AI and Grieving Series Part 2: StoryFile

It really is a great idea: StoryFile Life is an SaaS that creates an interactive icon of a loved one on video, allowing for on-demand dialogue-like exchanges with the actual likeness of the deceased.

The “conversations” are prompts and responses; via pre-selected video recordings, the result is an exchange controlled by the bereaved posing questions of the deceased. It actually feels almost like a real conversation (William Shatner is the spokeperson for the service, and you can try it out by visiting him here and asking questions of your own about all kinds of things from his life [yes, even Star Trek]).

Questions come from a provided list of prompts covering topics from the early life and experiences of the deceased to their wisdom on subjects like love, divorce, work, running a business, death, ethnicity, taking a second life partner, coming out and LGBTQ+ topics, being a parent and grandparent, adoption, holidays, and many more.

There is a range of packages available at various costs. A free account option comes with 37 questions, and additional packages and questions can be purchased with charges of a dollar per question, with answers of 1, 2, and 5 minutes available. The list of prompts, as of this writing, is over 1800.

Benefits and imitations of the StpryFile approach fall on a wide spectrum:

• On the one hand, it sounds great to have access to an actual library of very specific conversational responses with a loved one after death; on the other hand, it’s not really anything you couldn’t do on your own with a smart phone. The central location of the story files in the cloud make files available to anyone with account access, though — helpful for loved ones who may not maintain contact with the family member who took the videos. Also, organizing centrally is done for you, and they’re securely saved and protected.
• It could get a bit expensive at the high end, with additional questions a$1 apiece.
• It also entails a bit of fearlessness about death: when is the mortality of a loved one likely to come onto the radar of most people? In cases of chronic or terminal illness, handling and arranging something like StoryFile Life videos may not be feasible; for someone fighting for her life, are they likely to have emotional bandwidth available for arranging a collection of messages for survivors to remember them by?
• How do they even feel about doing such a collection of videos? Not everyone battling with health matters will necessarily be open to recording themselves in illness, especially their health has taken a toll on their appearance.
• Remembering can be emotionally demanding.
• If a mortal outcome isn’t one which the family wants to face, the nature of the service could be off-putting.

And perhaps most importantly for our purposes: the appropriateness of the service specifically for support with grieving isn’t immediately clear. The value for memorializing is obvious, but would the story files be any more helpful than your photo album or facebook page?

Recommended, with caveats; there’s definite comfort available in videos of those lost, but such vividity in memorialization also comes at an emotional cost to the rememberer. The objective seems to be exactly that vividity… but it could be quite beneficial, depending on the nature of the content of the responses provided by the deceased. Here is an unprecedented opportunity to comfort their bereaved themselves over their own death, in their own words, and in their own voice, after the fact.