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Danielle Batist is an experienced freelance journalist, founder of Journopreneur and co-founder of the Constructive Journalism Project. She lived and worked all around the globe and covered global and local stories of poverty, exclusion and injustice. Increasingly, she moved beyond ‘problem-reporting’ to include stories about the solutions she found. She witnessed the birth of the new nation of South Sudan and interviewed the Dalai Lama. She reported for Al Jazeera, BBC and the Guardian and regularly advises independent media organisations on innovation and sustainability. She loves bringing stories to the world and finding the appropriate platforms to do so. The transformation of traditional media fascinates rather than scares her. While both the medium and the message are changing, she believes the need for good storytelling remains.
Grief 2.0: Keeping Dad Alive Through Artificial Immortality
At first glance, I thought this article was a geeky sci-fi type story about recreating humans after they die. But then I read it and realised it’s about much more than that. It is a beautifully documented quest by a son who tries to find a way to keep his dying father’s story alive.
The son, James Vlahos, is not just a coder but a talented storyteller too. Yes, he uses chatbot technology and artificial intelligence techniques to build the "Dadbot", but he also uses 91,970 transcribed words (or, as he describes in the piece: “203 single-spaced pages with 12-point Palatino type”) from over a dozen hours of interviews he recorded with his dad.
This piece reads like a diary:
“As my father declines, the Dadbot slowly improves. There is much more to do, but waiting for the prototype to be finished isn’t an option. I want to show it to my father, and I am running out of time.”
This is a journey into the unchartered territory of posthumous technology applications, but beyond that, a very personal journey into illness, physical and mental decline and, ultimately, grief.
This could be one of these stories that we’ll look back on a decade from now and recognise as a turning point in how we keep not just memories but personalities alive, long after they’ve gone.
