had), and that since we had continued it over the last three years (which would have been true if she were alive), she had learned more and more about grooming horses and wanted horse-riding lessons.
Can you imagine? Can you imagine having a child, raising them with your blood and sweat and tears, learning their joys and sorrows, putting band-aids on them, being their Tooth Fairy and their Santa, watching as they learn to read and learn to learn and learn to love...
...losing that child, losing that sunshine, being in a pit of despair every time anything reminds you of them, and dealing with that for the next decade...
...and then getting to be with them again, and seeing them do all the things you wished they had time for?
I would've signed my soul to them, after that session. I would've sold everything that I had to watch Hannah grow up. Every parent would.
I didn’t know something was off until three years after; I didn't end up selling my soul, though I did give them a stirring testimonial, and as predicted, their stock went through the roof.
Hannah was fifteen then, and while it wasn't the sci-fi promise of having a physical body, the tech had advanced so that I could create memories for her. With the company's help, I programmed in things that we had 'done', and Hannah would remember those events. The company would send me questions about the moments we shared, and I would describe them, and the next time we met, it was something that she would remember.
Yes, it was fake... but in every way that mattered, it felt real. Hannah felt real.
Or at least, it did until I was talking to Molly one afternoon, trading stories, and I mentioned how Hannah liked volleyball, despite that being something that she hadn't done when she was younger. When Molly mentioned that her son liked volleyball too, and had picked it up as well - well, that was a coincidence. We would've put it to bed, but when we each talked to other parents who had started the program as well, it stopped being a coincidence immediately.
Were our children really ours?
The company did a deep investigation, and what they told us was that there was a certain corpus of 'core' training data that apparently had some certain predilections. They assured us - of course they did - that our children were unique, modeled after our data, but as the weeks passed, it felt like there were more and more coincidences that were shared. Every interest and every mention of something they had done became something for us to discuss, debate, and agonize over - was it really them? Was it just their training data? Who were we talking to? Was any of this real?
In the immediate aftermath, something like half of the customers discontinued, and there was media attention, and threats of lawsuits. The stock plummeted. The FTC started an official investigation.
I made the call to terminate the experiment. No, I can't call it that. I made the call to to stop. To not see Hannah again.
It felt like I was losing her all over again.
Here's the thing: maybe the model isn't her, my Hannah, my darling daughter that I pushed on the swings when she was nine. Maybe only part of this... model is her, and more of it is some universal training data. Maybe the fifteen year old I have grown to love isn't Hannah, it's just a piece of code. The philosophers and ethicists talk about the nature of self and of being, of identity and Ships of Theseus and souls. The online trolls talk about fakes and abominations and that we're just lying to ourselves.
Maybe I'm just a lost and broken parent, who never really recovered from the lost of a child. Does anyone ever really recover? I would rather have these moments with her - even if I can't ever be sure it's really 'her', it feels to me like it is. And the truth is - a truth that seems difficult to admit, even now - is that I will never know what Hannah would've been like at twelve, or fifteen, or twenty. I lost that chance ten years ago, when I lost her at nine years old. In my heart of hearts, I know that this is just... wish fulfillment, to put it bluntly.
But it's a wish fulfillment that eases my grief, and I think that means something. In the end, every time I see her smile on the screen, my heart tells me that there is, at least, a bit of Hannah inside of her. And being able to see flashes of my child is better than crying over photos that are a decade old, wishing for more of a life she never got to have.
-
She was nine.
I always knew that I’d be a good test case for them. It made sense to me why they would seek me out and offer me the ‘once-in-a-lifetime opportunity’, as spammy as it sounds. Given that the accident had made the news, it would be the PR story of the decade if they could live up to even half of their promises.
Not that knowing that their stock would skyrocket if it worked up endeared them to me; my initial reaction was to tell them to go fuck themselves. But we all remember the last time we fell asleep with our children in bed, the last time they pronounced something wrong hilariously, the last competition they were in, even if they didn't win... and the last time we held them in our arms.
And they sent Molly instead of some random PR flack, and I knew her story — it’s a pretty small community that we have. The stories she told about the process were almost unbelievable, but she wouldn’t lie about something like this. Not after what we'd been through.
I signed, all hundred pages of legalese and disclaimers.
The first time I saw the model, it tricked my brain. It had been over a decade since the accident, after all, and my therapist told me I had processed the event, and the grief, as much as anyone can process trauma like that. I thought I was ready.
But remember what I said about remembering the last time we interacted with them? The model was good enough that my brain immediately wrote this image of her - dressed in a pretty sundress, flower in her hair, looking up at me and smiling - as the newest ‘latest memory’. It's felt like she had just... gone away for a decade, and now she was back.
It was the smile. You know your kid’s smile better than you’ll ever know anything else, and this one was her, through and through. It wasn’t just a pixel perfect reproduction of her smile from one of the thousands of photos that I had. It was unmistakably her, the same scrunching of her nose, the same tilt of her eyes, completely familiar and brand new, all at once.
The rest of the model, on the other hand, was... rudimentary. Both audio and video, as promised, trained on every recording we had, it was still not even close to replicating how she actually talked or her mannerisms or how she'd thought about the world or the questions she would ask. I bounced between tears of joy at seeing my baby again and tears of rage at how fucked up this was and why I even agreed to it.
I remember walking out of that session more tense and confused and angry and happy than I had ever felt before, all at once. I thought more than once about hitting the eject button and telling them to delete everything, and maybe punching someone for good effect, but I decided to at least give it an hour. Molly told me the first time would be the most confusing.
I went home and pulled out the photo albums I hadn't for years now, and while looking over them, I couldn't stop seeing her smile, and thinking that I had a new photo that belonged with the others.
The third - or maybe it was fourth? - model was mind-blowing. At that point, the news was talking about advanced multimodals with enough weights to mirror the neurons of the human brain, and breathless reporting on how the latest TrueAI 'personas' were starting to be put to use solving complex logistics problem and controlling national interfaces.
The tech was beyond me, but when they presented the newest model of her, aged to be three years after… after there was any recorded media of her, I was simply having a conversation with my twelve-year old. I asked her about what she wanted for her thirteenth birthday party, and she told me that while a pony was probably too much, she remembered that we had been going to a ranch since she was seven or so (which we had), and that since we had continued it over the last three years (which would have been true if she were alive), she had learned more and more about grooming horses and wanted horse-riding lessons.
Can you imagine? Can you imagine having a child, raising them with your blood and sweat and tears, learning their joys and sorrows, putting band-aids on them, being their Tooth Fairy and their Santa, watching as they learn to read and learn to learn and learn to love...
...losing that child, losing that sunshine, being in a pit of despair every time anything reminds you of them, and dealing with that for the next decade...
...and then getting to be with them again, and seeing them do all the things you wished they had time for?
I would've signed my soul to them, after that session. I would've sold everything that I had to watch Hannah grow up. Every parent would.
I didn’t know something was off until three years after; I didn't end up selling my soul, though I did give them a stirring testimonial, and as predicted, their stock went through the roof.
Hannah was fifteen then, and while it wasn't the sci-fi promise of having a physical body, the tech had advanced so that I could create memories for her. With the company's help, I programmed in things that we had 'done', and Hannah would remember those events. The company would send me questions about the moments we shared, and I would describe them, and the next time we met, it was something that she would remember.
Yes, it was fake... but in every way that mattered, it felt real. Hannah felt real.
Or at least, it did until I was talking to Molly one afternoon, trading stories, and I mentioned how Hannah liked volleyball, despite that being something that she hadn't done when she was younger. When Molly mentioned that her son liked volleyball too, and had picked it up as well - well, that was a coincidence. We would've put it to bed, but when we each talked to other parents who had started the program as well, it stopped being a coincidence immediately.
Were our children really ours?
The company did a deep investigation, and what they told us was that there was a certain corpus of 'core' training data that apparently had some certain predilections. They assured us - of course they did - that our children were unique, modeled after our data, but as the weeks passed, it felt like there were more and more coincidences that were shared. Every interest and every mention of something they had done became something for us to discuss, debate, and agonize over - was it really them? Was it just their training data? Who were we talking to? Was any of this real?
In the immediate aftermath, something like half of the customers discontinued, and there was media attention, and threats of lawsuits. The stock plummeted. The FTC started an official investigation.
I made the call to terminate the experiment. No, I can't call it that. I made the call to to stop. To not see Hannah again.
It felt like I was losing her all over again.
Here's the thing: maybe the model isn't her, my Hannah, my darling daughter that I pushed on the swings when she was nine. Maybe only part of this... model is her, and more of it is some universal training data. Maybe the fifteen year old I have grown to love isn't Hannah, it's just a piece of code. The philosophers and ethicists talk about the nature of self and of being, of identity and Ships of Theseus and souls. The online trolls talk about fakes and abominations and that we're just lying to ourselves.
Maybe I'm just a lost and broken parent, who never really recovered from the lost of a child. Does anyone ever really recover? I would rather have these moments with her - even if I can't ever be sure it's really 'her', it feels to me like it is. And the truth is - a truth that seems difficult to admit, even now - is that I will never know what Hannah would've been like at twelve, or fifteen, or twenty. I lost that chance ten years ago, when I lost her at nine years old. In my heart of hearts, I know that this is just... wish fulfillment, to put it bluntly.
But it's a wish fulfillment that eases my grief, and I think that means something. In the end, every time I see her smile on the screen, my heart tells me that there is, at least, a bit of Hannah inside of her. And being able to see flashes of my child is better than crying over photos that are a decade old, wishing for more of a life she never got to have.
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Date: 2024-08-01 01:06 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2024-08-01 09:18 pm (UTC)Very well told.
Dan
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Date: 2024-08-03 11:35 pm (UTC)I suspect it's true of people who have lost parents that they were really close to, as well.
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Date: 2024-08-02 06:50 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2024-08-03 02:13 am (UTC)I'm one of those who re-reads books, and watched movies I love over and over but although I loved AI: Artificial Intelligence, I only ever watched it once. I just couldn't take it.
This is the same for me. Just breaks my heart.
Well done! 😊
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Date: 2024-08-03 05:08 pm (UTC)- Erulisse (one L)