Does ChatGPT Understand Death?

A new generative AI bot called ChatGPT is taking the world by storm.
Credit: Alex Knight

Ever since OpenAI released ChatGPT, its generative AI bot in November, the internet has been lauding its ability to write poems, explain quantum computing, and even provide dating advice. There has also been much concern over the bot’s ability to write student essays, or its potential to impact the jobs of white-collar professionals such as telemarketers, history teachers and sociologists. But does ChatGPT understand death?

Questioning the bot about the nature of death makes it clear that ChatGPT can draw on data to state death’s biological meaning. However, those who’ve sought to use the AI to generate eulogies have found the process slightly more frustrating.

Janus Rose, who used ChatGPT as well as an AI tool called Finding Words to pen her own obituary, found that it repeated back much of the information she’d inputted verbatim, along with a slew of clichés. “This made it feel more like I was filling out a really morbid Mad Lib than using a cutting-edge AI tool,” she wrote in Vice.

Meanwhile, writing in Slate, journalist Charles Seife was alarmed by the tendency of Davinci-003, ChatGPT’s sibling, to not only include blatant factual errors, but also to unnecessarily embellish his credentials – awarding him with a fictitious Ph.D. in mathematics from Berkeley and authorship of a non-existent book titled E=mc2 to Schrodinger’s Cat. “Computer programs are optimized not to solve problems, but instead to convince its operator that it has solved those problems,” he wrote. “It’s a game of imitation, of deception. For the first time, we’re forced to confront the consequences of that deception.”

One approach that appears somewhat more useful is to ask the AI for advice on what to include in a eulogy, which results in a list of highly reasonable considerations.

The AI bot is also careful when asked to make jokes about death or aging, noting that “death is a sensitive topic and it may not be appropriate to make light of it.” While ChatGPT made a similar statement when asked to joke about aging, it did offer this attempt at humor: “Why did the old man fall in the well? Because he couldn’t see that well.”

Clearly, ChatGPT has some further development to undergo before it can truly contribute to our deeper understanding of death, eulogy-writing, or attempts to find light-hearted humor in some of life’s most tragic circumstances. But in the meantime, it may very well be a helpful tool.