The article I selected: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/jessica-simulation-artificial-intelligence/

This feature is about a Canadian guy (Josh) who successfully customized an AI chatbot on the website “Project December” to mimic his late fiancee Jessica. The author not only writes about how the AI helped Josh with his grieving journey but also about Project December itself as well as its creator and its development.

There are several key characters that this story is about:

First, there is Josh Barbeau, the main subject of the story. 33-year-old Josh has been dealing with the death of his fiancee Jessica for the past 8 years and because of that has somewhat isolated himself from the outside world. After trying out random chatbots on “Project December” he decided to create one based on his late fiancee and was positively surprised by the accuracy of the result. The feature includes Josh’s AI story as well as background information on him such as his personality and interests.

Another character is Jessica Pereira. She died in 2012 at the age of 23 from a rare type of liver disease. The author writes about Jessica’s life, death, personality, and interests. The latter two were mainly mentioned to show what Jessica was like so that the reader can get a feeling of whether the transcripts of Josh’s conversation with Jessica’s AI seem genuine.

The third main character in this feature is the creator of “Project December” – Jason Rohrer. The author writes about how he developed the program, what he intended it to do, and how he reacted to hearing about Josh’s story on Reddit.

Regarding the narrative structure of the feature, I thought it was a little too much back and forth. It jumped in between Josh’s, Jessica’s, and Jason’s stories which made it quite confusing at times. I think the author intended to break up the heaviness of Josh’s and Jessica’s story by using this structure which in itself is a reasonable approach. However, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was so much back and forth that the author forgot what information he had already talked about and mentioned several things several times.

In the end, I think the feature is “about” unusual ways of dealing with grief and the potential of AIs for goodness.

Overall, I do think the story is true. This is because the author received his information from the subjects as well as people close to them. There is a lot of deep information in the article, which for me shows that the author put a lot of time and thought into this feature and wanted it to be an accurate representation of what had happened. The article also includes the original transcripts of Josh’s conversation with the Jessica chatbot.