Digital Immortals: death tech making the dead live again

For a while after my mother died I would ring her old number hoping she’d pick up, just to hear her voice once more. Then I’d sit alone in tears in the minutes that followed listening to a thin recorded message telling me the number I was calling was disconnected.

I’d get through this black hole of grief, I thought, if I could just talk to her again. Tell her I loved her. But with the passing of a loved one comes a sudden heavy silence.

My instincts reached out for the timbre of her voice and the line of her face, but those things may as well have been a dream. She was gone.

Consider this. What if she had picked up? What if I’d rung a number, and that voice as familiar as my own breath, had said, “Hello?”

Enter the rise of artificial intelligence, the digital afterlife industry and the so-called ‘grief bot’ – a digital version of your dead loved one that you can buy after inputting their photos, videos, and media blogs. The result looks like them, mimics their speech and characteristics, and responds to your questions in real time. Bingo.

In a paper published last year in the academic journal Integrative Psychological and Behavioural Science, Spanish researchers Belen Jimenez Alonso and Ignacia Bresco de Luna found that new digital technologies are mediating the grief of the bereaved. However, unlike, say, digital memorial ceremonies, grief bots “imply a private conversational space between the mourner and the deceased person”.

“Based on the digital footprint of the deceased, grief bots allow two-way communication between mourners and the digital version of the dead,” they wrote.

We can make grief bots – but should we? What are the ethical dangers of monetising grief by a profit-driven industry?

And what of the psychological dangers of apparently bringing the dead back to life?

Michael Arnold is a member of the Melbourne University DeathTech Research Team and a professor in the history and philosophy of science. He says grief bots are rising in popularity among entrepreneurs, but while they should be considering the moral and social implications, they are not.

“A bunch of IT dudes sit around and say ‘I wonder if we can do this….let’s get some people on board and see if we can monetise this’,” he says.

“They come up with a business plan and they chuck it over the fence into the world.

“And the question of whether this is a good thing to do from a moral point of view or a social point of view has never entered the conversation.”

Dr Zena Burgess, CEO of the Australian Psychological Society, is intensely interested in the psychological dangers of grief bots.

“You can’t escape the pain of grief,” she says. “And the idea that being able to talk to someone who is dead just one more time ... is not the reality of the process of grief.

“It’s going to prey on the most vulnerable members in the community, and those that are most socially isolated. This is why I’m really keen to see some ethical guidelines around this, some proper evaluative research and some serious government regulations.”

Professor Arnold says there is insufficient evidence to understand the psychological impact of digital versions of dead loved ones being sold to family members. But he says society is becoming one that increasingly lives in and through discourse.

“Let’s pretend that Chat GPT and its descendants continue on the same trajectory,” he suggests.

“I can easily envisage a case where I am interacting with some ‘thing’. I’m uncertain as to whether it’s a human being or not a human being and I don’t care. Because my life is lived through discursive interaction. It’s not lived through shared materiality.”

Writing in online tech magazine IEEE Spectrum in October 2023, Canadian researcher Professor Wendy Wong reported most of the new players are small, not Big Tech.

“The current players include a company that offers interactive memories in the loved one’s voice (HereAfter); an entity that sends prescheduled messages to loved ones after the user’s death (MyWishes); and a robotics company that made a robotic bust of a departed woman based on her ‘memories feelings and beliefs’, which went on to converse with humans, and even took a college course (Hanson Robotics),” she wrote.

The emergence of AI has thrown accepted paradigms on their heads. No-one is sure how it will end. But the big questions around life after death that have persisted for generations now have the AI response.

Somehow contemporary society must navigate the complexities of a life where a failed US president can brazenly claim he won, where many think climate change is a hoax and others allege shape-shifting lizards are in charge. In a world in which the concepts of real and fake are often presented without evidence, how do we deal with dead living again?

Professor Arnold says the new industries must introduce moral considerations into their business models.

“I think tech dudes can and should be moral creatures,” he says.

“They can and should take on the social, cultural, psychological and moral implications of what they are doing … Technology should be held to moral account for its affects.”

Dr Burgess says there is a lot of interest around how technology can be used as a tool for therapy, but she is cautious around claims that grief bots may assist with healing.

“We are looking for the science and evidence first,” she says.

My grief bot is in my head. It’s not a perfect memory but neither is it a buy-in.

I don’t ring anymore but I still sense my mother is around.

Maybe we weren’t completely disconnected after all.