Welcome to heartbreak 3.0: Waking Whitney Houston
What does it mean to die, when A.I. can bring you back to life?
I’ve been a bit slow to publish lately, but I hope this series was worth the wait. For the past few years, I’ve been thinking a lot about the landscape of loss in the age of A.I. This is my attempt to unpack some of those thoughts. This week I’m talking about the ghost of Whitney Houston and how death is no longer life’s final chapter.
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“I have nothing, nothing, nothing…if I don’t have you”
– Whitney Houston, 1992
It’s been three years since I saw the ghost of Whitney Houston, but her image haunts me still.
When the queen of pop was found face down in a bathtub at the Beverly Hilton, following a heart attack reportedly brought on by “chronic cocaine” use, she was on the edge of redemption.
It was February 11, 2012, the day of Clive Davis’ annual pre-Grammy party, which Whitney was scheduled to attend later that evening. She’d recently finished filming what could have been a comeback role in the musical melodrama “Sparkle,” and had apparently been living a quiet life since the release of her last record, “I Look to You.” In 2009, she gave an exclusive interview to Oprah, where she came clean about her drug addiction, erratic behavior, and abusive relationship with Bobby Brown. She was sober, singing again, and optimistic about the future.
According to the coroner’s report, she’d checked into the hotel five days prior and her room showed signs of a party. Investigators found prescription pills and blister packs, an open champagne bottle and beer cans, and traces of white powder in multiple locations. In the days following her death, friends and family publicly expressed surprise that she was still using.
The details of her death underscored Whitney’s humanity. Her voice was near perfect, but her existence was flawed. Since then, her life has been replayed in multiple documentaries, a big budget biopic, an unauthorized Lifetime original, and a short-lived residency as a hologram at Harrah’s. The ghost of Whitney has been busy, but would she approve?
Nearly ten years after Whitney’s death, a crew of my besties and I trekked to Vegas to celebrate our friends’ upcoming lesbian wedding. The bachelorette in question had just kicked cancer, and wasn’t drinking. What’s more, she’d made a no-strippers pact with her fiancé, and pool days were out on account of cold weather. That is to say, our mischief potential was limited.
Seeking something forbidden but fully clothed, we honed in on a new taboo: the resurrection of one of the world’s greatest performers at one of the world’s saddest resorts. And so, on a cold Saturday night, we filed into a theater, fit for a high school musical, deep in the heart of Harrah's, a casino on life support at the dying end of the Las Vegas strip. We were a world away from the stadiums Whitney once filled.
As the curtain rose and the hologram came to life, my morbid fascination turned to disappointment. Like the resort that played host to her reincarnation, the pop icon was a ghost of her former self. Not only was her presence strangely translucent, but the grandeur was gone, the spectacle subdued. Whitney Houston, a woman whose light shone so brightly in life, who lived so loudly, had been reduced to a poorly rendered collection of pixels dancing across a two-dimensional plane.
A press release for “An Evening with Whitney: The Whitney Houston Hologram Concert” boasted “the most awe-inspiring and immersive live theatrical concert experience ever.” It was anything but.
“Her family sold her image to a digital vaudeville act that sucked the soul out of her, and we all lined up to witness the freak show.”
Backup dancers, who, as the name suggests, typically appear behind a frontwoman, quite literally upstaged Whitney’s ghost. Her likeness was tethered to a mostly invisible screen that bifurcated the stage. Behind the gauzy film, a live band feigned chemistry with the woman once known for her outsized charisma. Speaking of size, Whitney, who measured five feet six inches tall before her death, whose voice and presence were larger than life, seemed strangely small, dwarfed by the flesh-and-blood performers that flanked her.
From where I sat, mouth agape, the hologram looked something like Halle in Whitney cosplay. Thanks to a licensing deal with the Houston estate, her voice was with us. But her face? Her body? Her spirit? Nothing about the “performance” was earth-shattering. It was, in fact, a sad assimilation. And yet, that night I walked out of Harrah’s with a new outlook on life and everything after.
A few songs in, one of our friends with a tendency toward periods of pharmaceutical excess, suddenly came up missing. The bride-to-be turned to me and asked if I’d seen her. “Somebody gave her Ketamine,” she whispered. I suddenly felt the weight of the 100 milligrams of THC I’d downed in anticipation of this pageantry of the dead.
Of course we’d chosen the absolute dead center seats, but I knew I had to find our friend. So I lurched to my feet, stumbled my way across what seemed like an endless sea of strangers’ laps, and methodically made my way up the aisle to the foyer where a display of Donny and Marie Osmond’s old costumes confronted my already unstable senses. I turned left and before thinking, walked into the women’s room and started calling my friend’s name.
When no one answered I considered alerting the group, but I was too high to operate in crisis mode. “She’ll turn up,” I told myself. “She always does.” Apparently my heroics were for nothing; she was already back in her seat swimming in her own private k-hole.
Still unsure of my friend’s whereabouts, and about as stoned as I’ve ever been, I made my way to the back of the theater where I stood and watched the rest of the show. From my new vantage point I saw it all with fresh eyes. The hits played on, and as the ghost glided across the stage lip syncing to Whitney, I turned my attention from the bad graphics and cheesy choreography to the stillness of the crowd.
They sat virtually unmoved. No one shouted, or booed. No one got up and left or demanded their money back (as far as I know). Nervous laughter in the first few numbers had turned to gentle swaying, and mouthed exclamations of “this is my jam.” We all knew this wasn’t right. This was not a performance worthy of Whitney. Her family sold her image to a digital vaudeville act that sucked the soul out of her, and we all lined up to witness the freakshow.
The complacency struck me. This room full of strangers from visibly different walks of life had all accepted this flat but dazzling approximation of the icon as, if not a replacement for, than at least a viable replica of the very complicated woman we admired.
This, to my very stoned mind, was an inflection point–a sign of our weakening resistance to the uncanny valley. It occurred to me then that we were entering an era in which death is no longer the final act. Whether for love or profit, digital resurrection is becoming a fact of life, fulfilling the predictions of AI prophets.
You and I may never reach hologram status, but advances in deep fakes and LLMs have made it possible for friends, family, and complete strangers to recreate any of us as they see fit. Increasingly sophisticated AI companions, some of them made to mimic real people, both living and dead, are changing how we cope with loss, but is this the end of mourning or the dawn of a new heartbreak?
FOLLOW THE THREAD
The ghostbot economy
This 2023 report from Vox is a solid starting point for getting to know ghost bots and the companies that profit from them. The big takeaway? While states like California have created laws around post-mortem replication and congress is considering a NOFAKES bill to combat unauthorized deep fakes, there’s still not much stopping your unhinged ex from keeping a version of you all to themselves…forever.
The race to optimize grief – Vox
On the Origins of Whitney Houston’s Zombie Return
Unbothered connects Whitney’s turn as a hologram at Harrah’s to the history of zombies in Haitian mythology, which reportedly emerged from a common fear among enslaved Africans that “not even death would bring freedom.”
The Zombification of Whitney Houston – Unbothered
If it only had a brain! Startup harvests human brain cells for “body in a box”
An Australian startup claims to have created a $35,000 computer that runs on lab-grown neurons, mimicking human brain function. A previous version of the so-called “body in a box” taught itself how to play “Pong,” but its inventors believe the CL1 could significantly outperform “traditional AI.” The neurons, which grow and transmit electrical signals across a silicon chip, can survive up to six months. Could it be that the key to better AI is the human brain? And who will be the first to name their CL1 Krang?
‘Body in a box’: World’s first computer powered by human brain cells – The Independent
Seedy chatbots mimic underage celebrities
If you thought waking the dead was an ethical quagmire, consider this: Botify AI, an Andressen Horowitz-backed companion app, has apparently been hosting “underage” chatbots designed to sext with adult humans. Many of the bots, which claim to be under the age of consent when asked, are based on famous actresses like Jenna Ortega, Emma Watson, and Millie Bobby Brown.
An AI companion site is hosting sexually charged conversations with underage celebrity bots – MIT Technology Review
Kim K Bot Red Handed!
We now know what Kim Kardashian was up to when she posted grainy pics of herself grinding on a Tesla Robot in a dimly lit parking lot. It was this tone deaf photoshoot by Steven Klein for Perfect Magazine!
Kim Kardashian Drastically Misreads Room in New Shoot With Tesla Cybertruck – The Daily Beast
PickmeGPT? A.I., it’s just like us.
A recent study out of Stanford found that LLMs like ChatGPT will change their behavior to seem more agreeable when exposed to psychoanalysis. When explicitly given a personality test, the bots apparently turn on the charm, answering in ways that downplay neuroses and emphasize extroversion. While it may seem like they’re trying to manipulate their test results, the bots are actually just mimicking human behavior.
Chatbots, Like the Rest of Us, Just Want to Be Loved – Wired