Alzheimer's and AI

I’ve been looking after my mum for a month or so. I’m thankful to my employer for allowing me time to do this. My mum has Alzheimer’s disease and it’s challenging to see her cognition decline. At the same time as caring for her I’ve been experimenting with AI. The tools enabled and inspired by OpenAI and GTP-3 are largely magical. Sometimes terrifying.

The contrast between a family member’s organic mental decline at the same time as the birth of this almost super human artificial intelligence has had a profound affect on my thinking around life, meaning, grief and death. 

I remember seeing Bill Viola’s Nantes Triptych in London once. That experience left me feeling the same. In it, Viola displays, on three large video screens, his son’s birth, him floating in a pool of water and his mother’s death in a hospice. The symbolism is stark and obvious, the circle of life writ large in wide screen. The lasting impressions, however, are much more subtle, resonant and haunting; The inevitability of your elders and carers dying and your powerlessness to do anything about it, allied to the joy and responsibility of bringing a new life into existence. And knowing that one day the positions will shift and that you’ll be changing state while your child flounders with the meaning of it, at the same time as having to nurture and protect his or her own children. And the cycle will recycle and continue onwards. 

Now, however, with language models that can replicate the vocabulary and tone of anyone, as long as there’s a big enough dataset of words, images and video for it to reference, does anyone really die? If I upload all the email correspondence I’ve got from my mum into a language model, plus all the photos and videos I have of her, maybe add a sprinkle of he social media activity, will I be able to tell if the resultant version created by AI is real or not? Do I grieve her organic version or the digital one, if and when I decide to turn it off? Can the AI version vanish or will it live forever in a ghost server, trapped like General Zogg hurtling through cyber space, reminding an unseen version of me to wash my hands, do my best and pull my trousers up?