Digital resurrection: fascination and fear over the rise of the deathbot

The Guardian

4 days ago

Rod Stewart had a few surprise guests at a recent concert in Charlotte, North Carolina. His old friend Ozzy Osbourne, the lead singer of Black Sabbath who died last month, was apparently beamed in from some kind of rock heaven, where he was reunited with other departed stars including Michael Jackson, Tina Turner and Bob Marley.
The AI-generated images divided Stewart's fans. Some denounced them as disrespectful and distasteful; others found the tribute beautiful.
At about the same time, another AI controversy erupted when Jim Acosta, a former CNN White House correspondent, interviewed a digital recreation of Joaquin Oliver, who was killed at the age of 17 in a 2018 high school shooting in Florida. The avatar of the teenager was created by his parents, who said it was a blessing to hear his voice again.
In June, Alexis Ohanian, a co-founder of Reddit, posted on X an animation of his late mother hugging him when he was a child, created from a photograph. 'Damn, I wasn't ready for how this would feel. We didn't have a camcorder, so there's no video of me with my mom … This is how she hugged me. I've rewatched it 50 times,' he wrote.
These are just three illustrations of a growing phenomenon of 'digital resurrection' – creating images and bots of people who have died using photographs, videos, voice messages and other material. Companies offering to create 'griefbots' or 'deathbots' abound, and questions about exploitation, privacy and their impact on the grieving process are multiplying.
'It's vastly more technologically possible now because of large language models such as ChatGPT being easily available to the general public and very straightforward to use,' said Elaine Kasket, a London-based cyberpsychologist.
'And these large language models enable the creation of something that feels really plausible and realistic. When someone dies, if there are enough digital remains – texts, emails, voice notes, images – it's possible to create something that feels very recognisable.'
Only a few years ago, the idea of 'virtual immortality' was futuristic, a techno-dream beyond the reach of ordinary people. Now, interactive avatars can be created relatively easily and cheaply, and demand looks set to grow.
A poll commissioned by the Christian thinktank Theos and carried out by YouGov in 2023 found that 14% of respondents agreed they would find comfort in interacting with a digital version of a loved one who had died. The younger the respondent, the more likely they were to be open to the idea of a deathbot.
The desire to preserve connections with dead loved ones is not new. In the past, bereaved people have retained precious personal items that help them feel close to the person they have lost. People pore over photos, watch videos, replay voice messages and listen to music that reminds them of the person. They often dream of the dead, or imagine they glimpse them across a room or in the street. A few even seek contact via seances.
'Human beings have been trying to relate to the dead ever since there were humans,' said Michael Cholbi, a professor of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and the author of Grief: A Philosophical Guide. 'We have created monuments and memorials, preserved locks of hair, reread letters. Now the question is: does AI have anything to add?'
Louise Richardson, of York university's philosophy department and a co-investigator on a four-year project on grief, said bereaved people often sought to 'maintain a sense of connection and closeness' with a dead loved one by visiting their grave, talking to them or touching items that belonged to them.
'Deathbots can serve the same purpose, but they can also be disruptive to the grieving process,' she said. 'They can get in the way of recognising and accommodating what has been lost, because you can interact with a deathbot in an ongoing way.'
For example, people often wonder what a dead loved one might have done or said in a specific situation. 'Now it feels like you are able to ask them.'
But deathbots may also provide 'sanitised, rosy' representations of a person, said Cholbi. For example, someone creating a deathbot of their late granny may choose not to include her casual racism or other unappealing aspects of her personality in material fed into an AI generator.
There is also a risk of creating a dependency in the living person, said Nathan Mladin, the author of AI and the Afterlife, a Theos report published last year. 'Digital necromancy is a deceptive experience. You think you're talking to a person when you're actually talking to a machine. Bereaved people can become dependent on a bot, rather than accepting and healing.'
The boom in digital clones of the dead began in the far east. In China, it can cost as little as 20 yuan (£2.20) to create a digital avatar of a loved one, but according to one estimate the market was worth 12bn yuan (£1.2bn) in 2022 and was expected to quadruple by 2025.
More advanced, interactive avatars that move and converse with a client can cost thousands of pounds. Fu Shou Yuan International Group, a major funeral operator, has said it is 'possible for the dead to 'come back to life' in the virtual world'. According to the China Funeral Association, the cost is about 50,000 yuan per deceased person.
The exploitation of grief for private profit is a risk, according to Cholbi, although he pointed to a long history of mis-selling and upselling in the funeral business.
Kasket said another pitfall was privacy and rights to digital remains. 'A person who's dead has no opportunity to consent, no right of reply and no control.' The fraudulent use of digital material to create convincing avatars for financial gain was another concern, she added.
Some people have already begun stipulating in their wills that they do not want their digital material to be used after their death.
Interactive avatars are not just for the dead. Abba Voyage, a show that features digital versions of the four members of the Swedish pop group performing in their heyday, has been a runaway success, making about £1.6m each week. Audiences thrill – and sing along – to the exhilarating experience while the band's members, now aged between 75 and 80, put their feet up at home.
More soberly, the UK's National Holocaust Centre and Museum launched a project in 2016 to capture the voices and images of Holocaust survivors to create interactive avatars capable of answering questions about their experiences in the Nazi death camps long into the future.
According to Cholbi, there is an element of 'AI hype' around deathbots. 'I don't doubt that some people are interested in this, and I think it could have some interesting therapeutic applications. It could be something that people haul out periodically – I can imagine they bring out the posthumous avatar of a deceased relative at Christmas dinner or on their birthday.
'But I doubt that people will try to sustain their relationships with the dead through this technology for very long. At some point, I think most of us reconcile ourselves with the fact of death, the fact that the person is dead.
'This isn't to say that some people might really dive into this, but it does seem to be a case where maybe the prospects are not as promising as some of the commercial investors might hope.'
For Mladin, the deathbot industry raises profound questions for ethicists and theologians. The interest in digital resurrection may be a consequence of 'traditional religious belief fading, but those deeper longings for transcendence, for life after death, for the permanence of love are redirected towards technological solutions,' he said.
'This is an expression of peak modernity, a belief that technology will conquer death and will give us life everlasting. It's symptomatic of the kind of culture we inhabit now.'
Kasket said: 'There's no question in my mind that some people create these kinds of phenomena and utilise them in ways that they find helpful. But what I'm concerned about is the way various services selling these kinds of things are pathologising grief.
'If we lose the ability to cope with grief, or convince ourselves that we're unable to deal with it, we are rendered truly psychologically brittle. It is not a pathology or a disease or a problem for technology to solve. Grief and loss are part of normal human experience.'