Nineteenth-Century Forum

The rise of grief tech, chatbots trained on the words, voices, and memories of lost loved ones, offers the alluring chance to continue a relationship beyond death. Grief tech is new, but that allure is much older, dating at least back to nineteenth-century Spiritualism. Today’s grief tech is connected to its Victorian predecessor by a shared culture of grief - one that seemed to have disappeared. While current psychological practices try to move the bereaved toward closure, Victorian mourning lingered in yearning. Bringing together Alice Stringfellow, a Victorian mother who corresponded her dead son every night, and Joshua Barbeau, a present-day aspiring actor who created a chatbot version of his girlfriend after her death, this talk explores how contemporary technologies might reveal the value (and risks) of using technology to redress the innately human problem of death.

Megan Ward is a faculty member in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film and Director of the OSU Center for the Humanities and the Center for Material Cultures Research in Archaeology, Art, and Indigenous Studies. Her first book, "Seeming Human: Victorian Realist Characters and Artificial Intelligence" (Ohio State UP, 2018) offers a new theory of realist character through the realist novel’s unexpected afterlife: the intelligent machine. She is currently writing a book of essays, "Chatbots in Love," which explores how the human desire for intimacy has shaped the creation of AI - and why that desire has been left unfulfilled. Her work on technology and realism has appeared or is forthcoming in edited collections such as "AI Narratives" and "The Routledge Guide to Politics and Literature" as well as journals such as "New Literary History" and "Public Humanities."

RSVP here: https://sessions.studentlife.umich.edu/p/track/16399