Digital Afterlife: How AI Is Changing Our Relationship With Death and Memory

AI technology enables preservation of voices and stories of the deceased, but cannot replicate the complete essence of a person.

Modern artificial intelligence is increasingly being deployed to maintain the voices and narratives of those who have passed away. From chatbots that simulate loved ones to voice avatars enabling "conversations" with the deceased, the expanding digital afterlife industry promises to transform memory into an interactive and potentially eternal experience.

In research recently published in Memory, Mind & Media, we investigated the implications of algorithmic remembrance of the dead. Our exploration included creating and interacting with digital versions of ourselves.

"Deathbots" are specialized AI systems engineered to simulate deceased individuals' voices, speech patterns and personalities. These systems analyze a person's digital footprint – including voice recordings, messages, emails and social media activity – to create interactive avatars that appear to communicate from beyond death.

Media theorist Simone Natale describes these as "technologies of illusion" with historical connections to spiritualist traditions. However, AI makes these illusions considerably more convincing and commercially viable.

Our research forms part of the Synthetic Pasts project, which examines technology's impact on personal and collective memory preservation. For our study, we evaluated services claiming to preserve or recreate individuals' voices, memories or digital presence using AI. To gain deeper understanding, we became test subjects, uploading our own videos, messages and voice recordings to create "digital doubles."

In some instances, we acted as users preparing our synthetic afterlives. In others, we positioned ourselves as bereaved individuals attempting to communicate with digital versions of departed loved ones.

Our findings were simultaneously fascinating and disquieting. Some systems focus primarily on memory preservation, helping users record and organize personal stories by themes like childhood, family or advice. AI then indexes this content, creating a searchable memory archive.

Other platforms employ generative AI for ongoing conversations. Users upload data about deceased individuals – messages, posts, voice samples – and the system constructs a chatbot responding in their style. Using machine learning, these avatars supposedly evolve over time.

While some platforms present themselves as playful ("host a seance with AI"), the experience can feel unnervingly intimate. All platforms claim to offer "authentic" emotional connections. Yet we found that greater personalization attempts often resulted in more artificial interactions.

When prompted by these systems, we provided additional personal information, only to receive stiff, scripted responses repeating our exact phrasing. The tone was sometimes incongruous – cheerful emojis or upbeat language appeared during discussions about death, clearly demonstrating algorithms' inadequacy at handling grief's emotional complexity:

Oh hun… 😔 it (the death) is not something I'd wish for anyone to dwell on. It's all a bit foggy now, to be honest. 🌫️ Let's chat about something a bit cheerier, yeah?

The more archive-focused tools offered calmer experiences but imposed rigid categories with limited nuance. As digital media scholar Andrew Hoskins notes, memory in the AI era becomes "conversational" – shaped by human-machine interactions. In our experiments, however, these conversations often felt one-dimensional, revealing synthetic intimacy's limitations:

Human: You were always so encouraging and supportive. I miss you.

Deathbot: I'm right here for you, always ready to offer encouragement and support whenever you need it. And I miss you too… Let's take on today together, with positivity and strength.

These experiences are underpinned by commercial interests. These are tech startups, not memorial charities. Subscription fees, "freemium" tiers, and partnerships with insurance companies or care providers reveal how remembrance is being commercialized.

Philosophers Carl Ohman and Luciano Floridi argue that the digital afterlife industry operates within a "political economy of death," where data continues generating value long after someone dies.

These platforms encourage users to "capture their story forever" while harvesting emotional and biometric data to maintain engagement. Memory becomes a service – an interaction to be designed, measured and monetized. As Professor Andrew McStay demonstrates, this forms part of a broader "emotional AI" economy.

These systems essentially promise resurrection – reanimating the dead through data. They offer to restore voices, gestures and personalities, not as recalled memories but as real-time simulated presences. This "algorithmic empathy" can be persuasive and moving, yet remains constrained by code limitations and subtly alters the remembrance experience by smoothing away ambiguity and contradiction.

The platforms reveal tension between archival and generative memory forms. All normalize specific remembrance approaches, privileging continuity, coherence and emotional responsiveness while producing new data-driven forms of personhood.

Media theorist Wendy Chun observes that digital technologies often conflate "storage" with "memory," promising perfect recall while eliminating forgetting – the absence that enables both mourning and remembering.

Digital resurrection thus risks misunderstanding death itself: replacing loss finality with simulation's endless availability, where the deceased remain perpetually present, interactive and updated.

AI can help preserve stories and voices but cannot replicate a person's living complexity or relationships. The "synthetic afterlives" we encountered are compelling precisely because they fail. They remind us that memory is relational, contextual and fundamentally not programmable.

Our study suggests that while AI enables conversations with the dead, the responses reveal more about the profit-driven technologies and platforms – and ourselves – than about the spirits they claim to channel.

Eva Nieto McAvoy, Lecturer in Digital Media, King's College London and Jenny Kidd, Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.