Talking with the virtual dead through AI

Cody Delistraty, We’re In a New Age of Techno-Spiritualism, NYTimes, March 30, 2025. Several paragraphs in:

A little over a century ago, Thomas Edison announced that he had been trying to invent an “apparatus” that would permit “personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us.” Known for his contributions to the telegraph, the incandescent lightbulb and the motion picture, Edison told The American Magazine that this device would function not by any “occult” or “weird means” but instead by “scientific methods.”

As science and technology have evolved, so too have the ways in which they attempt to transcend death. Where the 19th and early 20th centuries saw the rise of Spiritualism and pseudoscientific attempts at communing with the dead — through séances, ghost sightings and Edison’s theoretical “spirit phone” — with the invention of these A.I. avatars today, we’re now entering a new age of techno-spiritualism. [...]

A.I. used for psychological well-being is already relatively mainstream. These tend to come in the form of mental health chatbots or “companions,” [...] This latest wave of technology, however, has grief and loss specifically in its cross hairs.

Many of the companies producing A.I. avatars and chatbots have adopted the language of optimization, suggesting that their tools can help people “ease grief” or otherwise better process loss by providing a chance for postmortem conversations and closure.

There's a large potential for exploitation:

The potential risks of A.I. tools for grieving are significant, not least because the companies producing them are driven by profit — incentivized to exploit desires and delusions that may be unhealthy for their users. A recent study from the University of Cambridge, for instance, evaluated the ethics of “the digital afterlife industry” and posited that these businesses may soon realize there’s even more money to be made by requiring people to pay subscription fees or watch advertisements in order to continue interacting with their dead loved ones’ avatars, especially after hooking them on the ability to converse. [...]

Another possible dystopian scenario the Cambridge researchers imagined is a company failing (or refusing) to deactivate its “deadbots,” which could lead to survivors receiving “unsolicited notifications, reminders and updates” and instilling the feeling that they’re “being stalked by the dead.”

This mixing of reality, fantasy and enterprise is a detriment to grieving.

There's more at the link.