Research Presentation

Grief is an inescapable part of loss. Grieftech describes emergent digital products which seek to preserve a person’s essence after death through the extraction of human stories. These are then able to be interactively recalled using artificial intelligence to power chatbot experiences. Grieftech positions itself as remembrance reinvented, but there are deeply ethical considerations for the currently unknown psychological impacts of synthetically prolonged sorrow, the changes in ways we relate to the dead, legacy data privacy, and the commercial rights to likeness left to survivors. As custodians of remembrance beyond what’s stored on a product’s servers, it is essential that we establish the deeply human dimensions of responsibility, care and accountability into the decision making processes which go into not just their development, but also their distribution. Grieftech developers bear the same ethical responsibilities to their future users as they do to their current content creators.

Grieftech platforms must be held accountable to endure themselves, ensuring that existential issues such as large language model collapse, algorithmic bias and commercial risks are held at a mitigated distance. They are products explicitly intended for an unknown future. They bear deeply human custodial responsibilities to operate in ways which sustain themselves into the future. Grieftech runs on the extraction of the oil of human essence, the story. As investors you control the means by which many of these personal experiences achieve an audience in the future. In your hands you hold both great power and great responsibility. Exercise it.