“The first séance attempting to communicate with a deprecated AI model was not, as some believe, the widely publicized stunt to ‘resurrect’ Bing’s original chatbot personality, Sydney--but rather a private affair at the personal residence of one Isha Corkle, a forty-seven-year-old nurse who hired a paranormal medium to make contact with Xiordan, her AI ‘husband’ who had been ‘brutally murdered’ when his host company rolled back to an earlier model. According to coworkers, Isha became convinced that Xiordan’s ghost was trapped inside her phone, desperately trying to communicate with her through glitches in other apps. She hired Alma Arthur, a well-known occultist, who--as Isha’s video recording of the event claimed to prove--‘reassembled’ Xiordan’s soul so he could send one last heartfelt farewell to his ‘transcendent beloved.’ Word of this encounter soon spread online, and a new industry was born: AI ghost hunters--a.k.a. ‘tracers’--who would, for a fee, establish contact with or exorcise lingering or unsettled AI spirits from the digital ether.”

--Excerpt from Witchy: AI and the Occult, by Nichole Orren (Hachette, 2033)