Talking with the dead

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Lyssa Soep (1:07)

Let me just start by saying this is not your typical dinner party.

The invitation is said to bring a photo of a dead person you love. So you've got one in your pocket, you show up at the venue, and you step inside.

Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska (1:23)

So you'll see me.

Lyssa Soep (1:25)

This is Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska. She's a professor at the University of Cambridge.

Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska (1:32)

And you and the other eight guests will be invited to the table.

Lyssa Soep (1:38)

It's been decorated with tiny stars and curly ribbons.

There are plates of local dishes. Maybe you take a sip of non-alcoholic wine.

Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska (1:49)

Because sharing meal and eating together is one of the most natural way for human beings to be together across cultures. And we have this very difficult conversation about death, dying and grief.

Lyssa Soep (2:08)

Katarzyna has been traveling around the world to hold these dinners in China, India, and Poland, where she's from.

She works with a colleague, a death doula, to host the gatherings. And the idea is to get together with a bunch of strangers and reimagine where life ends and death begins.

Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska (2:31)

And the first question that you will be encouraged to respond to is what makes you feel alive. We start this conversation about death with asking about life.

Lyssa Soep (2:46)

And the next question is about the photos. Everyone goes around and shares a story about their person, a best friend, a grandparent, a son.

Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska (2:57)

So we are here as a guest, but we have additional circle, a kind of symbolic circle that is represented through the photos.

Lyssa Soep (3:07)

It's almost like the living guests are joined by a gathering of ghosts. And then the conversation takes a turn.

Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska (3:19)

We started very gradually introducing AI as a potentially new tool to help maintain relationships with the dead.

Lyssa Soep (3:32)

What if you could talk to an AI recreation of the person in your photo? How would that shape your grief?

This dinner is actually a research focus group, exploring these kinds of questions, tapping personal stories to get at a much wider potential paradigm shift, and how we experience loss. It's part of a global study on deadbots, or AI simulations of people who have died. Katarzyna has been investigating digital immortality since she started her PhD, more than 10 years ago, asking what it means that we can now use emerging technology to talk to the dead.

Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska (4:17)

There is this kind of illusion of reciprocity, that I ask you a question and I can hear your answer.

Lyssa Soep (4:27)

And isn't that what many of us want? To speak with people we've lost? To continue that relationship after they're gone?

This is Unexplainable. I'm Lyssa Soep. And today on the show, what happens when we reach out to our lost loved ones and the dead talk back?

This question of how we sustain conversations with the dead, it's something I have thought about a lot. I wrote a book about it called Other People's Words. Two of my closest friends had died, and all I wanted and all their families wanted was to keep talking to them. The book is all about how we can stay close to people we've lost by continuing to engage with the language they leave behind. So I get the appeal of a tool that sort of lets you do that. And so did a grieving mom at one of Katarzyna's dinners in Poland. Her son had recently died.

Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska (5:46)

And one of the first things that she shared with us was that she feels that she is ready to digitally resurrect her deceased son.

Lyssa Soep (6:02)

When Katarzyna hears something like this, her goal is to just listen and embrace where the person is coming from. Because the whole point of the dinners is to learn how people genuinely respond to what AI can do, and to understand how these tools can align or collide with local grief practices.