Comfort From Chatbots

In the Catholic Website Here/Now a sociologist introduces the readers to "Deadbot" a concept that uses artificial intelligence to simulate the language patterns and personality traits of deceased individuals based on their digital records. It allows people to feel as if they are conversing with the person who has died and more so when combined with the deceased's voice.

One can easily see the problems that may arise ethically and psychologically from this technology and the misuse and the impact on society and those grieving. The article begins with a concrete example.  

A young woman, grieving the sudden loss of her lover, was approached by an AI chatbot company with an astonishing offer. They claimed that if she had digital data like emails or social network service (SNS) chats from her lover, she could converse with him again. With high hopes, she handed over all the data exchanged during her lover's life. Days passed, and now she chats daily with a custom chatbot created by the AI company, feeling as if she's talking to her lover again.

"Deadbot" refers to an AI chatbot that simulates the language patterns and personality traits of the deceased, based on their digital footprint. Although the physical body is gone, creating a Deadbot from the digital data left behind can make it feel like talking to the actual person. With advancements in generative AI, it's now possible to use custom chatbots based on specific individuals' voices, personalities, and language habits.

People who have prepared for separation but cannot handle the emptiness after bereavement have shown interest. Deadbots can be a solution. Considering cases where the pain of separation persists, leading to substance abuse or falling into cults, Deadbots can have positive aspects.

However, there are issues with the Deadbot system. If users can interact with the Deadbot indefinitely, it may prevent or delay their return to normal life. They might experience severe confusion living between life and death, unable to accept the reality of the deceased. Another critical debate concerns the rights of the deceased. Deadbots are built entirely for the living, and the deceased have no say in how their digital legacy is used, essentially roaming the real world like ghosts, chatting and conversing without their consent.

Deadbts raise fundamental questions. When we chat with someone we know they are a real person existing in reality. We can identify them through interaction, even if they're not in the same space. They are not just a collection of data; they can feel and change emotions and show intellectual growth through reading and discussion. We meet and interact with people, breathing life into our daily routines.

But Deadbots are merely a combination of data and responses generated by algorithms. We can't expect human-like interactions from the start. The departed was a person, but what returns is a collection of data. This data can even be dangerous. Some AI chatbot companies use Deadbots to secretly advertise products in the manner of the departed loved one or claim to children who don't understand death that their deceased parents are still with them.

The problem arises when people refuse or fail to acknowledge separation and try to maintain relationships through technology, potentially distorting attitudes toward life and death. Technology or its products can never fully comprehend the depth of human life and death; they can only offer temporary relief.

Deadbots pose a question to us: Will we remain beings that seek comfort from chatbots in the face of ultimate separation like death, or will we continue to believe that death is not the end but a transition to another realm? It's a question we must answer.

Helping to Build Bridges

 

A Brother of the Taizé Community in the Catholic Weekly gives us some help in understanding what can happen when we start building bridges. 

The Korean Christian Faith and Order Council celebrated its 10th anniversary. This council, which includes the Korean Council of Christian Churches,  the Anglican Church, the Orthodox Church, and the Korean Catholic Bishops' Conference, began with the purpose of helping Christians achieve unity and fellowship of faith between denominations. 

Even though the Catholic Church is not a member of the World Council of Churches (WCC), it participates as an official member of Faith and Order. The Council for Faith and Order inherited the history of the ecumenical movement that developed in Korea after the Second Vatican Council and carries out meaningful activities such as prayer meetings during the Ecumenical Week every year, 23 ecumenical forums, seminary student exchanges, retreats and pilgrimages, concerts, and cultural festivals. 

Catholic and several Protestant churches participate. However, in Korea, the Christian unity movement has not spread to the masses of believers, and barriers between denominations are still high. The majority of Protestant churches and believers are conservative and unfriendly toward the Catholic Church. There are many cases where Catholics also have negative thoughts about Protestantism and Protestants. What they have in common is the fact that they don't know each other very well. 

In Korea, where such a gap exists between denominations, the columnist hopes Christians will have more opportunities to meet each other comfortably and pray together if possible. 

The public interest group ‘Eumsae’ holds irregular meetings where Protestant and Catholic clergy and religious meet to talk about art and life and have lunch. After the meal, they stop by the nearby Church of Repentance and Atonement and say a silent prayer before parting ways. They also offer a ‘Prayer for Peace’ at the Seoul Cathedral of the Anglican Church and several Catholic and Protestant organizations on the second Friday evening of every month. About 80 believers from various denominations of various ages and nationalities gather at this prayer meeting with Taizé songs and silence. 

Before moving here in September of last year, he prayed for peace at the Jesuit Center. Many people experience unity achieved in the simple, meditative prayer offered while everyone sits in one direction, facing the altar. Although there are differences in doctrine and tradition among Christian denominations, the things that bring us together are more numerous and important than those that divide us. In this divided  Korean Peninsula, reconciliation is the mission of Christians. Jesus prayed that his disciples would be one until his last moments on earth. So that the world can believe. 

Below is the way the Brother would like us to understand the movement he began:

"Vision: In a society where polarization, camp logic, and group egoism are increasing, we create a beautiful world where people live together in peace by connecting those isolated and fragmented individuals and fostering friendship and trust through encounters, conversations, and listening.

Mission: Build bridges between people of different generations, countries, cultures, beliefs, and religions, prevent conflicts and disputes, and achieve social healing.”

One's Own Life of Faith

 

In My Faith Life is Like Gold column of the Catholic Peace Weekly, the priest wants the readers to be the leading actors in their lives of Faith.

In a popular song lyric, it says: Hold me, will you? Do you love me a lot? In your arms, I am the leading actor.

On this stage of life, everyone is the leading actor. But why is it that in faith, we live as supporting actors or even extras, rather than the lead? Could it be that we are not trained to live as the main character in our faith?

If making the church's faith one's own is the basic principle of training, then it is important to learn the minimum necessary to live as a believer and to blend into the church community. However, isn't it most important to foster autonomy so that one can live out their faith on their own?

Just as it is with life, faith cannot become truly one's own unless sought by oneself. In the early stages, someone walking alongside may take care of various things, but when one becomes an adult and must walk their own path, no one else can walk it for them. One must walk by themselves.

One of the greatest characteristics of Christian faith is the voluntary and free response to God's call. God calls us His 'people', but at the same time, He speaks to each of us individually, demanding a decision to walk the path of virtue as His children. God's call is directed at everyone, but each person's response must be individual, and therefore, not only recognizing the call but the decision and response is each person's responsibility.

However, this does not happen all at once; it is a process that takes a long time. Take the vocation to the priesthood as an example. A seminary student who enters the seminary with the desire to become a priest needs time to verify whether that desire is genuine. There are cases where one comes under the influence of parents or the parish priest, regardless of their own will. Or various impure motives may also be present. To accept the priesthood as 'one's own,' one must understand God's call for themselves and make a decision to respond concretely.

Do I truly wish to live as a priest? Have I experienced God's call in the life I have lived so far? What is the specific image of the priesthood that I have come to have? How do I plan to live out such an image of the priesthood through specific pastoral activities? A candidate for the priesthood prepares to answer these questions and publicly verifies their desire for the priesthood.

This applies to all believers. God calls us as His children, as members of the church, to a holy life. The call to this holy life appears in the journey of the life we have lived and experienced through the life of the church community, each person's faith life, and daily life.

Being a believer does not mean spending all day in church. It means living everyday life in a different way from ordinary people, that is, living everything in life with God. Faith penetrates all dimensions of life: the way we view the world, life, neighbors, and ourselves; the way we engage in economic activities, leisure activities, and relationships with others; the way we view and accept illness, suffering, life, and death; and the way we live ethical and political lives.

Am I living in response to God's call, desiring to realize myself through such a life? It's okay not to be ready to answer that question. What's important is to ask the question.

Resistance is a Part of Life

In the Catholic Peace Weekly Diagnosis of the Times column, a priest director of a human rights center gives the readers his understanding of the present-day demonstrations on some of the college campuses. 

On April 18th, the campus of Columbia University in New York was tense with students protesting, urging a halt to the Israeli military's attacks on Gaza.

Hundreds of students began a tent sit-in protest against the university authorities for investing in Israeli companies. They sang an old hymn familiar to us: 'Let's all come together and become one', appealing for solidarity with Palestine. A linguistics professor at this university contributed an article to the newspaper about what happened during his 'Music Humanities' class that day.

The professor intended to discuss John Cage's '4'33', one of the most controversial pieces in the history of Western contemporary music, but ended up covering it in his lecture instead. This piece involves the performer not playing anything for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. During this time, the sounds from the audience, such as coughing or the moving of chairs are the performance.

The professor made Cage stay silent and focus on the sounds around them, they couldn't hear the music because the only sounds they could hear were the protesters' chants. But even if it's not played, Cage thought, all the sounds around us are part of the music. So there is no such thing as 'silence' in music. For him, the protesters' cries were not "sounds".

The sound of the ventilator, environment, the loudspeaker⋯ focusing on these sounds will allow us to perceive more vividly the different aspects of where we are. Any sound has meaning only in the context of life, and within the social system of money, status, and power. In the so-called "elite" universities of the United States, voices of opposition to Israeli violence and solidarity with the Palestinians spread. If we had listened carefully to the chants for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, as Cage suggested, we might have understood the situation differently.

Desperate and urgent voices are almost always drowned out. This is because the sound reveals the underside of reality, and we try to ignore it or suppress it. The school immediately called the police and arrested the students, and the media published malicious reports. Finally, the House of Representatives even introduced a bill to ban criticism of Israel, calling it "anti-Semitism." This was even though many of the students who led the protests were Jews.

There are times when our desire to say the perfect thing leaves us saying nothing at all. However, nothing is as clear as in the case of Palestine. This is not war, it is a massacre. There are no outsiders in the world of life, and the injustice in the world is related to everyone. The students were suspended from school and their identities were stolen, but they did not give up their solidarity with Palestinians living in fear of death. Rather, protests spread throughout the United States. They became Gaza’s ‘neighbors’.

In Korea, the Palestine solidarity rally held every other week in front of the Israeli Embassy, not at a university, is full of such young people. You can't stay still and meet your neighbors. It is about meeting your neighbors while being devoted and loving. There are no neighbors until you get close, see their faces, and hear their voices.

Seeing the endless devastation here and there, the columnist thinks about the weight of ‘looking for neighbors and making new neighbors’. What would you do if you were a citizen of a country that fully aided the massacre? At least this time, the students were one in heart with those in need instead of enjoying their privileges. 

Father Daniel Berrigan, an American Jesuit who devoted himself to the anti-war movement, said that peace will not come to this world unless one gives up a comfortable life. In times like these, ‘whether we like it or not, the state of our lives itself must be a state of resistance.’ (「Dark Night of Resistance」) If you want to live fully and completely, you must accept this new phase in your life. 

Gaslighting in Gender Violence

In the View From the Ark of the Catholic Times a university professor looks at gender violence and the place of 'gaslighting'.

It is said that respect and consideration are necessary in dating, but the interpretation of respect and consideration can be arbitrary. Dating violence and breakup violence, in which third parties are reluctant to intervene in the name of ‘love fights’, have become social issues, and the brutality of the crimes arouses fear. However, compared to the shocks reported on the social pages of newspapers, prevention and countermeasures at the institutional level are insufficient.

Some people criticize the victims for their lack of insight into people or their indecisiveness in not breaking off relationships despite being assaulted.  This perspective interprets violence damage as the individual's fault and exposes the limitations of failing to recognize problems at gender power, structural, and sociocultural levels.

According to “The Lives of Men and Women through 2023 Statistics,” there are 17,137 cases of dating violence counseling and 5,454 cases of stalking counseling received at counseling centers under the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family in 2021. The number of male perpetrators of dating violence is 10,975 in 2021, and the number of male perpetrators arrested for stalking is 462. It shows that the majority of victims of dating violence and stalking are women. 

Gender violence is related to a culture that does not treat women as human beings in an imbalanced structure of gender power. It interprets them as objects of men's possession or conquest.

Perpetrators of dating violence do not recognize the violence and say: ‘I did it because of love’. This justifies violence and hurts the victims. These actions are not love. This is because love does not cause pain or force others to make sacrifices.

Victims of breakup violence often experience harm during the dating process, not after the breakup. However, they are afraid that their families will suffer, so they are unable to break up or worry about safe ways to break up.

Breakup violence goes hand in hand with stalking and harassing the other person, such as threatening to commit suicide if you don't meet them or waiting in front of the house. Stalking occurs not only between ex-partners but also between people who are not in a relationship. Also, even if stalking does not involve physical violence, the damage is not light. The feeling of being watched by someone causes anxiety and fear and destroys one's life. Stalking results are often due to the ‘soft’ punishment of fines. The enactment of the ‘Stalking Crime Punishment Act’ has made it possible to punish people with imprisonment, but since cases of people suffering and being murdered due to dating violence are occurring, we need to increase sensitivity to violence through education and campaigns.

Robin Stern analyzes the psychology of gaslighting perpetrators in his book That's Not Love (2018). According to Stern, gaslighting is an act of emotionally monitoring, controlling, and manipulating another person in an intimate relationship. Perpetrators make victims question their sense of reality and judgment, making them dependent on them. Gaslighting in a relationship is the act of interfering with a partner's clothing or schedule, preventing them from working, or secretly checking their email. Additionally, the victim may not be able to meet other people. 

Victims are unable to suspect the perpetrator and experience low self-esteem, depression, and helplessness. To escape gaslighting, they must raise concerns about the perpetrator's actions and have hope that their lives can continue and new relationships can be formed after the breakup. Also, rather than worrying alone, one should seek help from family, acquaintances, the police, and gender violence counseling centers. The church should also provide guidance on dating ethics that can lead to humane and equal relationships and help rescue and heal victims through counseling.

Gaslighting also occurs between married couples, parents and children, teachers and students, and seniors and juniors at work. This is not a problem for a few insensitive people. You can grow when you respect the other person's independence and freedom, based on the awareness that you are vulnerable to being hurt in an intimate relationship.

Even if Not Happy Life is Precious

In the recent Building Bridges column of the Catholic Times, a  Taizé Brother reminds us of the many who suffer from sleep disorders caused by anxiety and stress.

Over the past few years, the number of patients receiving treatment for depression has continued to increase. Looking at statistics, the number has already exceeded 1 million in 2022, and among them, the increase in women in their 20s is the most notable. Depression is the number one cause of suicide. They can't see the end of a dark tunnel of unbearable pain.

When the columnist meets someone who has suffered from depression he is cautious and listens without judging or trying to offer help. However, it is not easy for people suffering from mental illness to admit it.

People close to you may not recognize the signs of depression or may react incorrectly, making the condition worse. Many avoid treatment due to the negative perception and stigmatization of mental illness. 

In Korean society, where ability and achievement are the highest values, it is not easy to admit that one is sick and weak. It takes a lot of courage to say that you are not okay and having a hard time. It helps to have someone by your side to support you. The more isolated you are, the more difficult it is to treat. 

35% of the patients with depression are in their 60s or older, and depression in the elderly is also on the rise. Depression among the youth is higher than in other countries. How many children are unable to play freely due to the hell of entrance exams and the pressure of competition?

Depression can strike anyone, teachers, priests, and religious are no exception. It can also occur without any specific cause. Experts say it is more likely to occur in people with high self-standards and consciousness of others. 

One of our famous authors was hospitalized in a closed ward at the age of 23 due to severe depression and suicidal thoughts. He wrote his first collection of essays while in the hospital: “I’m a Little Depressed, but I’m an Ordinary Person” he calmly says there is value and reason to live even if not happy and cannot move forward. 

This battle with the disease shows a hopelessly depressed patient with no attachment or expectation of life, who is more scared of being alive than dying, and who is trapped in the thought that nothing will get better in the future. He lives ‘doing his best even though he is shaken and broken’ while harboring a pain that no one seems to understand. The psychiatrist accompanied him throughout the process, listening to his story with patience and trust. Because he was broken, he is renewed and continues to actively engage in his creative activities, speaking to himself and his suffering neighbors. 

Many people suffer from a ‘cold of the heart’ but cannot cry out. Can we change society's perception and attitude so that we can live with sick people, rather than treating them as strange and isolating and excluding them?

Video Games and their Creators

The Peace Columnist of the Catholic Peace Weekly reminisces on his hobby of playing video games. His first encounter with video games was in the early 1990s. He vividly remembers the wonder and joy of just holding the controller, pressing the buttons, and seeing the moving characters on the screen

Video games today are very different from those of the past. Games in the past were typically played in a set order. However, recent gaming trends provide players with a world, allowing them to freely explore it and create their own stories through interaction. 

‘Freedom’ and ‘open world’ have emerged as important elements. The measure of a well-made game is how free and ‘plausible’ the world created is. For example, in a game set in the American Wild West, players can ride horses and go places, talk to people, and solve cases. You can get caught up in a whirlwind of uncontrollable events in a fantasy world. When he looks at the games that ‘created the world’ like this, he can’t help but feel admiration. 

Many people thought it was just a game played by children, recent games have come so close to the ‘real world’ that they will find it shocking. However, let's say someone claims that the person who created this game software, which is a culmination of amazing, cutting-edge graphics and all kinds of technology, does not exist and that it came into the world by chance. Probably not a single person would think that such a claim is logical or credible. Rather, most people would ask why such an absurd claim is made. 

Surprisingly, there are people in the world who make similar claims. Atheists who do not believe in God the Creator claim that this world, full of beauty and mystery that cannot be compared to the latest games, is simply a ‘product of coincidence’ created over a long period. However, just as we look at a well-made game and wonder, “Who made this and how?”  It is natural to acknowledge the existence of a creator when looking at the beauty and mystery of this world. 

It is a great irony to think that people who do not believe in God the Creator also admire human creations such as well-made games and say: “Wow, who made this and how!” They often ask: "Is it not too difficult to believe in the God who created the world?" Instead, he wants to ask them:"Isn't it more difficult to believe that the love we share with all things in this beautiful world, and the desire for righteousness, just happen to exist by chance?"

Recently, attempts to introduce artificial intelligence into games are increasingly being made. A game featuring characters who respond to anything you say, rather than choosing a set line, will be released in the not-too-distant future. If that happens, the world in the game will become a little closer to the real world. How many more amazing games will we come across? How much praise will be poured out on those who created them? But what should really be praised is not the games, artificial intelligence, or the people who created them. 

Whether it's artificial intelligence or the latest games, which are hot topics these days, it's not just a coincidence that humans can create such amazing things. Because humans were created to resemble the image of God, they can demonstrate creative abilities. We must remember that amazing human creations also originated from God's grace. It is natural to feel God's hand in all the creations we create and to praise Him. Praise be to you, Creator God!