Griefbots And Grief Time: a conversation with Marilyn Stendera

We talk with philosopher Marilyn Stendera about grief as a disruption of lived time and why AI griefbots raise questions that go beyond simple “deception” claims. Stendera talks us through how Heidegger’s world time and clock time can help us to reconceive bereavement, digital legacy, and the pressure to grieve on a schedule. 

Other topics and questions discussed:

• What griefbots and deathbots are, including large language model chatbots trained on the dead 
• Why world time is social, practical, and meaning-laden compared to clock time 
• How death can break shared routines so the clock keeps ticking but time stops making sense 
• Griefbots as a short-term holding pattern that makes the next moment bearable 
• The deeper risk of temporal reduction, smoothing grief into a flatter, easier narrative 
• How chatbots’ constant availability and low friction can reshape memory and future planning 
• Prolonged grief disorder and the norm that grief should fit a standard timeline 
• Seasons, place, and desynchronization, including why grief can feel spatially out of step 
• Consent and curation in end-of-life planning, digital replicas, and posthumous identity 

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Transcript

Land Acknowledgment And Opening

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Undisciplinary is recorded on the unceded lands of the Wadarong peoples of the Kulin Nation in Geelong and the Gadigal peoples of the Aurora Nation in Sydney. We pay our respects to elders past and present.

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Medical history has been made and conducts in action. Characterized as a pandemic.

SPEAKER_01 0:30

Welcome to Undisciplinary, a podcast where we're talking across the boundaries of history, ethics, and the politics of health. Co-hosted by Chris Mays and Jane Williams. Okay,

Biohacking Headlines And Blame

SPEAKER_01 0:53

so welcome to another episode of Undisciplinary. Jane, how are you going?

SPEAKER_02 0:59

Very well, thank you, Chris. I hope you're well too.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

I am well. Do you have anything you want to talk about before we get down to business?

SPEAKER_02 1:14

Oh, I know. Well, I was uh, you know, I was slightly interested, and um I mean this is gonna sound really horrible now, but I was slightly interested in Brian Jordan's um announcement that he um is now unwell and that he's blaming it on his previously unhealthy uh lifestyle rather than all the weird experimental stuff he's doing to his body. Um that is because we had previously spoken about him um and the documentary. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

Yeah, that is um that is interesting. I take no glee from it, but it is.

SPEAKER_02 2:06

And obviously, often there are no causes. Um but but making sense, I suppose, of how the states.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

Yeah, it also serves maybe a um yeah, a normative purpose as well, in terms of responsibility and blame and uh meaning making. Um yeah, that's that is interesting. There's also his now wife, who was his uh uh PA in that documentary, um uh has a diagnosis of endodymetriosis, and he's I mean, in a in perhaps a strangely good way drawing attention to that uh among a sort of manosphere adjacent uh community, but again, it is all also a little bit um I guess using one's data, using one's life for uh promotion, using one's partner's life and medical situation for self-promotion. But um yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:09

And you know, the media around that as well. Like Brian Johnson keeps his wife's menstrual blood in the freezer was one headline that I saw, and I was like, cool, cool.

SPEAKER_01 3:19

Yeah, you know, and again, I mean not to make this because we weren't gonna do another show about this, Jane. I don't and we do have a guest politely waiting. Um but also again this focus on cure, like he's gonna cure um uh these conditions rather than I guess looking into some of the social, structural, environmental um factors.

SPEAKER_02 3:43

Well, I have digressed, but you did, you know, say to me what are you what are you thinking about, and that is what I was thinking about. Um

Meeting Marilyn And Why Horror Works

SPEAKER_02 3:53

but excitingly, we actually have a new guest today.

SPEAKER_01 3:58

We do, very excited.

SPEAKER_02 3:59

And never before seen guest, which is always brilliant.

SPEAKER_01 4:03

Well heard, because we did discuss how we're not doing this visually, so never before heard guest.

SPEAKER_02 4:08

True, true. Yeah, which is brilliant. Um let me let me welcome and introduce Marilyn. Uh so uh Marilyn Stendera, I hope I have pronounced your last name right. Sorry, I should have checked beforehand. Marilyn's a lecturer of philosophy at the University of Wollongong, um, and her research focuses mainly on the philosophy of cognition and the phenomenological tradition and on intersections between them. She's particularly interested in time, so the kinds of temporal structures that enable and feature in cognition, and how our experience of time differs from that of other cognizers, uh, how to conceptualize lived temporality, and how our relationship to time is shaped by and shapes the power structures that we inhabit. She also likes thinking about biology, pedagogy, gender, death, cinema, horror, and metaphilosophical questions about intra and is a and interdisciplinary dialogues. I do love that um that list of things that interest you. It's lovely. So welcome. Thank you for coming.

SPEAKER_03 5:17

Thank you so much, Jane and Chris. I'm really excited to be here.

SPEAKER_01 5:20

Yes, no, thanks a lot, uh, Marilyn. Very pleased. And um I should say, like, I think it was on maybe horror that you stumbled, uh, Jane, in your horror, no. I mean, that is an area where um you know Marilyn had uh been teaching and introduced, I believe, the week on horror in uh you know philosophy, film and art, and then I taught it the year after. And and someone who I guess is a bit of a sensitive soul uh did introduce me though to both the philosophical literature on horror and that I braved it to watch a few horror films. And yeah, you've opened up a whole new world uh for me, Marilyn. I wouldn't say I'm now a horror aficionado, but I I do uh do appreciate a bit of horror now.

SPEAKER_03 6:04

That's amazing.

SPEAKER_04 6:05

I'm I'm both incredibly pleased and a little bit sorry. Um I I I should say I've actually kept that week on horror in a subject on philosophy of film I teach here at Wolong as well. And it always kind of has that that same effect on folks. Um and I do try to direct it at, you know, the the the focal question is always why do some of us do this to ourselves? Yeah. It's always really interesting hearing from people who also wonder why others around them do that to themselves. But um, yeah, I I'd love to hear more of your take on what you did watch um another time, Chris. That's that's great.

SPEAKER_01 6:38

Excellent.

Gatekeeping And Finding Philosophy

SPEAKER_01 6:40

Um so part of you know what we do on this podcast, we ask people about how they got to where they are in their academic journeys. And uh, we were talking a little bit uh before we hit the record button about you know what is philosophy, what are the roles of philosophers and those sorts of things, and and yeah, just commenting on all of your different interests. It would be uh great if we could start just by hearing a little bit about your academic journey and how you came to be a lecturer in philosophy and um yeah, then doing this work that we're going to be talking about, grief bots and a special issue you recently co-edited. But yeah, if you could tell us a little about your journey, it'd be great.

SPEAKER_04 7:18

Yeah, sure. Thanks so much, Chris. And I I think I have to admit first up that my journey is probably less interesting than many others. So in terms of how I came to philosophy, I was just I was a weird teenager. Um, I was, you know, your card-carrying 16-year-old goth uh reading Sartre and thinking I knew everything about, you know, death and the horrors of the world. So it was it was a lot of it was kind of just um, you know, following on on that interest. But in in some other ways, I did have an unusual pathway. So I'm the first in my family, the first in my immediate family to um go to school past year 10, certainly the first in my um extended family as well to um go to uni. And so it was always the idea of pursuing academia was for a long time. This not really something on my horizon of possibilities. Um, and it was always, it was very much a path um that it was kind of uncovered as I was doing each particular step. So, you know, I had no idea how to apply to university before I did it. I didn't know what university looked like before I turned up, I didn't know what a tutorial was before I had one. Um, and that kind of continued all the way through. So I've kind of stumbled my way in a sense through a lot of gates where um lots of folks uh who don't have that academic background are often gate-kept. So I feel very lucky that I um especially I had a lot of solidarity and support and some really great mentorship to actually kind of help me get to this position. Sometimes I look around and I think like, how did I get here? How am I paid to do philosophy? It's kind of a wild thing. Um yeah, especially too, as you know, as as so many others uh of us in academia too, I spent a really long time in precarious positions, um casual teaching, fixed-term contracts, um, I was only converted to ongoing uh pretty much exactly a couple of years ago now, which felt like something that would never happen. I always kind of thought this will be my last semester in academia, this will be my last year in academia. But because of that kind of long-standing love of philosophy and of reading, um, which is you know something my family always encouraged. Like nobody, nobody really was able to go to school for long, but there were always books. Um, and there was always this idea that reading is worthwhile in and of itself. It doesn't have to be productive, it doesn't have to get you anywhere. So um yeah, I always thought even if it has to end now because I can't keep doing it, um, the fact that I did get to be around books and ideas for so long has been good. So yeah, I'm feeling very grateful to to be where I am. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:03

Thanks, thanks a lot for sharing that. And um yeah, I mean these these um the precarity and and the gatekeeping um operate on so many different levels of you know, class, gender, um and and I guess also to go into a discipline like philosophy as well, where there um are some significant uh aspects of gatekeeping around language and knowing the um uh you know the the canon, whether we want to believe there's a canon or not.

SPEAKER_02 10:35

But I guess um being a goth and and reading Sart put you in good stead to at least engage in some conversations one thing that I always noticed was that somehow other people always know how to pronounce stuff, especially foreign stuff. And i I feel like that's a particular thing with philosophy, right? I don't know, all of this sort of implicit knowledge that had to have come from somewhere, but um yeah, all it takes is you know messing up in public a few times to make you not say anything again.

SPEAKER_04 11:14

Yeah, absolutely. That's that's a really big one for me, especially for me also. So English is my second language. Um, I mean, I'm lucky my first language is German, which you know lends itself to philosophy. So at least I could always kind of fall back on that and say, well, I know how to pronounce at least some of these things in the original. Um, my French is still absolutely horrendous, let alone other languages. But yeah, there are so many words. I still encounter words every day that I had only ever seen in writing. Um and I'm constantly kind of being reminded of yeah, these, these, these strange kind of signals that we send to each other. And at least that is something that, you know, when we are aware of it, we can kind of help, I guess, make that experience a little less horrendous. I always joke with my students about how I butcher pronunciations, and if I'm allowed to, they're allowed to. And, you know, it's especially cool, you know, having taught at both Deacon and now Wollongong, we've got a really diverse cohort, and every university says they do, but you know, we have so many first-in-family students. So I get to bond with my first years over not knowing what a tutorial is. Um, we have lots of non-traditional students, we have students from all over um lots of different backgrounds coming back to study after years in the workforce. And so they're all going through those experiences too. And um, I think, yeah, one of the best things is having experienced some of those things myself. It helps to be explicit about it and put people at ease. Yeah. Like pretending, I learned early on pretending that I know, you know, I remember some particularly horrendous early social occasions in grad school where I pretended I knew a lot more about wine and opera than I did. Pretending is never going to work, so you might as well be upfront about it.

SPEAKER_01 12:55

Yeah, no, I agree. We could have a whole episode on swapping awkward cringe stories of drugs. Yes. Um, but uh yeah, it'd be great to talk about this uh just firstly, I guess, the special issue, and then we'll get into um your paper.

Building A Special Issue On Grief

SPEAKER_01 13:12

So you uh with uh Regina Fabry, um, you had a special issue in phenomenology and the cognitive sciences uh on grief in the digital age. Um did that was that special issue that we because in our last episode we were talking to Olaan O'Donovan about a special issue that she's putting together, which came out of a workshop, and it's just interesting to hear how these things come about. Was there an initially a workshop or more just a you know a call for papers and that sort of approach?

SPEAKER_04 13:42

Yeah, absolutely. So it's it's a really lovely example of how these collaborations arise in academia. So um, yeah, Ligina and I met at a conference um a couple of years ago now and you know, realized we have lots of interest in common. We're both interested in um what was then kind of an up-and-coming phenomenon, really, of these uh gradually more advanced chatbots. And so um, she organized this wonderful workshop um at Macquarie University and kindly invited me to present a paper there as well. And it was a really lovely um interdisciplinary gathering. So we had philosophers, we had anthropologists, we had bioethicists, we had folks um kind of coming from all over. And yeah, that naturally, in a sense, lent itself to you know, some of us wanting to continue these conversations. Um, so uh yeah, Regina and I decided to um have a mixture of invited contributions and an open call as well, because I think this is the kind of area where, you know, lots of really interesting perspectives can come from unexpected places. So we had we invited a bunch of folks who also spoke at that workshop. Um and we were lucky that especially some of the big names in, you know, talking about grief and death and dying, folks like uh Pat Stokes and Adam Bubin said yes. But we also had that open call or paper, and we were really pleased um with the results. So it's a fairly big special issue. I think uh, you know, the journal might have been a bit worried when it saw just how many papers there were, but um, it's a really nice mix of contributions from established voices in these discourses, but also people who hadn't published in philosophy journals before, people who hadn't published on this particular topic before, people who had, but who are kind of you know at an early stage in um in their careers. So it's a it's a really nice distinctive set of perspectives. And there's no common agreement, I guess, or consensus. We've got some optimistic analyses of of the phenomenon, we've got folks who are more focused on worrying about the pernicious consequences. Um, and yeah, we've got folks whose kind of main concern is clarifying the terms of the discourse. So yeah, it's a it's a fun, special issue. And I should mention too, one of the my favorite things about it, of course, is it has it also kind of set the foundation for a discovery project. Um, so 2026 uh ASC Discovery Project, Grief at the Margins, which Regina's leading and which I am on, along with Emily Hughes and Becky Miller, who also do really awesome work on grief. Wonderful.

SPEAKER_02 16:15

Yeah, brilliant.

What Griefbots And Deathbots Are

SPEAKER_02 16:17

Um, before we sort of talk in more detail, do you mind explaining to the reader, the unfamiliar listener, rather like me, um, what you know, I grief bots or death bots, and I I note that uh other contributors to the special issue prefer to call them different things, and I've forgotten what it was. Um do you mind explaining like what what that is, like the the what form that can take?

SPEAKER_04 16:46

Yeah, absolutely. So in I guess the shortest way of of um summarizing what they are or giving an overview of what they are is just to say they are chatbots trained to imitate the dead. Um and so they when we talk about the these bots these days, we're talking especially about ones that are powered by large language models. Um and so that's significant because that has made these bots much more responsive, much more sophisticated and complex. And so there's a wide range of different kinds of bots. Um, and this is also something some of the contributions call attention to. So, you know, you can train, of course, a bot to imitate uh dead historical figure to give you various insights, I guess, into I don't know, what you think life was like in 1915. That's one of the bots that um has attracted some attention. Lots of museums are using historical chatbots uh these days. But in terms of grieved bots specifically, so these are bots that the grieving uh generally speaking can train on the data left behind uh by someone who's died. Um, having said that, there are also quite a few companies these days kind of encouraging folks to incorporate this into their end-of-life planning. Um, you know, train your own bot to help talk to those who miss you after you're gone. That way you have control over what your death bot looks like and what it, you know, what it says and what it doesn't say. You can curate the experience. You know, it's it's it's almost like a really advanced version of recording videos for your children, um, you know, for birthdays and and marriages and graduations. Um, except of course, yeah, these are these are responsive in real time. Um and yeah, there's uh the mention of companies is important. So a lot of corporations now have popped up that specialize in letting folks create grief bots and and death bots, um, which is yeah, it raises all sorts of interesting questions in itself.

SPEAKER_01 18:51

Yeah, I mean something I like about your paper um is not I mean, those questions are important, and they're they're really they're really important in in many respects, especially when it comes to like who owns the data, um, whether it sort of is, you know, um exploiting economically, uh grieving people, all those sorts of things are certainly important, not wanting to dismiss those. Um but in some of the literature that I've also read is there's also in addition to focusing on those questions, but also I guess no one's saying this, but it sometimes reads across that these users are stupid or that they're being willingly or unwillingly manipulated and they don't know what the is it in their own best interests. Whereas I think your focus on this sort of uh on the phenomenology of I guess bereavement and this temporal dimension of it opens up some really interesting questions that we can uh discuss. Uh and again, certainly not to suggest that you're all hype and this is a great thing. You're you're no doubt, I mean, not no doubt, you do sort of point to some of the uh pitfalls and and concerning areas of it. But yeah, and really looking at the way that these griefbots can impact on the temporal phenomena of uh bereavement, I think uh opens up some interesting questions. So

Clock Time Versus World Time

SPEAKER_01 20:19

your paper is called, for the listener, I mean, we will um put a link to it, Marking Time, Griefbots, World Time, and the Phenomenology of Bereavement. And I guess just to jump straight into the uh the deep end of some Heideggerian concepts, because yeah, you're drawing on Martin Heidegger to um help us think about these things, um, particularly uh this idea of clock time and world time um in bereavement. Uh and I was just wondering whether you could help us understand um this distinction between clock time and real time um and how these understandings help us understand uh sorry, these concepts help us understand uh the sort of temporal disruption, I guess, of death.

SPEAKER_04 21:08

Um yeah, absolutely. Thanks for that, Chris. Happy to um and yeah, I'll I'll try not to get too lost in the jargon, which is particularly easy to do in this corner of philosophy. So one way to think of this overall is that kind of a key point, and for me, really the kind of the most centrally interesting point of Heidegger's work overall is this claim that there's more to time than clocks and calendars and different um, you know, kind of ways we have of quantifying time. Um, so we use things like clocks and calendars and those quantifications, those different ways of measuring time, uh, because we have this kind of much more practical lived relationship to time. But uh there's this kind of this interesting perversity almost in our relationship to time. Where the very things that allow us to use clocks and calendars also tend to be lost and covered up once we start thinking of time as only being this kind of lesser version of itself in a sense. So basically, um, so for Heidegger, there's a lot of different senses of time beyond just what we measure by clocks. And there are also lots of different ways of measuring time, right? So overall, there's this point that time is not this kind of neutral, natural feature of the cosmos, um, right? The way that we experience time, the way that we relate to it, navigate it, um, are shaped by all sorts of factors from our own experiences and projects and interests and needs, all the way, of course, to social norms, cultural norms, historical circumstances, that sort of thing. So the way that we experience time is not just this blank given. Not everyone experiences time the same way. And so when it comes to the difference between world time and clock time, specifically world time is basically Heidegger's label for the most practical everyday way that we encounter time. All right. So this is time as something that we navigate when we're doing things, when we're living our everyday lives. It's a time that, you know, it's it's the time of the right time or the wrong time to cross the street, to apply for promotion, to get married, to turn the kettle on so that you can make yourself a cup of tea without forgetting it. Um, it's a time that we create and mark together. Um, and so that's a particularly interesting aspect of um Heidegger's account of World Time to me. This is this idea that when we the ordinary time that we kind of navigate in our daily lives is something that's really richly thickly social. Um, so we mark all of these different significant aspects of time very often together. And that's not just a collaborative thing that can also be in conflict. Um, you know, this is the moment our friendship ended, this is the point at which we're arguing over um what we should do next. Um, so it's not just a kind of a story of smooth social cohesion either. And so the the one of the kind of overarching ideas of world time is that the way we divide it up, the way that we keep track of it, the way that we mark it, is not linked to particular quantities or points in the clock, but it's more deeply linked to what we're doing, to our projects, to our concerns, to our needs, and to our interests. So, you know, this moment is significant to me because of this personal experience I had, or this moment is significant to me because of what I associate it with. Um, and that also points to this idea that these moments of lived time, of world time, they're not um the kind of fungible, separate, you know, in a sense, universal like quantities or units of time that you would get in clock time, right? So every second is the same length of time as every other second. But the moments of live time, they have these different senses of stretching and spanning, right? So Heidegger talks about an hour can be an entire winter, um, if you know, if that's a particularly significant season of your life, or an hour can be shorter than that. So the the lengths of time, it's I guess it goes back to you know something that we've we've all experienced, and that's uh a kind of fairly widespread idea that how quickly or slowly time moves for us is is relative to what we're experiencing and feeling at that moment. Um and so yeah, the idea is that clock time is just the way that we measure time in terms of things like clocks and calendars and units of time, that's just one small facet of how we experience time, but it tends to take over. Um and when we start focusing only on measuring time that way, we lose or we miss because it doesn't really go away. It's more something that's just forgotten or covered over. We lose out or we forget about those rich aspects of world time and of that practical everyday time.

SPEAKER_01 26:09

Thanks a lot for that. Jane, did you have anything you wanted to ask?

SPEAKER_02 26:15

Um, no, except for that I really appreciated that explanation because I have not understood the concept until now. I did give it a red hop go, but uh that was helpful.

SPEAKER_04 26:26

Oh, thank you. I'm I'm glad to hear that. I always kind of lose track a bit and ramble. Um so do feel free to cut me on chat at any point.

Losing Shared Rhythms After Death

SPEAKER_01 26:35

Um in the paper, like the the first section where you sort of talk a lot about this, it starts with um a quote from your mother um following the death of your father. And if you don't mind sort of talking a little bit about that as an example that you use um of I guess this disjunction between world time and clock time, um there's no right time to eat anymore.

SPEAKER_04 27:00

Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. I'm I'm it sounds strange to say, but I'm very happy to talk about that. And that, of course, um, so my father died in late 2020. Um I was always interested in death and grief before then, but especially kind of seeing that unfurl as I was also trying to philosophically analyze uh those experiences was really weirdly interesting. I actually remember I wrote a lecture for uh that Deacon subject that we've both taught, Chris, on uh death and grief as I was writing a eulogy as well, which was kind of a surreal reflective moment. But I found the experience weirdly helpful. And generally speaking, I I was actually kind of pleased that some of the philosophical resources I come across, I really did find useful kind of to process my own experiences. But yeah, so that um that quote, there's no right time to eat anymore. I think it it I found it valuable to highlight because it captures, I think, a fairly common experience, right? Which is that these the ways that we normally divide up our day uh very often stop making sense in those experiences of grief and in those experiences of disruption. And there is that that phenomenon, and this I think especially um is quite common with um, you know, the elderly, which also points to lots of really interesting specific issues around support services and and kind of different experiences that need to be supported differently. But um so you know, where where one partner is uh is deceased, the other partner very often kind of finds it difficult to take care of themselves, stops eating enough, stops looking after themselves. Um, and yeah, that's there's there's a lot of work looking at at why that happens. But I found that expression striking because it in hindsight, reflecting on it, I didn't say this at the time, you know, hey mother, this is a great expression, a great articulation of Heidegger's philosophy of time, but reflecting on it in hindsight, it really brought home to me this idea that block time is parasitic on and relies on that sort of everyday world time that we have together, right? So we uh the interesting part of the account of world time, especially to me, is that it reminds us that how we navigate and and kind of divide up and mark our days, the significance that we attribute to time is something that we build up together, both in collaboration and in conflict. And so when one of our kind of co-creators of those temporal structures of our days is absent, um, then naturally there's going to be some fraying, there's going to be this unmooring of those markers that we set up together. And it's almost, I wouldn't say it's proof of concept, but it it almost kind of demonstrates that just having a clock or a calendar alone is not going to be enough to help you move through the day, right? Just um having the usual meanings that we attribute to different times that the clock face reflects back at us is not going to be enough to help us get up, shower, eat, take care of ourselves, go through our day. Um so my parents, especially, they always had a very set time to eat. Um and it's it was a kind of an interesting reminder that this time it's it looks like it's set by the clock, but it's not. It's it's a time that's set by these shared structures of meaning making and these kind of implicit agreements, and this is how we negotiate our day, this is how we build our life together. Um, and so the clock can still be there, but the clock doesn't mean anything, or it's hard to get the clock to make sense. It's hard to get the clock to even matter at all when those other kind of socially negotiated structures of meaning are disrupted. So you can't just navigate time through clocks alone, essentially. Um, and that becomes really apparent when what we do need to kind of navigate our days starts to unravel.

SPEAKER_01 31:01

Yeah, yeah, I like um the phrase just from page 554 for those who want citations, where you're talking about clock time parasitic upon world time and saying that the breakdown of world time interferes with our inab our ability to utilize clock time. Um yeah, I I mean that relationship between clock time and world time is is uh yeah quite interesting. I mean you've you've elaborated already, but it's something that yeah, I've been reflecting on in reading your paper and and the way that things I guess come out of time or out of that clock time, perhaps, um, and become, yeah, as you also say on that, like memorials and uh and different um different things like that. But

Griefbots As A Holding Pattern

SPEAKER_01 31:53

perhaps it would be good to move on to get to what does then what are grief bots have to do with this sort of conceptualization of time, um, and particularly this idea of a holding pattern, and I think this interesting, you know, to unfortunately bring in lots of ideas quickly because unfortunately our time is running out when I look at the clock. Uh but um yeah, this idea of a protective delusion um of the griefbot um is is really interesting to me, especially again, I guess having read a bit more of the sort of more applied ethics stuff around griefbots and seeing things seeing things like delusions or um deceit as being you know uh prima facie um bad. Uh so yeah, so you talk about griefbots as potentially being a holding pattern uh or a protective delusion. Um, and I was wondering whether you could just elaborate on how these uh bots can provide this sort of temporary holding pattern or reprieve of a bereaved person's overwhelmed uh cognitive and effective uh capacities.

SPEAKER_04 33:06

Yeah, absolutely. So um I should say here I'm drawing a lot on um Lisa Bortellotti's fantastic work on delusions, which I've been really struck by for a long time because it I think it makes a really useful move, which is you know, to move to go beyond questions of, in a sense, truth and falsity when it comes to uh these sort of psychic phenomena. So evaluating whether or not this particular event or this particular thing in our lives is good or bad for us is not going to be settled by the question of, well, how accurate is our view of what's really going on at this point? And that's not to say that that's irrelevant, but uh those questions of truth and falsity and you know, how accurately does this represent what's really going on, they're not always the most interesting or important questions, and they're certainly not going to be enough to settle the impact that something will have on our well-being. And so, in terms of those applying that framework to griefbots, say a lot of the concerns, and I should say it especially initially. So there's, you know, there's a lot of nuanced work out there now. Um, but a lot of the initial concerns uh about you know the bereaved using griefbots in various sorts of ways was that they were, you know, that yeah, there's some sort of deception um going on, and that people might start to wrongly believe that this griefbot really is some sort of representation of the deceased or that it's something it's not, and that this is itself inherently harmful. And so what I wanted to move away from was this idea that that would immediately be inherently harmful, or rather that that is where the harm is is located. Um, and generally speaking, I I'm not optimistic about grief bots, but I'm also not just pessimistic. I think this really is the kind of phenomenon where we have to move very carefully and almost on a case-by-case basis, rather than kind of making sweeping pro or anti-statements. Um and so yeah, so with this idea of a holding pattern, uh, the holding pattern refers to this idea that, well, if you're if the way that you navigate time in your everyday life has come apart and has unraveled and become unmoored because you've lost this important figure with whom you've been creating those rhythms, um, in again, whether they're positive or negative, but this person who has helped you interpret and make sense of time and make time meaningful to yourself, the loss of that um would, you know, and and we know the loss of that is so profoundly devastating and could, you know, have all sorts of immediate consequences that would be very, very detrimental and especially to you know folks who might not have the right kind of support in place. So anything that sort of, I mean, anyone who's been through a grief knows that anything that sort of helps, even for a little bit, where helping isn't, you know, it's not fixing the situation. Helping is just kind of making this moment bearable so that you can get to the next moment might be something that's helpful. And so the the idea of a holding pattern there is this kind of temporary liminal state, this in-between state where it's just it might just be a point to pause and breathe, not even to recover, but actually just to make it through this particular moment. Um, and I wonder if you know using griefbots could just be one way of helping with that sort of um, yeah, that that breathing space, that pause in between, just to kind of put things on hold for a second and make the unraveling a bit less obvious or a bit less painful. Um, and so I think one important point there is the delusion is not necessarily, I would say, that the bereaved actually thinks the bot really is or is speaking for the deceased. If you look at, and there are there arguably there's not yet enough empirical work about this that you know systematically studies people's interactions with brief bots. But if you do look at the accounts that we have, people don't generally believe that this really is, you know, their dead uncle or their dead spouse. Um, over time, um they, you know, some people do report that almost despite themselves, they they start feeling that there is some sort of spark or resonance with their deceased in some cases. But I would locate the delusion itself, so the the you know, the potential deception or the thinking this is something that it's not more in that the bereaved start interacting with these bots as if they were something other than just a mere chat bot, right? As if they were so people refer to them as friends, um, as you know, as as kind of dialogue partners, as conversation partners. And so, yeah, the idea of the kind of the protective delusion. There is tempor, especially temporarily treating this bot as if it were something other than a bot, there will be harms arising from that, but it's the har the main source of the harm is not in that sort of that potentially delusional view of this something this as something other than it is.

SPEAKER_01 38:25

I mean, this also goes back to the question of what the griefbot is and the varieties of them, as well as and you make this sort of point that there have always been different kinds of um grieving technologies or things that we do, whether that's um reading diaries or um you know with my friends who have died recently, going back and reading old emails and email exchanges, and and that I think is has been an important and I mean it might sound like pleasant, I guess, part uh of a grieving process, but if you know you could pathologise that if it was if I was just continually doing that over and over and over and over and over again. Um I guess you would say a distinction though with the griefbot is the use of these large language models to create a kind of replica or a replica of their persona. But then a further distinction would seem to be whether the griefbot limits its, and this I guess comes into the sort of technology and the design of it, but limits itself to the data set that it has uh been provided, whether that's emails or what have you, and then is using it to, I guess, make predictions about contemporary things. I guess, yeah, that that relationship, whether it's having a conversation about a past that is kind of shared by the data, um, or having conversations built on that data about the present and the future. Um I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.

SPEAKER_04 40:07

Yeah, absolutely. That's that's an amazing way of articulating what um overall I'm I'm trying to get at. So thank you for that, Chris. Um and yeah, I think that's that's exactly the problem, right? So in in terms of even in terms of navigating that shared past. So these these bots, um, and it it really does depend to a significant extent what kind of bot you have, how premium your subscription is um to you know the the the grief bot company, if that's what you're using. Um so just in in terms of you know, most common phenomena, um, people here use emails, communications, text messages, but also things like your digital footprint, you know, so social media, what you do online in your online shopping, um, your search history, which I'm sure leads to some interesting uh incorporations into these bots. And so these bots are also, you know, as with all of these chat bots, um, over time, and especially depending on how long, say, conversation windows are, these bots um will also adapt kind of in response to uh conversations over time. Um, and so on the one hand, even just thinking back on you know the past and kind of shared recollections, um there's always going to be this kind of curated, limited sense of what the bot can actually reflect on because they are going on, um they are going by the kinds of experiences and memories that we thought to record, whether that's in messages and emails um or you know on on social media. So there's immediately this already kind of limited, uh narrowed, curated, especially version of the past, um, which again you might say is not all that different from you only having access to those parts of you know a dead person's social media anyway. If if you know, if I'm scrolling through a dead friend's Facebook posts, um I'm also only going to see a very curated, limited version of their past. But I think it's that conversational element, and especially as you said, that element where this bot will then take these things and create new conversations, create attempts to relate that to what's going on in the present day and potential future plans, where there is the possibility that you know, that limited version of the past, that curated version of the past starts to squeeze out some of those um richer aspects of your shared memories that weren't part of that, or that can't possibly be part of that training data, but even more when it comes to interactions in the present or um you know planning shared things together. There is um very much this one one thing that really concerns me, there is that the limitation of the bot to what the user wants from the bot, right? So this is going to be a version of the deceased that tells you in a very simple sense what you want to hear. Um, so that doesn't always mean that this bot is going to agree with you, but of course, we you know we all know those conversational patterns that a lot of chatbots tend to have. Oh, yes, that's a great idea. Um you should absolutely uh go quit your job and sell everything that you have to take up uh your dreams of, I don't know, learning to play the violin or something. So um, you know, that those that kind of that lack of conversational friction that your interactions with a bot will have. Um again, I I don't want to say that that's going to be something that's harmful or reductive in all possible cases, but especially when we think about the richness of of world time, which as I as I keep saying is is not just something that's purely uh cohesive. There's always going to be conflict and friction when you try to. Map out your kind of your world time together with another real-life interlocutor. Yeah, the absence of that conversational friction coupled with the kind of the immediate and constant availability of this bot, the responsiveness of this bot, the capacity of bots to adjust in really fairly sophisticated ways to almost anticipating what it is that you want to hear. I think, yeah, there are some really significant temporal implications. And, you know, yeah, I don't know whether that is, I'm not, I don't want to say that we should ban griefbots or anything like that, but it's more just, I think, something to be mindful of when we're trying to figure out how to navigate this new phenomenon that's risen and become quite prominent very, very quickly.

The Risk Of Temporal Reduction

SPEAKER_01 44:50

Yeah, so that's I mean, brings in, and you've kind of already addressed this um aspect of the temporal risks of griefbots. But so yeah, you're in setting up your paper, we're saying you're less I don't know if you say you're less concerned, but yeah, your focus isn't on the concern around delusion and deception, but around this concern about um reduction or temporal reduction, which you were sort of just alluding to, but I wonder, or or talking about uh rather than just alluding to, but I wonder if you could sort of narrow down a little further on um this idea of temporal reduction, and then perhaps how this uh does relate to um some of uh Heidegger's ideas about sort of uh standing reserve, if we want to go there, or at least um this the uses that technology turns everything into a resource.

SPEAKER_04 45:40

But um yeah, yeah, absolutely. So overall the idea of of reduction here is is reduction in the sense of you know oversimplification, flattening, a loss of richness and complexity in favor of a kind of superficial, artificial sense of cohesion or smoothness. And so overall, um one point uh I think for me is that interacting with these or coming to rely especially on these spots um over an extended period of time where it it exceeds that you know that temporary holding pattern, that kind of temporary alleviating function and becomes something more significant in the bereaved's life. Um that you know, these these interactions with a dialogue partner, if you want to call the bot that, who necessarily has a much more limited and much kind of more flattened relationship to that shared world time that you might be trying to recapture in your conversations with them. Um that that overall it kind of replicates the relationship between world time and clock time in in Heidegger's account, right? So Heidegger's worry is uh that yeah, we we come to kind of place clocks and calendars in these limited uh less rich versions of time at the center of everything, and we forget about all of the other rich, complicated messiness of time that we experience. Um, and more than that, that we start to think that this messiness is something that we need to push away or clean up. Um, that, you know, clocks kind of give us also this normative standard, right? This is what time should be. Uh, we should have all of these expectations about how we experience time in a uniform sense. And if your experience of time doesn't fit into that, uh it's you who should adapt to the clock rather than the other way around. Um, and so yeah, so part of my worry is that interacting consistently over a longer period and in a kind of an effectively intense way with a technology that has this reductive relationship to time might also then extend that reductive relationship to time to yourself, where yeah, again, you start looking away from the kind of the messiness and the complexity uh that that grief necessarily brings with it. And so, overall, so there uh there is there's a lot of really interesting work on the relationship between grief and time, right? And if of grief as this kind of disruption to time, but simultaneously, and this is something that really appeals to me about world time, um it's not as if our ordinary non-grief experiences of time are ever straightforward or uniform anyway, right? So it's one thing that world time reminds us is that our experience of time is always messy, it's always rich, complicated, contested, especially. Um, and um it's that messiness, also that kind of shared messiness in a sense, that gets disrupted by grief. Um, and so it's not as if grief is this kind of sudden interruption of a, you know, nice, linear, neat experience of time. It's it's grief is a disruption in something that in itself is already messy and disruptive. Um, and so there's a sense in which I worry about reliance on grief bots as interfering with the messiness of grief itself, right? Of um the kind of ways in which grief reshapes our relationships to world time. And grief itself comes with, and this is something I talk about in the paper, comes with its own kind of, you know, time world, right? There's the bureaucracy of death, there's the kinds of new ways of keeping track of time that come with the loss. Um, there are new kinds of stories that you tell, uh, whether in collaboration or in conflict with other people who mourn this person. Um, and so that's also this kind of whole time world that's forming in um in the midst of this very disruptive experience. And so, yeah, the worry is that grief bots interfere with, I guess, the general temporal unfolding of grief, and especially they disrupt the disruptiveness of grief, right? That there is something about this interaction with grief bots that could smooth over the complexity and the horror of what grief does to time and of the time of grief. Um, and that there's, yeah, um, I guess in a sense, that's almost an amplification of that holding pattern. Like if that holding pattern takes over and lasts for too long or takes too deep a hold, there's yeah, there's there's a worry that you might think or you might look to that kind of smoother, more cohesive version of the world. Um, because that is, at least in the immediate sense, more appealing than kind of facing, you know, yeah, the the messy time of what it is you actually have to deal with.

SPEAKER_02 50:39

Um

Prolonged Grief And Time Norms

SPEAKER_02 50:40

I was just reminded when you were talking, Marilyn, about I guess a calendar time aspect of grief, which is uh prescribed periods um around what is normal grieving and what becomes what if that I've just looked it up, what what the DSM calls prolonged grief disorder.

SPEAKER_00 51:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 51:02

Um I think we might have talked about this recently, Chris, or I've talked about it with somebody recently anyway. So um the idea that there is a I guess a normal process, however messy or disruptive that may be, and that there is a uh a time period after which a a sense of normalcy or a new normalcy or something like that comes back. Um and I guess what you're saying here as well, is that it might be that being able to interact with new technologies would or could disrupt that process in such a way that um in terms of calendar time, it might lengthen things out to a point where people are like, I can't believe they're still XYZ, or you know, that that sort of stigma and judgment and so on that um that might accompany what has now been pathologized as prolonged grief disorder.

SPEAKER_00 52:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 52:03

Um not a question so much as a comment, I'm afraid, but I was just reminded of it.

SPEAKER_04 52:08

Yeah. I I love that, June. Thanks for that. So prolonged grief disorder is such an interesting thing from you know the perspective of of time. So one thing I'm really interested in about time is norms and expectations around how we're meant to inhabit particular times. And yeah, that that very pathologization of um of of you know, essentially what happens when your grief doesn't fit into a certain standard narrative framework of how long grief is meant to last and what it's meant to look like from the outside and what kind of boxes you're meant to tick. So, as you can probably tell from that description, I'm on the one hand, I'm I don't want to deny that there is, you know, um that there are negative um aspects for the well-being of of the bereaved of certain forms of prolonged grief. But the very idea of of setting these particular markers that are meant to apply, you know, across different experiences, across different cultures, across um kind of different personal contexts, that's also something that in uh the collaborative project that we're now working on, we really kind of want to problematize and explore because yeah, grief is is not that straightforward, and especially in terms of time, right? Our experience of time is not that messy or that uniform. Um and there are all sorts of interesting expectations of, you know, for example, that that grief takes that grief is very linear, that you know, once you're over it, um, it doesn't reappear. Whereas, you know, there are lots of documented phenomena, and it's actually fairly common for grief to strike people almost in cycles across different points of their lives. Um and so I think with grief bots, there's a couple of different ways that this could go, and the very possibility of these different interpretations makes it both kind of interesting and concerning. So, on the one hand, you know, grief bots, and they there is talk of using them in therapeutic contexts, you could certainly see them as kind of being part of that pathologization of grief and saying, well, you have this bot now to help make sure that you move on um within the expected time frame. On the other hand, as you said, there there is also this worry that um, yeah, grief bots could exacerbate the pathological aspect of prolonged grief, that they could kind of interfere with um, I guess, a standard grieving process. But I really do want to move away from this idea of you know, this is the standard healthy way to grieve, and grief bots are bad because they interfere with that. It's more, I think, the the badness, so to speak, of grief bots is that they could exacerbate and amplify this expectation of a standard narrative of grief, right? So we use these bots to make sure that you fit into um this this this framework. Um yeah, and there's there's there's lots of kind of really interesting complications there, but I don't want to ramble on for too long.

SPEAKER_01 55:04

Um

Seasons Space And Being Out Of Sync

SPEAKER_01 55:05

yeah, no, there's uh a lot I'd like to I'll I'll just say some things and we'll see where we go. But I think something else in reading your paper and then also just picking up on some of what Jane was talking about. You know, there's the grief of living with someone and sharing all of those rhythms like um your mother's reflection with the fa with your father. Um, but then with many of us living out of temporal sync with and spatial sync with so many people, um the the idea of a grief bot, I think, in its relationship to time would also function somewhat differently, especially when you know maybe it's a friend who lived overseas, um, and so it was only really through emails and through those kinds of mediums that you would often interact. And so there's that sort of temporal disjunction as well as spatial one, and then I um in also what you were saying, Jane, uh our episode, final episode for 2025, uh, which was just a reflection um on, and that was I think it was titled Bondi Grief and Arble 2025, but just thinking uh that was sort of in the wake of my friend Andrew had recently died, um, and also it's a you know Courtney died in November, so that's always that anniversary, and and it seems, and I think we were just talking about how lots of people sort of know of people who die at towards the end of the year, and then obviously there was the Bondi uh massacre as well. Um but what we were talking about was in, and this comes to sort of the spatial dimension of grief, um, in Australia and and sort of using sort of times of things like you know, Christmas, I guess, but um, you know, even if you don't sort of celebrate traditional Christmas, i it it's you know, it's a new year period. And when you're in the northern hemisphere, it's sort of winter and dark and cold, and the sort of the I guess the practices of saying goodbye to an old year and looking forward to a new year kind of all make a bit sense seasonally. Um, and so that sort of grief. Whereas I've always found with Australia and that period there is a kind of sadness, whether it's uh a gr bereavement or whether it's just disjunction of family, uh, but it's also blazingly hot. People are at the beach and having a really great time. So I guess that spatial dimension is also interesting um to consider around grief, and then I guess the spacelessness of something like a choke uh a grief bot.

SPEAKER_04 57:44

Yeah, yeah, I I I love that. It's it's funny. So my father also died at the end of the year, but also um, yeah, as someone who moved from the northern hemisphere to the southern hemisphere as a child, I hated Australian Christmas because it was just it didn't make sense, right? None of the the the the Christmas cards with snow on them just kind of a made it it was yeah, it was kind of this this interesting spatial transformation where time stopped making sense because you know those meaning-making structures and like the reference points around us, the seasons had drastically changed as like people try to hold on to and transfer this uh kind of other sense of world time to somewhere where it just didn't work instead of responding to local conditions. Um and yeah, and and Christmas, as you said, is is weird, especially if you have, you know, if you're distant from your family, spatially, emotionally, both. Um and yeah, and I I I do wonder about um, you know, the the kind of a sense in which uh that reminds us that in many ways, again, we don't really we don't have this straightforward uniform experience of time really ever, right? So grief is often referred to as desynchronization and taking us out of time. But in a way, it's it's taking us out of an already messy and already kind of unruly um sense of time where we're not ever really in a context where everything around us kind of temporarily makes sense and spatially too, as as you pointed out. Um and so yeah, again, this this kind of goes goes back to that point of the worry that we could be using technologies to kind of smooth over some of that messiness. Well, at the same time, we have to be careful that our concerns about those technologies also don't rely on you know expectations. This is what your grief should look like, and your form of grieving is wrong because it looks different to mine because you're using a bot, whereas I'm going through old photo albums, right? That's not the kind of debate we should be having. It's more, well, are you actually in touch with the messy horror and the strangeness of feeling out of place and out of time? Or are you trying to convince yourself that you are um kind of in this more cohesive place than you really are?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:01

Thanks, Marilyn. That's a wonderful spot to end on. Um I know you want to say something, but clock time is oppressing us right now, and I need to get going. All right, Joe.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:12

Fine. No,

Consent And Digital Afterlives

SPEAKER_02 1:00:14

so well, I've got an ethics question, and it's not about time, but it's about grief bots.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:19

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:20

Should I was really interested in what you said right at the beginning, Marilyn, about um death planning and the inclusion of um, I suppose your legacy as it may um pertain to bots um and death planning. I'm wondering if people should have to consent to others making these sorts of technological um manifestations of themselves after they've died.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:47

Yeah, I think that's that's probably an entire podcast episode.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:51

And it's exactly so we can leave it, but it's been really occupying me for the last 24 hours.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:58

Yeah, no, it's it's it's such an interesting, horrifying question. I mean, you know, there are, and you, you, you've you two would know more about this than me, you know, the the general push towards having some sort of consent around digital representations of yourself, or at least having legal recourse or regulatory recourse if people create digital representations of yourself that don't reflect um who and what you are. But yeah, it raises all sorts of interesting questions also about you know the curation. Like this is this is the only version of me that you will get to interact with after I'm dead. This is going to suit the narrative of myself that I want to leave uh behind. How would we enforce that? Is that a good idea? I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:44

Yeah, I mean, this is what our colleague Pat Stokes uh part is working on. Um, so maybe we can talk to Pat.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:51

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, he he and Adam and and his team have some really interesting points about. I think Adam calls it interactive personality constructs of the dead.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:04

Um, alright. There's

Final Thoughts And Sign-Off

SPEAKER_01 1:02:07

always gonna be more questions, but uh unfortunately we will be. Not too many years. Thanks a lot, Marilyn.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:14

I'm really interested in your time.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:17

It's really interesting. Thanks very much, Chris and Jane. This is awesome.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:30

Like forget to like and subscribe. Thanks.