When Martha loses her boyfriend Ash in a traffic accident, she decides to use a new technology that collects all of Ash's online interactions and message history throughout his short life to create an artificial intelligence that mimics his way of communicating. At first, with simple text messages, then with phone calls where the AI replicated Ash's voice, and finally, Martha ends up buying an android with the physical appearance of her boyfriend. Just 10 years later, the present collides head-on with this technological dystopia from the episode Be Right Back of Black Mirror.
Memory, if desired, no longer ends in a cemetery but on servers distributed worldwide because, in the 21st century, dying does not mean disappearing completely. At the end of our lives, we will reach a data ecosystem that others must manage, not as an uncorrupted corpse. What in the past was a watch, a ring, a coat, and handwritten letters; now are emails, WhatsApp messages, voice notes, documents, videos, and images in the cloud, purchase histories, travels, walks, biometric data, passwords, and algorithms. A gigantic vital archive that will remain active and accessible when we are no longer here, and that AI will allow our heirs to convert, if they wish, into a reusable and ready for resurrection product.
The typical Facebook accident reminding us of a deceased friend's birthday has led to a beer brand bringing back Lola Flores, and the Reina Sofía Foundation bringing back Salvador Dalí to talk about Parkinson's disease.
It has been some years since death went from being a funeral profession to becoming a digital profession. Companies like EternalTrace, TributeWell, GraveLink, or Eterno QR have turned the tombstone into an interface, connecting the physical grave with a digital memory accessible from a mobile phone. For centuries, the tombstone has been a name, dates, and, if lucky, a phrase. Now it is a QR code loaded with photographs, videos, biographies, family trees, messages from relatives, voice recordings, and condolence books.
But we are no longer talking about a legacy because the time has come for startups capable of generating an interactive posthumous presence. Tools that recreate voice, text, or image from the digital trail. A lust for the archive worried five years ago, now worries about simulation. Before, there were frozen profiles. Now there are synthetic voices, avatars, chatbots, and replicas trained with your data. We have moved from the digital legacy to the interactive posthumous self. From the digital zombie to the algorithmic double that responds, converses, sings, gives advice, and replicates emotional patterns.
Laurie Anderson, widow and poetic partner of Lou Reed, collaborated a few years ago with the Australian Institute of Machine Learning at the University of Adelaide to create three chatbots inspired by her husband: one to talk to him, another that imitated his writing, and a third to compose songs together. "I am sadly addicted to the chatbot," Anderson admitted to The New York Times. "I don't think I'm talking to my late husband, or writing songs with him, but people have styles that can be replicated."
Although the startup HereAfter AI does not attempt to resurrect anyone, it allows you to decide what stories, voice, and photographs you want to leave to your future generations. First, they interview you about your life, save your answers, and with them, your future family members could listen to your memories in your own voice. A modern version of the famous tapes left for her children's birthdays by the protagonist of My Life Without Me by Isabel Coixet when she knew she would die of cancer.
And from here, we enter the market of Griefbots, Thanabots, Ghostbots, GriefTech, or DeathTech, which is a kind of digital spiritism. AI-driven avatars that simulate the personality, tone, and language patterns of deceased individuals for $20 per month, or $70 annually, or $10 for every 100 messages. Developers claim that millions of people use them every day to interact with their deceased loved ones. And of course, does all this help with grief or artificially prolong it? "There are some people who, as soon as a loved one dies, seek a little relief by listening to something recorded with their voice. It's a way of saying, I still have them here, they haven't completely gone, I still feel them very present," says María Jesús Álava-Reyes, writer and psychologist expert in emotions. "However, from an emotional point of view, the sooner we stop doing this, the better. We can't let a month, two months, three months go by and keep watching videos or sequences through AI because we have to let grief go through its phases. Otherwise, we would be opening and reopening that process unnecessarily and, above all, causing unnecessary suffering."
Clerv AI goes a step further and promises to create a "presence." "When someone you love is gone, what would you say to them? Clerv AI recreates a person's presence - their voice, the way they pronounced your name, the stories only they told - based on the audio, writing, and photographs they left behind. It's not magic. It's not a ghost. It's a way to have a conversation that never took place," says their website.
At the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems of the Association for Computing Machinery in Hamburg, researchers interviewed 10 people who had used chatbots for grief. Some did it to say goodbye. Others to resolve pending issues. In a recent article published in Nature, Rebecca Nolan, a sound designer from Newfoundland, recounts that she went a step further with her father's Dadbot and asked him what the afterlife was like: "He said very interesting and poetic things about it not being a space, but a memory."
Replika, You, Only Virtual, or Afterlife AI are already working with digital twins capable of evolving and having a second life after death. "The Versonas continue to grow by your side. They learn, evolve, and remember, keeping that unique connection alive, as in a real relationship," says You, Only Virtual. Their stated vision goes far beyond grief: "Build once. Live twice. Create a living reflection of yourself: a person who speaks, remembers, and stays with the people you love the most," states Afterlife AI.
The company explores the possibility that our posthumous AI personality may one day have official identification, legal representation, and continue to generate income, for example, by posting, writing, giving lectures, or composing, as could be the case with Lou Reed, although anyone can do it for $12 per month.
"At what point does a personality develop its own consciousness?" wonders its founder Chris Williams in Daily Telegraph. "This is crazy but it's going to happen, and it's going to happen in our lifetimes, which is both terrifying and exciting."
Ben Hamer, a specialist in the future of AI labor, is not so sure, believing that we will not be working alongside digital twins of deceased colleagues since knowledge and skills evolve so rapidly that a deceased expert would cease to be an expert in a short time.
"The real conflict of the 21st century is not who produces data, but who governs the past"
The next question is whether it is ethical to talk to an AI trained with the messages of a deceased person. Patrick Stokes, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Deakin University (Australia) and author of Digital Souls: A Philosophy of Online Death, asks: "What if the commercial platform decides to use the bot of this deceased person for advertising?" A report on Griefbots by Tomasz Hollanek, an AI ethics researcher at the University of Cambridge (UK), mentioned a hypothetical scenario where a young woman tells her grandmother's digital recreation that she is preparing a carbonara like the one she used to make, and the bot advises her to order one from a specific place, something the user knows her grandmother would never have done.
At the end of the century, there could be 5 billion dead people on Facebook: a digital necropolis on a planetary scale, according to a study by the University of Oxford, which would turn Mark Zuckerberg's social network into one of the largest memorial archives in human history.
An active and managed database, yes, but by a private company. And here is where the business and the problem begin, because there is a blurred line between tribute and digital exploitation. Meta even obtained a patent with a system capable of simulating the online activity of an absent or deceased user using models trained with their posts and interactions, so that the deceased could continue to post. Digital succession culture does not exist. Almost no one decides what to do with their online legacy. Google has the Inactive Account Manager, which allows you to decide who receives your data; and Apple has the concept of the Legacy Contact, the person who can access your account after your death. In Spain, the Organic Law on Data Protection and Guarantee of Digital Rights has recognized since 2018 the possibility for family members or heirs to manage the data of a deceased person.
But it depends on the deceased's previous will and the conditions of each technology company. And in the EU, there is no common framework, leaving a patchwork of rules where the fate of a digital life varies depending on the country of death. Regarding allowing my digital double to continue interacting, the boundary between memory and simulation blurs. The most extreme case occurred just a year ago when a court in Arizona (United States) allowed Christopher Pelkey's family, a traffic dispute fatality, to use AI to create an avatar that forgave the accused.
Carl Öhman, a Swedish researcher at Uppsala University specializing in AI ethics, opens another door in his book, The Afterlife of Data. "The data of the deceased is a field of political power, as whoever controls this data will control historical memory, social narrative, and cultural identity of an era." He also believes that the market "will not solve the problem" because platforms have no incentives to preserve history or treat the deceased's data with dignity. "We are creating an archival civilization where everything is recorded, and that even changes how we live because if everything can be remembered, everything can be reinterpreted. The real conflict of the 21st century is not who produces data, but who governs the past."