AI Necromancy
Black Magic, LLMs and the dangers of conjuring ghosts from the machine
“But when Orpheus had almost reached the upper air, seized by a sudden madness, alas, forgetful, he looked back at his Eurydice, now on the very verge of light. Then all his labor was scattered and lost, the pact with the cruel tyrant broken, and three times a crash resounded in the Avernian pools. She cried: ‘What madness, Orpheus, has destroyed both me and you? Behold, the cruel Fates call me back, and sleep seals my swimming eyes.’” Virgil’s Georgics, Book 4, lines 490-498 (translated by A.S. Kline, 2002)
This is a quote about the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Devastated at the loss of his wife, Orpheus descends into Hades to bring her back on the condition from Hades that he will not look back at her as he leads her out, but at the last moment, he looks back and fails. This story is about both the desire and frustration of necromancy, but even it does not truly get to the heart of the sinister consequences of this black art.
Who has not been enticed by the idea of raising lost loved ones from death? To bring them back from across the veil? And yet the attempt to raise the dead is one of those things that every story, myth and legend warns against. Perhaps most people have never been in danger of violating this law of nature before as seriously as right now. Of the many criticisms of AI, the most disturbing and horrifying is necromancy.
AI necromancy comes in many forms. A deceased person’s texts, emails, tweets and social media posts can be scraped by AI to recreate letters, thoughts or messages from them “in their voice”. You can get a letter written to you from Winston Churchill or Jane Austen, or your father who has passed away. Recently a man used AI to recreate a video clip of his deceased mother hugging him as a child, even though they never really were together. He claimed that the exercise gave him a great sense of “joy and happiness”. We must always be wary of self reported happiness, especially online. Note that he “rewatched it 50 times” how much time did he spend with the dead rather than the living? With a fake memory rather than a real one? What does that do a person’s psyche?
