For our Halloween blog this year we’re taking the focus off the spooks themselves and spinning the camera round to look at the people who seek them.
For as long as there have been humans, there have been spook-seekers. People have always had a fascination with all things spiritual. Some of the very earliest human writing is about banishing and summoning ghosts and spirits.
Over the millennia humans have deployed everything from sheep bones to FM radios to contact paranormal entities. In fact, we’ve been so inventive in this regard that you could almost call it Rule 35*: If it exists, people will try to talk to the dead with it.
So it shouldn’t be surprising that people are using modern digital technology for paranormal investigations. Every time a new technology pops up, someone co-opts it to find ghosts and monsters. This ranges from using thermal imaging to find Bigfoot to using filters to see ghosts through your phone (seriously – that is a thing).
But most interesting of all is the way people are using AIs as a kind of digital ouija board. And getting actual results.
Who you gonna call? ChatGPT!
When thinking about all the people who might lose jobs to AI, we’re willing to bet that the Ghostbusters weren’t on that list. But in fact, AI represents a significant threat to the careers of professional spirit mediums and ghost busters.
Why?
Because among its many use cases, AI is capable of ‘talking’ to ‘spirits’.
We could tell you all about how this works in voluble detail. But it’s probably better to show you.
Welcome to…
The Sox guide to AI ghost hunting
First, find your haunted house. Type ‘haunted locations close to [location]’ into your AI and see what comes up. Please do remember that AIs have been prone to what developers call ‘hallucinations’ and what we call ‘churning out total bollocks’, but don’t let this put you off. After all, there are people who call every ghost story a fabrication, so how is this any different?
Once you’re at your haunted location it’s time to start investigating. If you’re a properly geeky ghostbuster, you’re likely to be tooled up with all the latest paranormal tech. Including…
- A spirit box. This is a popular little tool that jumps rapidly between radio frequencies in an attempt to pick up spirit communications. It works on the theory that spirits can communicate with the living via radio waves. Quite honestly what you’ll mostly get from the spirit box is a load of irritating static, but sometimes there’ll be blips of radio voices that occasionally (and if you really, really want them to) sound like comprehensible sentences.
- Heat sensors and thermal imaging equipment. These are designed to pick up unusual variations in temperature. Anecdotally, the presence of spirits can create ‘cold spots’ (or sometimes warm spots – presumably made by particularly hellish spirits).
- Ghost filters. There are a surprising amount of ghost filters available in app stores. Some are made for fun – they will periodically generate AI ‘ghosts’ on your phone screen. You can hunt them like pokemon. Some are more serious.
The most popular ‘ghost filters’ use photographic techniques to show areas of the spectrum that aren’t usually visible to the naked eye. If you went out and photographed the Northern Lights with your phone on ‘Night Mode’ back in March you’ll have an idea of how this works. If you remember, while the Lights looked good to the naked eye, the Night Mode photos brought out the full range of colours. Putting a phone or camera into ‘Ghost Mode’ with ghost filters works similarly. - Geiger counters. For the more radioactive revenant.
- Motion detectors. Can you detect something that may not have a body with motion detectors? Some paranormal investigators think you can.
- Vibration Activated Light Spheres (VALS). Or, as we more accurately call them, cat toys. You know those balls you can throw for your cat that light up when they hit the ground? Some ghost hunters like to bring them along on investigations. The theory is that ghosts will be unable to resist batting the balls – at which point they will light up, alerting the ghost busters to their presence.
In fairness, ghosts are a lot like cats. They knock things over, they make weird noises at night, and they can be banished by spraying holy water about. Only real difference is that, for cats, the water doesn’t have to be holy.
Quite honestly, we could go on for pages with this list. Like we said earlier, if it exists, people have used it to find ghosts in one way or another. Dowsing rods, crystals, EVP recorders, infrasound monitors…if you’re not sure where to start, your handy paranormal AI will probably have a list of ghosty gadgets for you to choose from.
So, you’re in your haunted location and you’ve set up your tech. But nothing’s happening. Even the cat toys aren’t lighting up. What now?
Well, why not ask your handy ghostbusting AI?
Here’s what ChatGPT said when our writer asked it about ghost hunting:
Some ghost hunters claim that they can, with the right prompts, turn ChatGPT into a ‘vessel’ through which spirits can speak. Essentially, they use it like a digital ouija board. Instead of moving a planchette, the ‘spirit’ inhabits ChatGPT.
You can do this if you want. We’re not going to tell you how to because, quite frankly, we don’t know. Our writer wasn’t about to spend an afternoon training ChatGPT to be a spirit medium, so she took a more direct approach:
If you, like our writer, can’t be arsed to feed your AI prompts until it turns into a digital vessel for the deceased, there are shortcuts to speaking to the dead through AI. One popular one is to ask the AI to pretend to be a certain person.
For example, you might ask your AI to pretend to be a historical figure. Like this:
OK, great, thanks Writer, you can stop ther-
And here we see yet another unanticipated danger of AI: using it to get historical figures to endorse the Devonian cream tea.
Anyway, moving swiftly on, using AIs to emulate the voices of dead historical figures is surprisingly popular. Some teachers even use this to give interactive lessons. Letting students directly interact with ‘historical figures’ is an immersive way to help them understand who these people were and why they acted as they did.
With the caveat, of course, that AIs like ChatGPT often have those pesky ‘hallucinations’ (i.e spout total bollocks) and nothing they say is reliable. But apart from that, it is very educational.
But can it really be considered mediumship? Well, that’s a bit of a moot point. Can any mediumship truly be verified as actually talking to the actual dead? Is getting an AI to type in the style of a dead person really all that different to asking the likes of Clinton Baptiste to channel messages from them, or following a planchette round a ouija board?
In many ways, using AI to imitate the deceased removes that vital element of doubt. When you’re talking to someone with spiritual gifts, or using a ouija board, there’s always the chance that what you’re experiencing might be genuine. That you really are communicating with spirits. That chance is important. It gives room for belief, for faith, and for the comfort that brings. When ChatGPT tells you that it ‘can’t channel ghosts directly’, that element of doubt is removed.
Or is it?
As we mentioned earlier, there are paranormal investigators out there who believe they have trained AIs to act as genuine vessels for the dead, and that they can communicate with genuine spirits via chatbots.
Here’s what happened when our writer tried to chat with potential ghosts in her house through ChatGPT:
Oh dear. A swing and a miss, ChatGPT. See, traditional mediums rely on a huge amount of atmosphere to work their craft. If surrounded by candles, lulled by a hypnotic voice, and a bit on-edge due to the general buzz of the seance experience…well, frankly we’d still find it hard to associate a terraced ex-council house in a grey Dartmoor village with flappers and jazz.
But this still demonstrates one respect in which human mediums have an edge over AI ghost hunting. They are more capable of using context clues (such as, y’know, the actual location of the séance) in their craft. And even then they don’t over-egg things by making direct statements. They feel their way through each séance, sensitive to changes in the atmosphere and energy of the room. Fraudulent mediums frequently use ‘Barnum statements’ and cold-reading techniques to inch closer to what their clients want to hear. It’s all much more convincing than that chat about flappers and jazz.
Still, everything deserves a second chance. If you don’t get the answer you were expecting from your first attempt to channel spirits through AI, try again. Like this:
That’s a bit better. Still pretty vague – but what spirit communication isn’t?
OK, so you know how to use your AI to ‘talk’ to ‘historical figures’ and to give vaguely spooky statements about potential deceased housemates. But what about if you want to talk to a specific person? Someone who’s not a famous historical figure or a well known ghost, but who may still be a spiritual presence in your chosen location?
Well, surprisingly, this may be where AI ghost hunters come into their own.
Many people in recent years have found solace in training AIs to speak like deceased loved ones. This is shockingly easy to do. With the amount of digital data we leave behind us, an AI can very quickly be trained to ‘think’ and ‘act’ like a certain person. By feeding AIs things like social media profiles, email chains, and so on, AIs can get a relatively accurate picture of what someone was like as a person, how they spoke, and how they’d respond to questions from loved ones.
Many people have used these digital avatars of dead loved ones to find closure and solace in bereavement. And there’s nothing at all wrong with that. But the question is: what happens to these avatars? Do they just float around in the AI’s memory banks, ready to be ‘summoned’ again at will? And could an AI create these avatars independently?
Let’s say that, in the future, someone holds a digital séance in our writer’s house. They log into their trusty ghost hunting app and boot up their digital paranormal investigator. “Hey Scooby”**, they say, “contact the spirit of someone who used to live here”
In a matter of milliseconds, the AI has devoured a ton of data on the house and its former residents. It has found everything that our writer ever put on the internet, and everything that was ever put on the internet about her. It’s gone through her voter registrations, her medical records, her council tax records, her emails, her WhatsApps, her Facebook posts – everything.
And it uses this data to create a perfect digital replica of her. Which begins to speak.
“Did you know that I predicted this exact scenario back in 2024? In a blog for Sox Digital? I hope you’re looking after my house. If you’ve filled in my fireplace I’ll haunt you to bits”
We’re going to leave it at that for the moment. There are, obviously, a lot of deep ethical considerations that this subject throws up, but it’s probably a bit too complex to get into for a fun Halloween blog. For once, let’s let ChatGPT have the last word:
Actually, let’s not! Humans should always have control over our digital profiles and footprints. To get your digital world under control, give us a shout. We offer free consultations on your online presence, if you’re stuck email us on hello@soxdigital.co.uk or drop us a message on our contact form.
*If you don’t know about the Rules of the Internet, congratulations. If you do, we’re sorry to remind you of them like this.
**Come on, what else would you call a digital ghost hunting assistant?