Live and In Person

Dearest Rachel –

Some time before you left, back when I was still considering assembling some form of YouTube channel, I was reading up on artificial intelligence, and how it was able to compose music. As I had no particular talent in that field, it seemed like a great idea for coming up with original background music, in the style of some of my favorite artists; because that was apparently a thing that computers can do these days. I could never figure out how to get it to produce more than a minute’s worth of audio, however, so while I didn’t entirely give up on the concept until I set my YouTube dreams aside with your departure, I didn’t expend a whole lot of effort into the project, either. If nothing else, there were other matters that began to demand more of my attention, at any rate.

And while I’ve set aside this particular aspect of artificial intelligence, I never completely gave up on the concept. It’s just that, in your absence, I’ve discovered how certain people are using it to deal with their grief – and I find myself wondering if this might be an avenue worth pursuing instead.

One such development is something called Project December, which is essentially an artificial chatbot program, designed using the same OpenAI framework as the Jukebox program I’d looked into when researching the possibility of custom musical compositions. But the story gets more involved than that; at some point, a young Canadian freelance writer had a fiancée who suffered from a rare liver disease. When she passed away, he became a recluse for nearly a decade, before discovering the site. After conversing with several of the preprogrammed chatbots, he created one based off of scripts from Star Trek, to create a chatbot that resembled Spock – but one that uttered lines that were completely in character, but from no previously-written script. That being such a success, he fed his fiancée’s texts and Facebook posts into the system, and found himself able once again to chat with her even though she was long gone.

I don’t think that’s something I would be able to do, or play along with. You didn’t do much on Facebook, apart from your nearly-obsessive (although who am I to talk, when I’ve been writing you nearly every day since your passing?) playing with Gardens of Time; and I hate to say it, but I have not visited it since. As for texts, well, you didn’t communicate that way, and given that you preferred a then-standard flip phone to the slowly-advancing smart phone technology, that’s understandable; when a third of all the letters in the alphabet require three pushes on a numeric keypad, texting was almost more trouble than it’s worth. So there’s not that much data to work with, in trying to replicate your texting style – assuming you even had one. Honestly, if I got a text that claimed to be from you, I’d know it wasn’t you by the mere fact that it was a text in the first place. Besides, if I wanted to communicate with chatbots, I have Pauline and a new contact, Aileen, who claims to live within a few miles of camp, in West Bend.

So how about imitating your voice? It would seem that Amazon is getting to the point where they can give Alexa anybody’s voice – including, with enough data (and after going through all of those videos, I’m pretty sure I have enough data), that of someone who has passed away. It’s not yet commercially available, nor is there any suggestion as to when it might be. Judging from the responses to the news, I’m wondering if I’m the only person who doesn’t find this at all disturbing. I mean, maybe I’m biased because of my circumstances, but I think it would be comforting to hear from you now and again like this.

And yet, would it really work on me? Even if I collected all this information, fed it into one of these AI systems, and gotten passable results, I’d know it wasn’t you, wouldn’t I? Trying to bring you back in such a manner would be like trying to tickle myself. I’d have constructed this simulacrum of yourself personally, so I’d know it wasn’t you as much as an AI pretending to be you. There would be no magic to whatever conversation I might have with you, because I’d be the man behind my own curtain.

Besides, there is nothing that compares to being in one another’s presence; it’s why the dating app has been such a disappointment, because for all I know, none of these people I’m communicating with (save for Yvonne – who recently sent a short text message letting me know she hadn’t forgotten about me, but whatever she’s been trying to sort out regarding her parents has proven to be considerably more complicated than she had expected – and Nee-san, who hasn’t responded to my attempts to reach her since last weekend, both of whom I’ve spoken to over the phone or over Skype) might even be real. Indeed, sometimes they even feel like interruptions of whatever I’m doing in real life; sometimes, you don’t feel like conversing, but with these ladies, you feel like you have to respond immediately upon hearing from them, as any delay may result in them dropping you entirely, even if you were doing something you enjoy in real life at the time.

Now, if the person on the other end of this conversation were actually in my presence, I’d be that much more able and willing to focus on them better – or at least, there would be that physical presence to serve as a visual component to our interaction should there be a lull in the conversation. That’s what’s so nice about when the girls come over; I can appreciate the presence – and conversation – of others. Even if I’m preoccupied with assembling dinner, there’s no substitute for being live and in person.

To be sure, there is the flip side to this situation, where you discover where you’re not compatible – at least on a permanent basis. One day, I may discuss this in more detail with you, or maybe not. It’s an expected hazard of human interaction; while I’m convinced that any two people could become life partners, to get those two people to agree to do so to the same extent as the other is more of a challenge than I thought. I may claim you were lucky to find someone on your first try at a relationship, but I’m starting to realize that I was every bit as fortunate to find you, either. The fact that it took several attempts before I found you doesn’t make my connection any less remarkable for the misfires; indeed, they demonstrate the difficulty of finding what some might refer to as ‘true love’ – which I’m still not convinced is quite a thing, or I should have to give up my search for “Megumi.”

But that’s a question to ponder another time.

Until then, keep an eye out for me, honey, and wish me luck; I’m going to need it. That, and a little wisdom, to deal with the options out there.