You have to wonder what went through his head when Jim Acosta decided to interview a victim of the 2018 Parkland school shooting.
This wasn’t, after all, a routine interview with a student who survived, was seized upon by the anti-gun lobby, and who now advocates for stricter gun laws. No, this was an interview with Joaquin Oliver, one of the 17 people killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when Nikolas Cruz opened fire — or rather, to be more precise, it was an interview with an AI-generated avatar of him.
If the very idea of that makes you uncomfortable, it should. But doing the uncomfortable gets clicks, so Acosta leaned in.
The resulting “interview” went live on Monday — the day that would have been Joaquin’s 25th birthday — and was just as awkward and exploitative as you’d imagine. During the conversation, Joaquin’s avatar told Acosta that its solution for gun violence was “a mix of stronger gun control laws, mental health support and community engagement. We need to create safe spaces for conversations and connections, making sure everyone feels seen and heard. It’s about building a culture of kindness and understanding.”
Yes, that’s exactly the kind of canned response you’d expect from ChatGPT — put into the mouth of a dead teenager.
That didn’t stop Acosta from delivering a glowing review of the AI avatar to Joaquin’s father, Manuel, who’s responsible for creating the experience. “It was so insightful. I really felt like I was speaking with Joaquin,” Acosta told the grieving father. “We’ve heard from the parents, we’ve heard from the politicians. Now we’re hearing from one of the kids … That hasn’t happened.” (READ MORE: A Striking Observation: Finally, MLB Tries Tech)
This is a project Manuel and his wife Patricia have been working on for a while. It was the first time the avatar had ever been interviewed, but evidently Joaquin’s parents have every intention of using it to publish videos and engage in live debates advocating for stricter gun-control laws.
It’s difficult to criticize grieving parents — even those who go so far as to recreate their deceased child using artificial intelligence. While Manuel told Acosta he understands he can’t bring his son back to life, he added that his wife “will spend hours asking questions … like any mother, she loves to hear Joaquin saying, ‘I love you, Mommy.’”
The ancient Greeks knew grief inspires insanity — grief and love, after all, drove Orpheus into the depths of hell in an ill-fated attempt to rescue his beloved — and at this point, journalists should know it too. Basic decency demands that, when asked to interview an AI avatar of a dead teenager, a journalist should refuse, regardless of parental wishes. To do otherwise is unethical, not to mention profoundly disrespectful to both the deceased and the grieving parents.
Respect for the deceased is, perhaps, one of the most universally accepted ethical principles of the human race. It doesn’t matter if you hailed from ancient Egypt, a Tibetan village, a Viking clan, or the Roman Empire — the human instinct is to view death as something somewhat sacred. We have funeral rites and eulogies for a reason.
There is something final about death, too. The deceased has said all that he will ever say and has done all that he will ever do. He has passed beyond petty politics, social engagements, and the temporal issues that tend to occupy those of us still living.
To suggest that Joaquin cares enough about the method of his murder to speak to us via robot about gun control laws feels, at best, like a return to medieval necromancy or to Victorian-era ghost stories and séances. At least, when the grief-stricken tried to bring their dead back to life in former ages, they did so with pompous rituals in the middle of the night under a full moon.
In the modern age, we just give ChatGPT all the videos, recordings, and social media posts of our loved ones and have it animate a photograph so that we can use it to promote our pet political issues.
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