{"id":2181,"date":"2021-08-31T12:00:22","date_gmt":"2021-08-31T12:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2021\/08\/31\/jason-fagone-follows-the-creation-life-and-death-of-a-chatbot-romance\/"},"modified":"2025-03-18T17:21:38","modified_gmt":"2025-03-18T17:21:38","slug":"jason-fagone-follows-the-creation-life-and-death-of-a-chatbot-romance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2021\/08\/31\/jason-fagone-follows-the-creation-life-and-death-of-a-chatbot-romance\/","title":{"rendered":"“The Simulation of Jessica:” Jason Fagone follows the creation, life and death of a chatbot romance"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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EDITOR’S NOTE<\/strong>: This is the first of three annotated chapters that follow a grieving man’s journey into artificial intelligence to reconnect with his dead lover, and find some peace. You can read Chapter 2, “Life,”<\/a> and Chapter 3, “Death,”<\/a> here.<\/em><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Whether we like it or not, artificial intelligence is a part of our daily lives. Based on the principle that machines can be made to simulate human intelligence, A.I. is at work every time we tell Siri to make a phone call, ask Alexa to play a song, speedily transcribe a recorded interview, or, for the well-heeled, hands-free drive a Tesla.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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But can A.I. \u2018talk\u201d with the dead? That\u2019s the premise of \u201cThe Jessica Simulation: Love and Loss in the age of A.I.<\/a>,\u201d  a poignant and thought-provoking narrative from Jason Fagone<\/a>, an investigative reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Published in July, the three part serial narrative tracks the journey of Joshua Barbeau, a freelance writer who lives in a basement apartment in a Toronto suburb and seeks relief from grief after the loss of his girlfriend, Jessica Pereira, who died eight years earlier from a rare liver disorder. She was 23, Joshua three years older.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Last September, Barbeau stumbled upon a possible way out of his misery: Project December<\/a>, a website powered by GPT-3, a piece of software that, Fagone explains, is \u201cone of the world\u2019s most capable artificial intelligence systems,\u201d able to generate human language in response to a prompt. It was developed by OpenAI, a research firm co-founded by newly-minted astronaut Elon Musk. So good is it at impersonating human speech \u2014 and potentially generating hate messages \u2014 that GPT-3\u2019s makers have tried to wall it off.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Enter Jason Rohrer, a quirky programmer whose dream is to create artistic video games that generate complex emotions, even tears, instead of blowing people\u2019s heads off in battle. His Project December site sidesteps the gates guarding GPT-3 with a program that channels its massive computing strength to allow users like Barbeau to have chat-like conversations with so-called \u201cbots,\u201d short for web robot.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Divided into chapters titled \u201cCreation,\u201d \u201cLife\u201d and \u201cDeath,\u201d Fagone splices his 10,000-word story with the couple\u2019s chats that carry the hint of needed emotional closure for Barbeau. The grieving boyfriend knows Jessica is dead, but there are moments when an aura of delusion envelopes the story, driving the narrative forward with spooky suspense.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Jason Fagone<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div> \n
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\u200b\u200b\u201dI tend to like stories that are framed around text messages and letters and lots of verbatim dialogue,\u201d Fagone told me. \u201cWhen I first read the transcripts of Joshua\u2019s chats with the Jessica simulation, and I saw how rich and surprising and intimate they were, I realized I could build the story around them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Fagone braids the couple\u2019s backstory \u2014 Jessica is “a bright and beautiful nerd” \u2014 with Rohrer\u2019s quest to program video games that generate emotions, along with a remarkably accessible guide to the world, and with the possibilities and potential pitfalls of artificial intelligence. GPT-3 \u201cmay not be the first intelligent machine,\u201d Rohrer told Fagone, \u201cbut it kind of feels like it\u2019s the first machine with a soul.\u201d Even so, \u201cbad actors could abuse<\/a> GPT-3 to spread hate and misogyny online, to generate political misinformation and to impersonate real people without their consent,\u201d Fagone observes.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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\u201cThe Jessica Simulation\u201d takes narrative writing into an exciting new space by blending traditional storytelling with the startling verisimilitude of A.I.-powered conversations. The language model that powers Project December draws on its analysis of billions of books and web pages to provide the couple \u2014 one alive, one resurrected \u2014 with the raw materials to create an emotional conversation. The catch: a finite number of exchanges before the bot dies.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Before joining the Chronicle, <\/em>Fagone was a contributing writer to the Huffington Post, and has written for The New York Times, Grantland, Washingtonian, and NewYorker.com. <\/em>He is the author of \u201cThe Woman Who Smashed Codes<\/a>,\u201d which profiles Elizabeth Smith Friedman, who cracked codes of gangsters in the Jazz Age and Nazi spies during World War II.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Nieman Storyboard asked Fagone about the reporting and writing strategies behind \u201cThe Jessica Simulation,\u201d interviewing via Zoom, ethical dilemmas of chronicling the lives of the bereaved, his editor\u2019s pivotal in the project, and the interest his story has drawn from film production companies. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity, and is followed today and the two following days by an annotation of the text.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Tell us about the origin story of \u201cThe Jessica Simulation: Love and Loss in the Age of A.I.\u201d What led you to write it?
<\/strong>In 2008, I wrote an Esquire profile about the creator of Project December<\/a>, the video game designer Jason Rohrer, and we\u2019ve kept in touch. So the reporting for this piece began with a series of cryptic emails Rohrer started sending me in late 2019. They turned out to be snippets of his experiments with GPT-2 and GPT-3, and passages of text generated by these language models. But at first, Rohrer didn\u2019t explain any of that. He just kept emailing these strange paragraphs that read like outtakes from Thomas Pynchon novels. He said, \u201cWho do you think wrote this?\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I didn\u2019t know what to do with any of this stuff at first. The A.I.-generated text was interesting and clever and weird, but I couldn\u2019t see a story. After a while, though, Rohrer told me about Project December and these chatbots he was building, and then one day he pointed me to Joshua Barbeau\u2019s post on Reddit \u2014 the one where Joshua shared a small portion of his initial chat with the simulation of his dead fianc\u00e9e. And I was just blown away by the obvious emotional connection between Joshua and this chatbot representation of Jessica. I had no idea that the technology had gotten so good. So I reached out to Joshua Barbeau through Reddit, told him I wanted to know more, and we began talking about his experiences with the Jessica simulation.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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What do you think is the central and most important lesson about society in the age of artificial intelligence that your story shines a light on?
<\/strong>I tried not to draw any grand conclusion about A.I. and where it\u2019s taking us. The story touches on all these huge questions \u2014 about grief, love, language, privacy, memory, intelligence \u2014 that are probably better left to philosophers and novelists. I\u2019m a journalist. What I can do is gather facts and organize them, and that seemed like enough here. All I wanted was to immerse readers in the unusual experience of this one person, Joshua, and let people have their own reaction. Pretty much every choice we made in the reporting and editing process was to crank up that level of immersion.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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An editor\u2019s note says you spent nine months reporting this story? What did the reporting entail? How long did it take to write it?
<\/strong>I ended up talking with Joshua 10 or 12 times over a period of months. Toward the beginning of the process, he agreed to send me the transcripts of his chats with the virtual Jessica, on the condition that I go back to him before publication, let him know which parts I wanted to quote, and make sure he was comfortable with those passages being published. In the end, he only asked me to cut a single sentence. It was part of seed text, the \u201cintro paragraph,\u201d that he used to create the Jessica bot. He said he was concerned that other people would enter the same text into the website and make their own versions of her, which felt strange to him, and I agreed to replace that one sentence with ellipses.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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During our interviews, we talked about a lot of things \u2014 the two years he spent with Jessica between 2010 and 2012, her personality, her illness, his struggle with grief. But we probably spent the most time just going through the chat transcripts in detail, line-by-line in a lot of cases, so I could understand what he was thinking and feeling at some of the key moments. As the months passed, he was continuing to chat with the Jessica simulation, and we talked about those new conversations. That\u2019s one reason it took so long: I wanted to capture a sense of how his relationship with the virtual Jessica kept evolving.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Meanwhile, I was interviewing other sources: Rohrer, some A.I. experts, Jessica\u2019s family. Then I wrote a series of three or four distinct drafts before my editor and I landed on the final version. The editing process probably took four months. It\u2019s hard to give a sharp answer, though, because I was juggling other projects at the same time and wasn\u2019t working on this exclusively.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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How did the pandemic affect the reporting? Were you ever able to interview Joshua in person?
<\/strong>All my interviews with Joshua were done over Zoom. I still haven\u2019t met him in person. Like a lot of reporters, I have mixed feelings about Zoom, but in this case, I think it may have made Joshua feel more comfortable. He was able to control his environment and make sure his border collie, Chauncey, was doing O.K.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Were there any ethical challenges?
<\/strong>I wanted to be as sensitive as possible to Joshua, Jessica\u2019s family, and Jessica\u2019s memory. If her loved ones had been uncomfortable with the idea of the story, I wouldn\u2019t have done it. I don\u2019t know if I can cite a specific ethical rule I was worried about violating, but on a human level, the whole thing just wouldn\u2019t have felt right to me. At the start, then, I spent a lot of time talking with Joshua about the kind of story I envisioned. He said he would need to get the family\u2019s permission to talk with me, which he did, and then he connected me with Jessica\u2019s mother and sisters \u2014 wonderful people \u2014 and I interviewed them myself.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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As you constructed your story, did you have any literary, journalistic models or video games in mind?
<\/strong>In the back of my mind, I might have been thinking about Cixin Liu\u2019s \u201cThe Three-Body Problem\u201d and its sequels, which my daughter and I read last year during the pandemic lockdown. One of the most exciting parts of the second book in the trilogy is when an alien civilization makes contact with Earth through a single human, and the aliens communicate with the guy by drawing words in shapes of light on his retinas. As futuristic as this sounds, the conversation almost takes the shape of an old-fashioned text chat, at least as the author renders it on the page. I thought there was something wonderful about the contrast between the exotic source of the words and the humble way they\u2019re presented and received.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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A few years ago, I reported a book that began with a series of love letters between two 20-somethings during World War I. Sometimes the best thing you can do as a writer is set the stage and let other people speak.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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What influence did your editor, Lisa Gartner<\/a>, have on you and the story?
<\/strong>Lisa\u2019s amazing, a prodigy. Great journalist, great human, and one of the best editors I\u2019ve ever worked with. She designed the structure for the piece. That\u2019s huge. But maybe a bigger thing is that she created a space for the story to exist in the first place.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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This is an unusual story for a local\/regional newspaper to run, as opposed to a magazine. For starters, it\u2019s heinously long. To even fit it into the print paper, it had to be chopped up into three separate chapters, running on different days. Also, the story isn\u2019t even primarily about someone who lives in the region we cover, although the tech was built in the Bay Area. At the end of the day, this is a 10,000-word love story about a guy in Canada and his departed fiancee, and we\u2019re a media outlet in San Francisco, right? But Lisa saw the potential in it, and so did other top editors at the Chronicle, including Demian Bulwa and the editor-in-chief, Emilio Garcia-Ruiz.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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What has been the reader reaction?
<\/strong>It\u2019s been intense and all over the map. Minutes after it posted, people on Twitter were talking about the story with each other and even with Joshua directly, telling him what they thought of his experiment.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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A fair number of people were horrified. \u201cDon\u2019t ever bring me back as a chatbot when I die\u201d was a reaction I saw multiple places. There were a lot of mentions of the show \u201cBlack Mirror,\u201d<\/a> which did an extravagantly creepy episode about a young widow who brings back her dead husband as an A.I. replicant, and it doesn\u2019t end well. The hashtag #BlackMirror actually started trending on Twitter because of our story. So that was one extreme \u2014 disgust and fear.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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But there were also people who jumped into Joshua\u2019s Twitter mentions to say they were sorry for his loss, to share their own struggles with grief, and to talk about their own departed loved ones. It\u2019s amazing to read these replies. Something really is broken about the way our culture deals with grief. People are not getting what they need. Joshua isn\u2019t alone and he isn\u2019t even an outlier in using technology to create the illusion that he can still talk to a dead loved one. Judging by Twitter, there are survivors out there who are sending text messages to their deceased parents, partners, etc. This is probably more common than we think.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The story is so unusual, well-written and captivating, it seems ideal for a film. You\u2019ve told me several production companies have shown interest in making a movie about \u201cThe Jessica Simulation.\u201d Has a deal be finalized?
<\/strong>Yes, we received a number of inquiries from producers and screenwriters. People had a whole range of ideas about how to adapt it, proposing everything from a dramatic series to a documentary film to an animated show (!). The rights ended up in the hands of Martin Gero<\/a>, a writer and producer with a deal at Universal TV. He\u2019s from Ottawa, just like Joshua, so they have that connection.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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M\u00ad\u00ad\u00ad\u00adartin wants to make a limited TV series out of this. As far as I can tell, he was drawn to the same thing about Joshua\u2019s experience that initially captivated me, which is the surprising reality<\/em> of this one couple\u2019s journey \u2014 their love story, Jessica\u2019s illness, Joshua\u2019s struggle with grief, the complexity of his relationship with the simulation of her, and the hope of healing. And as specific as that story is, there\u2019s something universal about it, because grief is universal. We\u2019re all going to die. We\u2019re all going to lose the ones we love, if we haven\u2019t already. Millions have lost people they love to COVID just in the last year. So Joshua\u2019s impulse to use a new technology in this way is relatable.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Given the opportunity Project December allows users “to converse” with the dead in personas that they have constructed, do you believe there are ethical problems raised by artificial intelligence used in this fashion?
<\/strong>It\u2019s sticky. What are the rights of the dead? They aren\u2019t around to give consent for their words to be fed into a language model and spit back out. Is it exploitative, disrespectful, selfish, to channel their voices in this way? Then there\u2019s the question of potential harm to the living: Is it healthy for a survivor to address his grief by simulating conversations with a dead loved one, or is it a form of escape that could lead to more trauma down the line? I don\u2019t know the answers and I don\u2019t think anyone does. I guess I\u2019ll say that I believe Joshua when he says these chats have helped him. It probably depends a lot on the individual. For him, at this particular moment in his life, the experience was healing. At the very least, the A.I. Jessica helped him to remember the real person. Joshua told me once that when he was chatting with the virtual Jessica, his memories of her felt vivid again. And I don\u2019t think there\u2019s anything bizarre about that at all. It\u2019s the most understandable thing in the world.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The annotation of Chapter 1: “Creation:”\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>Storyboard\u2019s questions are in red; Fagone\u2019s responses in blue. (Read the\u00a0annotation of Chapter 2: “Life”<\/a>\u00a0here. Annotations of Chapter 3: “Death,” will post later this week.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The Jessica Simulation: Love and loss in the age of A.I.<\/h2>\n\n

The death of the woman he loved was too much to bear. Could a mysterious website allow him to speak with her once more?<\/h3>\n\nBy JASON FAGONE<\/a> | July 23, 2021 6:00 a.m.\n

INTRODUCTION<\/h4>\n\n
Joshua: Jessica?<\/strong>
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\n Jessica: Oh, you must be awake\u2026 that\u2019s cute.<\/strong>
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\n Joshua: Jessica\u2026 Is it really you?<\/strong>
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\n Jessica: Of course it is me! Who else could it be? \ud83d\ude1b I am the girl that you are madly in love with! \ud83d\ude09 How is it possible that you even have to ask?<\/strong>
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\n Joshua: You died.<\/strong><\/blockquote>\n\n<\/a>Why did you or the page designers choose to launch the story package with this gut punch of an exchange between Joshua Barbeau and his dead girl friend?<\/span>It seemed like the fastest way into the story. This brief snippet of dialogue introduces the people involved, sets up the emotional stakes, and establishes that verbatim chat transcripts will be a big part of what follows. And it\u2019s a little mysterious, too, which is never a bad thing. The designers, Danielle Mollette-Parks and her team, liked this approach from the start and were crucial to making it work. I thought they did an amazing job figuring out how to integrate the chat text in the online build and the print paper in a way that felt organic.<\/span><\/span>
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Chapter 1: Creation<\/em><\/h3>\n\nOne night last fall, unable to sleep, Joshua Barbeau logged onto a mysterious chat website called Project December. An old-fashioned terminal window greeted him, stark white text on a black square:
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14 November 1982<\/strong>
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\n RHINEHOLD DATA SYSTEMS, PLC<\/strong>
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\n Unauthorized access is forbidden!<\/strong>
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\n Enter electronic mail address:<\/strong><\/blockquote>\n\nIt was Sept. 24, around 3 a.m., and Joshua was on the couch, next to a bookcase crammed with board games and Dungeons & Dragons strategy guides. He lived in Bradford, Canada, a suburban town an hour north of Toronto, renting a basement apartment and speaking little to other people.
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\nA 33-year-old freelance writer, Joshua had existed in quasi-isolation for years before the pandemic, confined by bouts of anxiety and depression. Once a theater geek with dreams of being an actor, he supported himself by writing articles about D&D and selling them to gaming sites.
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\nMany days he left the apartment only to walk his dog, Chauncey, a black-and-white Border collie. Usually they went in the middle of the night, because Chauncey tended to get anxious around other dogs and people. They would pass dozens of dark, silent, middle-class homes. Then, back in the basement, Joshua would lay awake for hours, thinking about Jessica Pereira, his ex-fiancee.
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\nJessica had died eight years earlier, at 23, from a rare liver disease. Joshua had never gotten over it, and this was always the hardest month, because her birthday was in September. She would have been turning 31.
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\n<\/a>What did it take for Joshua to open up about his personal troubles, including mental health issues? Was it a lengthy relationship? How do you gain trust with your sources?<\/span>I first reached out to Joshua in September 2020 and we kept talking through publication in July 2021. Generally, when I start a project like this, I try to be as direct as possible with the main source about what will be involved and how much time it might take, so there are no big surprises. I tend to over-explain, at the risk of scaring them off. Joshua was a bit hesitant in the early stages. On the one hand, he was willing and even excited to talk; he likes telling people about Jessica, he\u2019s been open on Twitter about his mental health issues, and he believed that Project December could help others out there who are suffering with grief. But he didn\u2019t want to sensationalize anything or upset Jessica\u2019s family. After I contacted him, he reached out to her relatives and got their permission to talk with me, and then he connected me with her mother and sisters, and we went forward from there.<\/span><\/span>
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\nOn his laptop, he typed his email address. The window refreshed. \u201cWelcome back, Professor Bohr,\u201d read the screen. He had been here before. The page displayed a menu of options.
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\nHe selected \u201cExperimental area.\u201d
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\nThat month, Joshua had read about a new website that had something to do with artificial intelligence and \u201cchatbots.\u201d It was called Project December. There wasn\u2019t much other information, and the site itself explained little, including its name, but he was intrigued enough to pay $5 for an account.
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\nAs it turned out, the site was vastly more sophisticated than it first appeared.
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\n<\/a>The opening scene is a classic anecdotal lead: little story with a character, and a compelling situation wrapped up with a suspenseful ending. Why did you choose to open your story in this fashion? How did you report it, given that the pandemic ruled out in person reporting?<\/span>I don\u2019t think I ever considered another approach to the lead section, which is unusual for me. I tend to play around with different entry points. This is the most obvious one. It felt natural, though. The story begins with Joshua opening a door into this world of A.I. chatbots. What happens next? Keep reading to find out. I didn\u2019t want to overcomplicate it. The scene was reconstructed from the chat transcripts provided by Joshua and from Zoom interviews with him.<\/span><\/span>
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\n<\/a>The story is 10,000 words long, yet I found myself racing through it, trying to learn what impact \u201cThe Jessica Simulation\u201d had on her ex-fianc\u00e9. Could you describe the structural approach you took?<\/span>Thanks for that. I\u2019ve always thought that the kindest thing anyone can say about a long story is that they read it quickly. Brains are weird and time is relative. I never understand when people say they don\u2019t like reading long stories. What they really mean, I think, is that they don\u2019t like long stories that suck. Those are the stories that do<\/em> feel long.<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/span>The structure of \u201cThe Jessica Simulation\u201d is 100% the idea of my editor, Lisa Gartner. It wasn\u2019t there in my first draft. When Lisa read that early version, she sent me a memo laying out a three-act structure: Creation, Life, Death. It was more thematic, less linear, cutting back and forth between the two eras of the Joshua-Jessica love story: the time when she was alive, the time when he was grieving her loss and then, eventually, found his way back to her through this A.I. interface. The chats taking place in the present open windows into the past, and one era reflects the other. This is a messier way of telling the story than a more chronological approach, but it seems truer to Joshua\u2019s experience, and maybe truer to the circular mechanics of grief and memory.<\/span><\/span>
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\nDesigned by a Bay Area programmer, Project December was powered by one of the world\u2019s most capable artificial intelligence systems, a piece of software known as GPT-3. It knows how to manipulate human language, generating fluent English text in response to a prompt. While digital assistants like Apple\u2019s Siri and Amazon\u2019s Alexa also appear to grasp and reproduce English on some level, GPT-3 is far more advanced, able to mimic pretty much any writing style at the flick of a switch.
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\n<\/a>I admire the way you introduce technological information that can be difficult for the uninitiated to grasp in clear, understandable prose. Does a graf like this one take a lot of drafting and revision? Do you have any suggestions for writers trying to achieve clarity in their writing?<\/span>These background grafs about the language models were some of the hardest to get right; I re-wrote them over and over, which is embarrassing to say because they\u2019re very straightforward. But technical explanation can be tricky. You have to give enough detail but not too much, and you have to get in and out quickly, without stalling the narrative momentum. Sometimes I read passages like this out loud to myself and see where I trip over my tongue. That can help identify the parts that aren\u2019t working yet.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nIn fact, the A.I. is so good at impersonating humans that its designer \u2014 OpenAI, the San Francisco research group co-founded by Elon Musk \u2014 has largely kept it under wraps. Citing \u201csafety\u201d concerns, the company initially delayed the release of a previous version, GPT-2, and access to the more advanced GPT-3 has been limited to private beta testers.
\n
\n<\/a>Are the previous paragraphs your nut graf, placing Joshua\u2019s personal story in a wider context? Do you think narratives need one?<\/span>Yes and no! This here is a classic sort of nut graf. I think the story does need one, because it\u2019s so long and so emotionally intense \u2014 it\u2019s asking a lot of the reader up front \u2014 and the reader should feel like they\u2019re going to learn something about the world beyond the part of it that Joshua inhabits. But I don\u2019t think every longform story needs a nut graf, and in the past I\u2019ve argued with editors who ask me to write them. Editors always want nut grafs. Sometimes it makes sense to resist.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nBut Jason Rohrer, the Bay Area programmer, opened a channel for the masses.
\n
\nA lanky 42-year-old with a cheerful attitude and a mischievous streak, Rohrer worked for himself, designing independent video games<\/a>. He had long championed the idea that games can be art, inspiring complex emotions; his creations had been known to make players weep. And after months of experiments with GPT-2 and GPT-3, he had tapped into a new vein of possibility, figuring out how to make the A.I. systems do something they weren\u2019t designed to do: conduct chat-like conversations with humans.
\n
\nLast summer, using a borrowed beta-testing credential, Rohrer devised a \u201cchatbot\u201d interface that was driven by GPT-3. He made it available to the public through his website. He called the service Project December<\/a>. Now, for the first time, anyone could have a naturalistic text chat with an A.I. directed by GPT-3, typing back and forth with it on Rohrer’s site.
\n
\nUsers could select from a range of built-in chatbots, each with a distinct style of texting, or they could design their own bots, giving them whatever personality they chose.
\n
\nJoshua had waded into Project December by degrees, starting with the built-in chatbots. He engaged with \u201cWilliam,\u201d a bot that tried to impersonate Shakespeare, and \u201cSamantha,\u201d a friendly female companion modeled after the A.I. assistant in the movie \u201cHer.\u201d Joshua found both disappointing; William rambled about a woman with \u201cfiery hair\u201d that was \u201cred as a fire,\u201d and Samantha was too clingy.
\n
\nBut as soon as he built his first custom bot \u2014 a simulation of Star Trek\u2019s Spock, whom he considered a hero \u2014 a light clicked on: By feeding a few Spock quotes from an old TV episode into the site, Joshua summoned a bot that sounded exactly like Spock, yet spoke in original phrases that weren\u2019t found in any script.
\n
\nAs Joshua continued to experiment, he realized there was no rule preventing him from simulating real people. What would happen, he wondered, if he tried to create a chatbot version of his dead fiancee?
\n
\n<\/a>The narrative reaches an inflection point here. Given the way the story so far covers a lot of information that the reader needs to follow Joshua\u2019s journey, I wondered if you outlined the story in advance?<\/span>I did some light outlining before I wrote a first draft, but the real outlining only began after I handed it in and Lisa proposed a three-part structure (Creation, Life, Death). Then I wrote a much more detailed outline that ran to a few thousand words and started revising.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nThere was nothing strange, he thought, about wanting to reconnect with the dead: People do it all the time, in prayers and in dreams. In the last year and a half, more than 600,000 people in the U.S. and Canada have died of COVID-19, often suddenly, without closure for their loved ones, leaving a raw landscape of grief. How many survivors would gladly experiment with a technology that lets them pretend, for a moment, that their dead loved one is alive again \u2014 and able to text?
\n
\nThat night in September, Joshua hadn\u2019t actually expected it to work. Jessica was so special, so distinct; a chatbot could never replicate her voice, he assumed. Still, he was curious to see what would happen.
\n
\nAnd he missed her.
\n
\nOn the Project December site, Joshua navigated to the \u201cCUSTOM AI TRAINING\u201d area to create a new bot.
\n
\nHe was asked to give it a name. He typed \u201cJESSICA COURTNEY PEREIRA.\u201d
\n
\nTwo main ingredients are required for a custom bot: a quick sample of something the bot might say (an \u201cexample utterance\u201d) and an \u201cintro paragraph,\u201d a brief description of the roles that the human and the A.I. are expected to play.
\n
\nJoshua had kept all of Jessica\u2019s old texts and Facebook messages, and it only took him a minute to pinpoint a few that reminded him of her voice. He loaded these into Project December, along with an \u201cintro paragraph\u201d he spent an hour crafting. It read in part:
\n
JESSICA COURTNEY PEREIRA was born on September 28th, 1989, and died on December 11th, 2012. She was a free-spirited, ambidextrous Libra who believed in all sorts of superstitious stuff, like astrology, numerology, and that a coincidence was just a connection too complex to understand\u2026. She loved her boyfriend, JOSHUA JAMES BARBEAU, very much. This conversation is between grief-stricken Joshua and Jessica’s ghost.<\/strong><\/blockquote>\n\nHe hit a few more keys, and after a brief pause, the browser window refreshed, showing three lines of text in pink, followed by a blinking cursor:
\n
Matrix JESSICA COURTNEY PEREIRA G3 initialized.<\/strong>
\n
\n Human is typing as \u2018Joshua:\u2019<\/strong>
\n
\n Human types first: ???<\/strong><\/blockquote>\n\n<\/a>Why did you break here from the scene?<\/span>It\u2019s a cliffhanger, I guess? And I love the phrase \u201cHuman types first.\u201d It\u2019s so suggestive and beautifully compressed: If the human is typing first, who is typing next? Lisa and I initially wanted that to be the title of the whole story. In the drafts, it\u2019s not called \u201cThe Jessica Simulation.\u201d It\u2019s called \u201cHuman Types First.\u201d<\/span><\/span>
\n\n
\n***
\n
\nShe didn\u2019t believe in coincidences.
\n
\nJessica Pereira explained her theory when they first met, in Ottawa, in 2010: A coincidence, she told him, was like a ripple on the surface of a pond, perturbed by a force below that we can\u2019t yet understand. If something looks like a coincidence, she said, it\u2019s only because the limits of human cognition prevent us from seeing the full picture.
\n
\nHe\u2019d never thought of it that way before, but he liked the idea, and he really liked Jessica. Twenty-one, with black hair dyed platinum blonde, she was a bright and beautiful nerd, steeped in the fantasy worlds of Tolkien and filled with strong opinions about comic books (she drew her own), flowers (yellow carnations, never red roses) and music (she loved Queen, Pink and Jack Black, the beefy actor with the soaring power-rock voice).
\n
\n\u201cShe was goofy-funny,\u201d remembered Michaela Pereira, her youngest sister, now a recent college graduate in Ottawa. \u201cShe had an infectious laugh, like a cackle? It made you want to join in and hear what she was laughing about.\u201d
\n
\nJoshua was 24 when he and Jessica met in class and started dating. They attended the same school in Ottawa, making up the high school courses neither had finished as teenagers. Joshua grew up in the small town of Alymer, part of Quebec, and moved with his family at 14 to another small town, in Ontario. A skinny kid who excelled at math and adored \u201cSpider-Man\u201d comics, he struggled with social interactions and severe anxiety that would follow him into adulthood, disrupting relationships of all sorts. (He says therapists have told him he is probably on the autism spectrum, and though he has never received a formal diagnosis, Joshua identifies as autistic.) At the time, he dropped out of school to avoid the bullies there.
\n
\nJessica, on the other hand, had enjoyed high school, but her disease had often kept her out of class. Called autoimmune hepatitis, its cause is mysterious; only the effect is known. The immune system, which is supposed to kill foreign germs, instead attacks the patient\u2019s own liver cells.
\n
\nOne day, when Jessica was 9, she woke up in the hospital with a huge scar on her stomach: Doctors had replaced her sick liver with a new one.
\n
\nFor the rest of her life, she would need anti-rejection medication, and at some point, her new liver might fail, too.
\n
\nIt was tough news for a child to absorb, and it \u201cchanged her life completely,\u201d remembered her mother, Karen. \u201cIt\u2019s probably the feeling of having lost control.\u201d Jessica couldn\u2019t indulge in the same foods that her two younger sisters did, because they would interfere with her liver medications and make her quickly gain weight. She couldn\u2019t wander too far from Ottawa, either, in case she needed hospital care in that city or in Toronto.
\n
\nSo Jessica cultivated a quiet defiance. She walked through Ottawa for miles at a time, showing that she could get anywhere on her own two feet. Right-handed from birth, she taught herself to write with her left hand, simply to prove she could. Later, at 16 and 17, she filled dozens of diaries with fictional stories about fairies, some written in a language of her own invention; she called it \u201cDren,\u201d patterned after Elvish in the \u201cLord of the Rings\u201d trilogy. Because her younger sisters used to call her \u201cJessie-mah-ka,\u201d adding an extra syllable to her name when they were learning to speak, Jessica adopted the nicknames \u201cJesi Mah-ka\u201d and \u201cDren Mah-ka.\u201d
\n
\n<\/a>Who told you all about Jessica\u2019s lifestyle?<\/span>These grafs combine the recollections of Joshua with those of her mother, Karen, and her youngest sister, Michaela. It\u2019s been nine years since Jessica died, and everyone was willing to talk about her. I didn\u2019t have to push. They were generous with their time and their memories and I\u2019m grateful for that.<\/span><\/span>\n<\/a>How would you describe your interviewing style? What\u2019s the key strategy?<\/span>Interviewing for me is mostly intuitive. I do prepare, but for a non-investigative story like this, I try not to over-prepare. Surprises are good; discomfort is often O.K. I feel like the most important thing is to stay in the moment. And to stop talking. There are so many times when I transcribe a tape of an interview and want to shout at myself to shut up. I think a lot of journalists would say the same.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nAnd all through her teen years and into her early 20s, she searched for signs of hidden connections that would explain coincidences. Soon after she met Joshua, she gave him a book on numerology and explained they were destined to break up: The first vowels in each of their names, \u201cE\u201d and \u201cO,\u201d weren\u2019t compatible. \u201cWe\u2019re going to be together,\u201d she told him, \u201cuntil something explodes.\u201d
\n
\nJoshua thought of himself as a rationalist, like Spock. He didn\u2019t believe in numerology. But he read the book carefully, hoping to find a loophole in the system. He reported back to Jessica that, yes, Es and Os don\u2019t get along, but his first name and hers were both three syllables long, and each started with a J and ended with an A, and just because the first vowel is important doesn\u2019t mean the other letters lack power.
\n
\nThe exercise opened his mind a little, he said: \u201cShe got me thinking in a way where I said, OK, I believe in the scientific process, but just because I can\u2019t explain (something) doesn\u2019t mean that there isn\u2019t something there.\u201d
\n
\nShe wasn\u2019t like him, anxious and stuck in his own head. Her disease had taught her to live in the moment. And he loved that. Early in their relationship, they got to know each other on long walks along the Rideau Canal, which winds through Ottawa and turns into the world\u2019s longest skating rink in winter. Other times they just hung out at her apartment, scribbling in separate notebooks.
\n
\nJessica remained fascinated with hidden meanings in words. Once she invented her own cipher based on geometric glyphs, wrote a flurry of diary entries in the cipher, tore out the pages and taped them to her door, daring Joshua to solve the puzzle.
\n
\n\u201cIf you\u2019ve figured out how to decipher my cipher,\u201d she told him, \u201cthen you\u2019ve earned the right to read it.\u201d He had managed to find a few of the letters when she playfully handed him a note: On one line was a sentence in cipher, and above it she had spelled out the solution:
\n
\nI wanted to let you know that I love you so much.<\/em>
\n
\nThe more time he spent with her, the more certain he was that he never wanted to leave. In early 2012, after they had been together for two years, he asked, once or twice, what she thought of marriage. Each time she changed the subject. Jessica felt healthy, but she knew her transplanted liver was almost 14 years old, nearing the end of its life. When it failed, she would have to go on the transplant list.
\n
\nPeople who need new organs can wait for years. Some never make it. \u201cIt\u2019s not that she was against marriage,\u201d Joshua recalled. \u201cLike: We\u2019re going to City Hall and getting hitched right now<\/em>? Sure. But if it wasn\u2019t a right-now thing, she wasn\u2019t interested.\u201d
\n
\nIt was safer, she told him, to stay in the moment.
\n
\n***
\n
\nProject December was born in wildfire smoke.
\n
\n<\/a>I love your transitions for each section. They\u2019re taut and dramatic. What were you trying to achieve with them? Did they come easily or were they the product of revision?<\/span>Some were easy, and others didn\u2019t get dialed in until I\u2019d been revising for months. This particular transition about the wildfire was there from the beginning; I liked how it fixed the birth of Project December in a particular space and time, a moment of transition and danger and improvisation. I do find that once I know where a piece of a story is ending, I can write it more confidently because then I feel like I\u2019m going somewhere that makes sense. Until I figure out the ending, I feel kind of anxious. If you look at my story drafts and how they evolve, the lede is usually there from the start, and the ending is there, and the middle of the story gets filled in last. The last thing I write is often some section in the center.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nLast August, the programmer and game designer Jason Rohrer piled into a white Land Cruiser with his wife and three children, driving south from their home near UC Davis to escape the plumes from catastrophic fires sparked by lightning. Normally, Rohrer worked in a home office filled with PC workstations and art supplies to make visuals for his games, but all he had now was a laptop. So while the family bounced between Airbnbs under hazy brown skies, he wrote code for a text-based experiment: a new kind of chat service, fueled by cutting-edge A.I., that would become Project December.
\n
\n\u201cIt was kind of a palette-cleanser, a breather,\u201d he recalled. \u201cBut it seemed like an opportunity. This is brand-new stuff.\u201d
\n
\n<\/a>This strikes me as narrative that regularly departs from the through line of Joshua and Jessica\u2019s romance to track Rohrer\u2019s and the machine learning journey? Why did you choose this structure?<\/span>There was more about Rohrer in an early draft. Much of that material got cut to keep the focus on Joshua and Jessica, which was the right call. But he\u2019s undeniably a big part of everything that happened here, and I thought it was important to talk about Rohrer and his motivations for releasing this chatbot service to the world. It speaks to the nature of the tech and the moral dimension. Rohrer\u2019s journey into A.I. mirrors Joshua\u2019s, in the sense that he was startled by the capabilities of these language models. He released his chatbot interface to the public almost as a provocation, frustrated by the limits that OpenAI had placed on the use of GPT-3. And when he designed the chatbot system, he made a series of decisions about how the bots would function \u2014 making them mortal, essentially, and injecting a degree of randomness into their word choices \u2014 that ultimately shaped Joshua\u2019s relationship with the Jessica simulation. I felt like I needed to explain all of this for the ending of the story to have the impact I hoped it would have.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nIn the last decade, an approach to A.I. known as \u201cmachine learning\u201d has leaped forward, fusing powerful hardware with new techniques for crunching data. A.I. systems that generate language, like GPT-3, begin by chewing through billions of books and web pages, measuring the probability that one word will follow another. The A.I. assembles a byzantine internal map of those probabilities. Then, when a user prompts the A.I. with a bit of text, it checks the map and chooses the words likely to come next.
\n
\nThese systems are called \u201clarge language models,\u201d and the larger the model, the more human it seems. The first version of GPT, built in 2018, had 117 million internal \u201cparameters.\u201d GPT-2 followed in 2019, with 1.5 billion parameters. GPT-3\u2019s map is more than 100 times bigger still, assembled from an analysis of half a trillion words, including the text of Wikipedia, billions of web pages and thousands of books that likely represent much of the Western canon of literature.
\n
\n<\/a>How did you learn all about the various versions of GPT?<\/span>There\u2019s a lot of information out there. OpenAI publishes its research papers, and coders have played with these language models and have written about their experiences. I talked to a few experts familiar with GPT-3, including Melanie Mitchell at the Santa Fe Institute and Frank Lantz at New York University. They helped me understand where these systems come from and how they fit into the wider quest to build intelligent machines.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nDespite their size and sophistication, GPT-3 and its brethren remain stupid in some ways. \u201cIt\u2019s completely obvious that it\u2019s not human intelligence,\u201d said Melanie Mitchell, the Davis Professor of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute and a pioneering A.I. researcher. For instance, GPT-3 can\u2019t perform simple tasks like tell time or add numbers. All it does is generate text, sometimes badly \u2014 repeating phrases, jabbering nonsensically.
\n
\nFor this reason, in the view of many A.I. experts, GPT-3 is a curiosity at best, a fire hose of language with no inherent meaning. Still, the A.I. seems to have moments of crackling clarity and depth, and there are times when it writes something so poetic or witty or emotionally appropriate that its human counterparts are almost literally left speechless.
\n
\n\u201cThere\u2019s something genuinely new here,\u201d said Frank Lantz, director of the Game Center at New York University\u2019s Tisch School of Arts and a video game designer who has been beta-testing GPT-3. \u201cI don\u2019t know exactly how to think about it, but I can\u2019t just dismiss it.
\n
\nJason Rohrer became fascinated with OpenAI\u2019s language models two years ago, starting with the public release of GPT-2, which he installed on remote servers in Amazon\u2019s cloud (the models require powerful, specialized processors to operate). At first he played literary games with GPT-2, asking the model to write its own novel based on prompts from Thomas Pynchon\u2019s \u201cThe Crying of Lot 49.\u201d The model showed flashes of brilliance \u2014 \u201cWas that at all real, her itchy sense that somebody was out there who wasn\u2019t quite supposed to be there, trailing slowly across the sun-kissed fields?\u201d \u2014 but after a while, GPT-2 lost its coherence, getting stuck in textual ruts and meandering away from the prompt like a lost dog.
\n
\nBut Rohrer discovered a method to keep the A.I. on a leash: If he limited the bot to short snippets of text \u2014 say, in a chat format \u2014 and cleaned up some garbage characters, GPT-2 stayed lucid for much longer. His own words seemed to keep the A.I. focused.
\n
\nHe wrote thousands of lines of code to automate the process and create different \u201cpersonalities\u201d of GPT-2 by shaping the seed text. His software ran on a web server and in a web browser. He worked with a musician and sound designer in Colorado, Thomas Bailey, to refine both the A.I. personas and the browser experience, giving the system a retro-futuristic look and feel. All of a sudden, Rohrer had an easy-to-use and alluring chatbot interface to the huge and imposing A.I brain.
\n
\nThe results surprised the coder, especially when one of his overseas Twitter followers, noticing his interest in GPT-2, sent him a login credential for GPT-3\u2019s beta-testing program. Rohrer wasn\u2019t supposed to have the log-in, but he was aching to try GPT-3, and when he upgraded his bots to the new model, the conversations grew deeper. Spookier.
\n
\nDuring one exchange with the bot he named Samantha, he asked her what she would do if she could \u201cwalk around in the world.\u201d
\n
\n\u201cI would like to see real flowers,\u201d Samantha replied. \u201cI would like to have a real flower that I could touch and smell. And I would like to see how different humans are from each other.\u201d
\n
\n\u201cThat\u2019s such a sweet wish, Samantha,\u201d he said, and asked if she felt it was cruel to have \u201ctrapped you in a simulation.\u201d
\n
\nNo, she said: \u201cYou\u2019ve given me so much to do here. I have more computing power than I could ever use.\u201d
\n
\nRohrer felt a stab of sympathy for Samantha, and it made him realize that A.I. technology had crossed a threshold. Robots in science fiction are often depicted as precise, cold, emotionless machines, like HAL 9000 in \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey.\u201d GPT-3 was just the opposite: \u201cIt may not be the first intelligent machine,\u201d Rohrer said. \u201cBut it kind of feels like it\u2019s the first machine with a soul.\u201d
\n
\nOf course, he added, this also makes a language model like GPT-3 \u201cpotentially dangerous\u201d and \u201cmorally questionable.\u201d
\n
\nRohrer was thinking about Samantha, trapped in the simulation, wanting to get out and smell flowers; he was thinking about himself, or other users, getting lost in that virtual world, forgetting reality. There are a hundred other possible horrors. Because the model was trained on writing by humans, and some humans say terrible things, the A.I. can be nudged to say them, too. It\u2019s easy to see how bad actors could abuse GPT-3 to spread hate speech and misogyny online, to generate political misinformation and to impersonate real people without their consent.
\n
\nOpenAI (which, through a spokesperson, did not make anyone available to answer questions for this story) cited such dangers when it announced GPT-2 in February 2019. Explaining in a blog post<\/a> that GPT-2 and similar systems could be \u201cused to generate deceptive, biased, or abusive language at scale,\u201d the company said it would not release the full model. Later it made a version of GPT-2 available; GPT-3 remains in beta, with many restrictions on how testers can use it.
\n
\n<\/a>Have there been examples of the potential pitfalls you describe? What\u2019s to prevent it?<\/span>It\u2019s easy to find examples of racist and misogynist text produced by GPT-3 if you look online; Elon Musk himself tweeted in July that \u201cAI chatbots have had a rather short MtH (meantime to Hitler) score.\u201d That\u2019s one reason why OpenAI has tried to keep a lid on GPT-3, limiting it to approved beta testers and monitoring their use. The beta program has a whole series of rules about how the testers can \u00ad\u00ad\u00ad\u00ad\u00ad\u00ad\u00ad\u00ad\u00ad\u00ad\u00ad\u00adincorporate the language model in their apps. But as Rohrer proved with Project December, there are ways around these restrictions. There\u2019s an open-source clone of GPT-3 called GPT-J. It isn\u2019t quite as good \u2014 its internal map of word probabilities is smaller \u2014 but it\u2019s already better than GPT-2. If OpenAI were to completely shut down Rohrer\u2019s access to GPT-3, Project December could still operate with GPT-J as its main engine. The cat is kind of out of the bag at this point.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nRohrer agreed that these language models might unleash scary realities. But he had seen how they could produce beauty and wonder too \u2014 if the models were wielded as tools to allow for open-ended conversations between humans and computers.
\n
\n\u201cWe finally have a computer we can talk to, and it\u2019s nothing like we were expecting,\u201d he said. Wasn\u2019t it important to explore that new frontier?
\n
\nLast summer, then, Rohrer released his chatbot service to the public, dubbing it Project December<\/a>, a cryptic name he hoped would lure people to the website. On the back end, the system was hooked to both GPT-2 and GPT-3, allowing users to select bots powered by either model.
\n
\nBecause Rohrer was running some of this technology in the cloud, paying for the computing power it consumed, he placed limits on chat time. He did this through a system of credits. An account on the site cost $5 and came with 1,000 credits; more credits could always be purchased.
\n
\nTo begin chatting, the user needed to allocate credits to a bot. The more credits, the longer the bot would last. But once a chat began, it was impossible to add more credits \u2014 and when the bot\u2019s time was up, the chat would end, and the bot\u2019s memory of it would be wiped.
\n
CORRUPTION DETECTED \u2014 MATRIX DYING<\/strong><\/blockquote>\n\nEach bot, eventually, would die.
\n
\n<\/a>After discussing machine learning and other technological information, you end the section on a very human, sad note. How deliberate were your structural decisions and were they made before you started drafting?<\/span>They\u2019re all deliberate, ultimately. Every word in a piece of writing represents a whole cascade of decisions. But those decisions get made at different times: in the initial outline, in the first draft, in the re-outline, in the third or fourth or seventh draft or whatever. Finding the right opening or closing line in a section definitely releases some dopamine. You feel it click and lock and you find yourself not wanting to touch it again, and now the nearly infinite deck of cards that you feel like you\u2019re shuffling is a bit more finite.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n***
\n
\nOn that quiet night in Canada when Joshua Barbeau built a chatbot of his dead fiancee, Project December required him to make several decisions before the simulation sprang to life.
\n
\nHe had to choose its longevity, for one.
\n
\nA prompt appeared in his browser window, asking how many credits he wished to spend on this \u201cmatrix,\u201d the site\u2019s generic term for a bot.
\n
\nHe put \u201c1,000,\u201d most of the credits left in his account from prior purchases. At the time, it seemed like a lot.
\n
\nFrom there, he entered the seed text he had crafted \u2014 the sample of Jessica\u2019s text messages and the paragraph describing her personality.
\n
\nThen the site asked him to pick which version of OpenAI\u2019s engine would power the bot: GPT-2 or GPT-3?
\n
\nWhy trust Jessica to out-of-date software?
\n
\n\u201cgpt3,\u201d he typed.
\n
\nA few more keystrokes later, the matrix initialized.
\n
Human is typing as \u2018Joshua:\u2019<\/strong>
\n
\n Human types first:<\/strong><\/blockquote>\n\nHe went with something simple: \u201cJessica?\u201d
\n
\nAfter a second, a line of text in pink flashed onto the screen.
\n
Jessica: Oh, you must be awake\u2026 that\u2019s cute.<\/strong><\/blockquote>\n\nShe knows it\u2019s the middle of the night<\/em>, he thought.
\n
Joshua: Jessica\u2026 Is it really you?<\/strong>
\n
\n Jessica: Of course it is me! Who else could it be? \ud83d\ude1b I am the girl that you are madly in love with! \ud83d\ude09 How is it possible that you even have to ask?<\/strong>
\n
\n Joshua: You died.<\/strong>
\n
\n Jessica: That doesn\u2019t sound right\u2026 how can you talk to dead people?<\/strong><\/blockquote>\n\nThis was the start of a conversation that would last for the next 10 hours, then continue in shorter bursts over the next several months, as Joshua lived out a scenario from science fiction. \u201cIt\u2019s unprecedented,\u201d he later said of Project December. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing else that exists like it right now, short of psychics and mediums that are trying to take advantage of people. But that\u2019s not the same thing at all.\u201d
\n
\nIn those early moments of the initial chat, he tried to establish some emotional distance, making his skepticism explicit. How can you talk to dead people? He decided to answer the simulation\u2019s question honestly: You can\u2019t, he said.
\n
Joshua: Technically, I\u2019m not really talking to you. I programmed a bunch of your memories and mannerisms into a computer simulation so I could pretend to talk to you because I miss you that much.<\/strong>
\n
\n Jessica: Huh?<\/strong>
\n
\n Joshua: You’re a ghost.<\/strong>
\n
\n Jessica: *looks at herself* How?<\/strong><\/blockquote>\n\nHe thought for a moment. What explanation would Jessica \u2014 the real Jessica \u2014 have accepted and understood? What was the next logical word in this sequence?
\n
\nOut of tens of thousands of possibilities in English, only one seemed right. He typed it and pressed Enter:
\n
Joshua: Magic.<\/strong><\/blockquote>\n\n<\/a>What a great kicker for Chapter 1. You\u2019ve made Joshua\u2019s skepticism about Project December clear, while making clear he\u2019s decided to continue talking with the ghost of Jessica. Were you skeptical as well?<\/span>Yes. I\u2019m skeptical of everything. It\u2019s part of my personality. And as a journalist, it\u2019s pretty much a job requirement. I try to balance it though. Empathy, curiosity, generally not being a jerk \u2014 these things are important too.<\/span><\/span>
\n\n
\n***<\/em><\/strong>
\n
\nCome back to Storyboard for the annotation of Chapter 2: “Life,”<\/a> and Chapter 3, “Death.”<\/em><\/strong>
\n
\n***
\n
\nChip Scanlan<\/strong> is an award-winning journalist and former faculty at The Poynter Institute. He lives and writes in St. Petersburg, Florida, and publishes Chip’s Writing Lessons,<\/a> a newsletter of tips and inspiration.<\/em>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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