Death is a certainty, it comes to all of us and everyone we know. Its finality is complete and terrible, unless you use AI to transform the period-like ending into a comma.
According to a new report from NPRthere is at least one Chinese company, Silicon Intelligence, that is building lifelike digital avatars of deceased relatives that can talk to you and connect with you via a kind of FaceTime call from the afterlife.
Yes, it’s as creepy as it sounds, but based on this and other reports, the concept is becoming more and more popular.
The quality of such a deceased clone is, as is often the case with AI, dependent on data. The system requires photos and videos of the deceased, as well as voice samples. In some cases, the systems rely on social media data to help determine the personality of the “deadbot.” This part was funny to me, because no one is themselves on social media, and it’s unlikely that a deadbot based on Instagram posts from “granny” would look anything like your real “maw-maw.”
Some of these deadbots can be connected to the internet, allowing them to gain insight into current events and then talk to you about them:
Deadbot Grandma: “So Joe dropped out…wow”
Grandson: “Yes, Grandma. He was getting too old.”
Grandma Deadbot: “But he’s still alive, and that’s more than I can say.”
Grandson: “…*…”
If you look at the five stages of grief, “denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance,” the last one is probably the most important. It means that you let go, that you accept the finality. You can move on. That doesn’t mean that you won’t miss that person, maybe every day of your life, but you can function without them and have long periods of time where you don’t think about them. At least that’s the hope.
Rise of the Deadbots
With these digital avatars or deadbots, you never move on. I’ve lost people and usually at first I think about telling them something until I remember they’re gone. If I had a deadbot of my grandmother, that thought would be followed by action. I’d open the iPad and start a call from the afterlife or at least from Silicon Intelligence servers somewhere in China and we’d have a nice and probably pretty weird conversation.
In the NPR report, Silicon Intelligence executive Sun Kai, who regularly talks to the deadbot version of his deceased mother, describes the technology as almost transcending death: “Whether she’s alive or dead doesn’t matter, because when I think about her, I can find her and talk to her. In a sense, she’s alive. At least in my perception, she’s alive.”
Of course, Kai’s mother is no longer alive, but he may be right. As more of us talk to AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Copilot, and Google Gemini, the line between human and digital conversation is blurring. Some believe we’re the Turing testwhich essentially means that someone observing a conversation between a human and a machine may no longer be able to distinguish which is which.
It’s not clear that any of the best AI chatbots have actually reached this threshold, and talking to a digital reconstruction of a dead person probably doesn’t meet that standard either. I don’t think it matters, though. People anthropomorphize hardware and software all the time (think of how you talk to Alexa or Siri). For some reason, people are actually quite comfortable talking to inanimate objects and digital personas and sometimes, develop relationships with them.
If the use of deadbots becomes widespread and they appear on our tablets and at funeral homeswhere we can scan a QR code to bring up Uncle Al’s digital likeness and chat with each other, I think people will embrace them – even if they can’t hug their long-dead relatives anymore.
A corpse made of data
The biggest stumbling block here, however, is data. All of these systems require significant amounts of potentially private data to build these deadbot personas. In our current political and new Cold War climate, China-based Silicon Intelligence has essentially zero chance of gaining a foothold in the US. Not that that’s going to stop other companies from launching similar services.
This week, Meta launched new AI tools in Meta AI on Instagram that let you feed images of your face into the system and then apply them to fantastical images. There’s not much distance between that and keeping those images and potentially videos in an archive that’s combined with all the other data you’ve shared across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to build deadbots for grieving families, that can live on Facebook and in Messenger. I have no doubt we’ll be seeing Facebook Messenger bots of deceased relatives soon.
“Dying will be a great adventure,” said Peter Pan in J.M. Barrie’s eponymous adventure. Depending on what you believe, death is an adventure for the dead and those left behind. One is full of certainty. What happens after death is anyone’s guess, but our perception of it is unchangeable: a person is here, and now they’re gone. The adventure for the living, however, has varied throughout those five stages of grief. But now, with this potential sixth stage (digital resurrection), the adventure continues, though I’m not sure it’s a journey any of us should take.