Inevitably, a family holiday arrives when Grandpa’s seat at the table is empty, or when those weekly calls from Mom suddenly stop. Grieving a deceased loved one is among life’s most difficult rites that we all must endure … or so we thought.
AI startups are offering a work-around: Instead of saying farewell, you can “keep talking.”
Digital avatars may resemble the dead, but they cannot love us and cannot be loved in return.
In China, tech companies are building interactive avatars of the dead, dubbed “digital resurrection.” This isn’t a static photo or a recorded message that you might find on your phone. These are lifelike AI deepfakes — complete with voices, facial expressions, even the ability to respond in conversation. For as little as 20 yuan (around $3), mourners can have their loved ones “come back” in digital form.
Digitizing the dead is big business. According to the Guardian, estimates placed the market value at 12 billion yuan ($1.7 billion USD), with forecasts suggesting it could quadruple by 2025. Zhang Zewei — founder of Shanghai-based Super Brain, one of the first companies to market — has charged each of his clients up to $1,400 to make digital replicas of a deceased loved one.
Even funeral operators in China have leaped at the economic opportunity, advertising that the dead may “come back to life in the virtual world” — for a significant sum of money. This includes avatars that can converse with the bereaved, using voice recordings, emails, and even old photos to power their responses.
How this technology emerged is not hard to guess. AI uses digital remains (texts, voice notes, photos) as lived-in sources to train on, making the “surviving” avatars disturbingly realistic.
What is surprising, however, is the technology’s popularity, especially among young people.
The Christian think tank Theos conducted a survey that found 14% of respondents already felt comforted by the idea of addressing a digital version of a loved one — especially younger users. The younger the user, the more willing to talk to a digitized corpse.
Ethics without elegy
Though developers like Zewei claim this technology is for therapeutic purposes, psychologists warn that it may be having the opposite effect.
Digitally immortalizing the dead can create psychological dependency — creating a crutch that blocks true emotional closure. In her article for the Guardian, Harriet Sherwood quotes Edinburgh University “grief philosopher” Michael Cholbi, who warns that such “deathbots” can derail grief, offering the illusion of presence where absence must be acknowledged.
She also quotes Louise Richardson, a grief researcher from the University of York’s philosophy department, who maintains that digital avatars “get in the way of recognizing and accommodating what has been lost, because you can interact with a deathbot in an ongoing way.”
This is especially alarming given the younger demographic composing its main user base.
Grief is not a product
All societies long have found ways to tend grief — photos, heirlooms, letters, memorial sites. But grief is meant to be endured, not postponed. To routinize grief with AI risks replacing memory with mirage.
These companies may claim they are selling comfort, perhaps with altruistic intentions. But they’re really commodifying grief — and postponing closure.
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Grief, at its best, teaches us to live more gratefully, to cherish the impermanence of life, and to love people as they are — not as perfectly animated projections. Digital avatars may resemble the dead, but they cannot love us and cannot be loved in return.
When we confuse likeness for presence, we lose not only the truth of who someone was, but also the beauty of what it means to say goodbye. The ache of loss is not a glitch to be debugged. It’s a mark of love — and love, not illusion, is what we are meant to carry.
The post Digital grief is here — and it’s creepy, costly, and fake appeared first on TheBlaze.
