What Do AI Models Say Happened to Amy Bradley? It Depends Who You Ask
Her disappearance in 1998 and new Netflix docuseries continues to spark wide debate online so we asked AI to try and solve the case.
And now for something completely different, as they say.
With a new documentary airing on Netflix, the case of Amy Bradley, a 23-year-old Virginia woman who went missing from a cruise ship in 1998, has resurfaced and caught fire once again. The case was never solved at the time, and with credible eyewitness sightings off the ship, it’s not as simple as chalking it up to an accidental or intentional drowning.
Bradley’s family vehemently believes she is still out there and could still be alive all these years later, perhaps caught in a human trafficking ring. At the very least, they believe that someone knows something that could lead to closure for the case.
This isn’t a place for recounting or exploring the various theories or details; there are lots of websites, forums, and videos that do that. This is more akin to a survey of some “smart” people taking in all the facts and forcing them to render an opinion on the most likely outcome.
It boils down to these possible outcomes listed in no particular order:
Accidental death
Intentional death
Abduction and taken off the boat
Willingly left the boat and was kidnapped/trafficked
The easy guess is to say she was drinking, then stumbled and fell between 5:30 and 6:00 am off the balcony as the ship came into port at Curaçao. However, that doesn’t explain the sightings of her outside her family’s stateroom, both on the ship and then months and years later off the ship.
It’s a peculiar case, to be sure.
Now then, let’s hand it over to the AI sleuths to figure out. The prompt I asked required them to succinctly take in all the available information they could find and render a likely scenario, followed by a short explanation.
Here are the conflicting and interesting results:
ChatGPT
Likely scenario: Abduction and human trafficking.
Explanation: Multiple credible sightings of Amy after her disappearance, including reports of her in distress and working in Caribbean brothels, strongly suggest she was taken against her will, likely after leaving the ship early that morning. The cruise ship's lax security and dock proximity to trafficking hubs support this theory.
Claude
Likely scenario: Human trafficking
Explanation: Evidence includes a U.S. Navy witness claiming he heard a worker at a Caribbean brothel claiming to be Bradley and a 2005 photo emailed to Bradley's family. Photos showed a woman resembling Amy on a Caribbean-based sex worker website, which Bradley's mother believed could be her daughter. Investigators ruled out accidental drowning or suicide, noting she was a trained lifeguard with strong swimming skills and no physical evidence supporting either theory.
Grok
Likely scenario: Accidental fall overboard
Explanation: Amy Bradley, a strong swimmer and trained lifeguard, was last seen on her cabin’s balcony around 5:30 a.m. on March 24, 1998, after drinking and dancing. The absence of her body, despite extensive searches, aligns with strong ocean currents near Curaçao that could have swept her away. Her shoes were left behind, and no conclusive evidence supports foul play or trafficking, pointing to an unintentional incident.
Gemini
Likely scenario: Accidental fall overboard
Explanation: Despite persistent theories of abduction and human trafficking, which her family strongly believes due to alleged sightings and circumstantial evidence, the initial and statistically most common explanation for disappearances from cruise ships remains an accidental fall overboard, especially given she was last seen on a balcony after a night of drinking. Her body not being recovered is not uncommon for disappearances at sea. While investigators couldn't definitively confirm this, they also found no direct evidence of foul play or that she left the ship voluntarily with others.
Analysis
I would not have expected the 50/50 split between accidental fall and abduction/trafficking. Then again, that seems to be the two camps of opinion in the Bradley case. There is compelling evidence for each theory, so it’s a matter of which mystery you want to subscribe to.
Statistically speaking, accidentally falling overboard is the most likely cause of death when someone disappears from a cruise ship. With that backdrop, it’s not too surprising, given the lack of concrete evidence to support the abduction theory, that Gemini and Grok stick with the safe answer.
However, investigators on Curaçao ruled out the overboard theory because they never found a body or related evidence washing ashore.
It’s possible that with the publicity this case is now receiving from a global distribution on Netflix that some new stone might be overturned and shed new light on this decades-old mystery.