The Long Read

This week: the ethics of building AI chatbots of the dead, an experiment in handing two weeks of daily life to AI agents, and a reflection on what a mental health system never thought to ask the people inside it.

AI can help us talk with the dead. Should we?

It is now technically possible to build a chatbot from a lost loved one's messages, voice, and habits of speech, and to keep conversing with it after the funeral. This Vox podcast episode takes the question seriously, without easy alarm or easy comfort, and asks what such a thing does to grief, to memory, and to the person left holding the conversation. The practical questions are harder. Who owns the likeness of someone who has died? What happens when the company hosting a parent's voice changes its pricing or shuts down? Whether the dead can consent to being simulated stops being abstract once a product exists. The episode lets those tensions stay unresolved, and it presses on something old: what we owe the dead, and what we are asking of them when we wish they could answer.

Vox · podcast episode, roughly 30 minutes

It's now possible to create AI chatbots of loved ones to interact with after their death. But that raises some difficult questions.

I outsourced my life to AI agents for two weeks. It went…weirdly.

A writer hands the management of ordinary life, the scheduling and the decisions and the small errands, to a set of AI personal agents for a fortnight, and reports on what happens. The piece begins from the observation that a busy person does not need more information, more notifications, or more feeds, and asks whether delegating to software relieves that burden or just rearranges it. The value is in the texture of the experiment: the moments where the agents were useful, the moments where they were strange, and the discomfort of finding which parts of a day one is reluctant to give away. It is a first-person account, more interested in what the writer learned about their own habits than in ruling on the tools. Read it for the honesty of the weirdness.

Vox · 15 minute read

The Person They Never Asked About

After lights out at a state forensic hospital, a worker would look through the square window of the author's door every fifteen minutes, a ritual of observation that opens this first-person essay. It is an account from inside the psychiatric system, written by someone who was watched constantly and, by the title's own testimony, rarely asked who they were. It suits a slow Sunday: the writing stays close to the physical details of confinement and lets the person behind the file accumulate weight without commentary. It also corrects how institutions describe the people in their care. If you read one thing this week that changes how you picture a locked ward, make it this one.

Mad In America · 15 minute read