Comment on In the future, there will be a sad scene of widow watching AI porn of their dead spouse
Artisian@lemmy.world 4 days agoThe claim that: avoiding grieving a pet by cloning it is bad for your mental health.
I’m also interested in how it is bad, and how it compares to and with other treatment. I have the same gut instinct as you, I think, that pet cloning is not a good grief strategy. But I don’t have data, and wasn’t online much when pet cloning was a big topic. Cultures deal with death in a variety of ways, yet we have strong gut feelings for how grief should be done. I also find the idea of eating the recently dead pretty gross, for example, but this is a key step in the grief process for several cultures (and they seem to deal with grief fine).
Not all that long ago, tuberculosis was an incurable and slow killer. People thought it was the coolest death, that the pale complexion was beautiful, and that lying in bed slowly dying of TB was the best way to write poetry, discover truth, and understand philosophy. Humanity had a lot of cope around TB. Now we can eradicate it, and I think the romanticized view of TB looks pretty bad today. No sane person gets TB intentionally to write better.
Rhaedas@fedia.io 4 days ago
I see your point, but that exactly was a coping mechanism for something that didn't have a solution. Is assisted suicide a modern version as a way to deal with an unsolvable problem (and I'm all for it btw, just comparing the goals of both).
I don't think they are the same as finding ways to avoid grief, which is what the topic of a replacement of the lost individual is about. I'm sure anyone in the therapy field has already explored this to find any benefits of prolonging.
But in regards about the claim: I don't even know how far the cloning has gone, or how it's been accepted. But I have heard that immediately getting another pet to replace that loss isn't a good thing to do for similar reasons for owner and pet, and the cloning is worse because it's pretending it's the same animal (in most cases, I can't say everyone). That's how it was sold, getting your pet back. I can't see how this can turn into a better route for grief when there isn't any, and might turn to despair or anger when the new version of the pet doesn't act the same as the old.
But you're right, there's no data, it's just a gut feeling based on my own experiences that I'm still dealing with in some respects.
If anything, the AI acting as far as just visual is not a huge jump from watching old video of them from the past. It's a bit odd, but I can accept that times change and some things become normal that were not. Having an AI that responds back as if they were the person crosses the line that I've been talking about. Some people think ChatGPT with its flaws is still a person, so they'll fall for this being the loved one from the grave, and I still hold that living in that fantasy is not healthy for the mind.
Artisian@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Thank you!
Yes, TB was an example for a kind of error we make in morbid, culturally heavy places, I agree it is not a perfect analog.