AI

Photo by PIOTR BENE on Unsplash

Maybe you’ve already heard this story, but I just today learned that some engineer at Microsoft created an app that uses digital traces (social media, etc.) to create a chat bot with the voice of a deceased loved one. This rattles me more deeply than I quite understand.

Somewhere in Seattle an engineer made an app

where the digital imprints of all your lost loved ones

could be gathered and coded into avatars of the dead.

It sits on its digital shelf, untouched.

“It was — disturbing,” the engineer said

as he closed the door behind him,

let his program flicker and run down in the dark silence of a vaulted file.

I think of every living creature

whose breath moves the leaves of my heart,

and the day to inevitably come

when the leaves of my heart dry out and crack from their loss.

Which vaulted file can I open to find them again?

I sink my toes into the rain-rich October clay soil.

I place my palm on the trunk of the tulip poplar.

I soften my breath until the rabbits sit still in the grass.

Here.

The vault is here.