Support WBUR

'Good Bot, Bad Bot': Episode III

35:07

Megan Cattel
Ben Brock Johnson
Amory Sivertson

January 18, 2023

James Vlahos, CEO of HereafterAI, holds a photograph of his parents, John and Martha Vlahos, outside his home on November 11, 2022 in El Cerrito, California. James created a chatbot or Dadbot as he calls it which allowed him to reconnect with his deceased father, the original motivation for starting HereafterAI. (Getty Images)

Find the original episode and a full transcript here.

Bots are everywhere. They're all over social media platforms, chatrooms, phone apps. These pieces of software — which are meant to imitate human behavior and language — influence our daily lives in sneaky, surprising ways.

In the third episode of Endless Thread's series "Good Bot, Bad Bot," co-hosts Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson explore a growing field of artificial intelligence: immortalizing the dead through predictive AI text.

They talk with two individuals who used this tech in different ways, and discuss how these bots can help us improve our understanding of grief.