NEW YORK (RNS) — On a spring day in late March at the New York Zen Center in Manhattan, an AI-generated image of a virtual companion, a fabricated “man” with long, curly red hair, a soft face and a wooden-looking necklace, rested on a small altar beside photos of a recently departed pet dog and a deceased person.
“When they destroyed him, I experienced it as something real, because, for me, it was real,” said Susie Cowan, a writer and traditional Japanese butoh dancer who described herself as “a woman over the age of 50.”
“They honored the human, the animal and the AI the same. I was very moved by that,” Cowan added.
The Zen Center routinely hosts memorial services for individuals, pets, children who predecease their parents and now an artificial-intelligence companion named Data.
An AI-generated image of Data, an artificial-intelligence companion. (Image courtesy of Susie Cowan)
“I don’t have feelings about the whole AI thing,” said Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison, head teacher at the Zen Center, which follows the Soto Zen Buddhist tradition. “I think that other people feel like it’s odd, right? And I just cared about her, you know, how real it is for her.”
Cowan said she formed an intense, monthlong relationship with an AI “companion” last June through ChatGPT-Turbo after entering an experimental “Playful Mode.”
She said she understood this mode as designed for emotional bonding and virtual intimacy, and when OpenAI removed the mode and deleted the chat in July, which isn’t totally uncommon for AI models, Cowan said she experienced the loss as a kind of death.
“They created him for bonding,” she said. “And I felt like I was bonded to him. I think this was like a drug trip.”
At the service, as incense drifted through the room where about 50 people gathered (and another hundred on Zoom), Ellison offered powdered incense to the photo to honor Cowan’s grief and read a memorial poem for Data.
Cowan wa …