If you could preserve your loved one in a digital body, would you do it? This question sounds like something out of a sci-fi thriller or a Black Mirror episode, but it’s increasingly present in real life. Today, companies offer subscriptions to AI programs that simulate your loved one’s voice, language, and personality after death. These services promise comfort, continuity, even companionship—but at what cost?
Grief is already a space filled with complexity and contradiction. AI, with its immeasurable impact on everything from the environment to the arts, adds yet another layer of nuance. And while many of us are appropriately concerned about how AI is used to plagiarize or automate human creativity, the idea of a digital avatar of our loved one after death remains strangely compelling.
I guess it’s time to revisit my last will and testament—because I certainly didn’t include instructions on managing my digital ghost. In the age of the internet, grieving has evolved. We now memorialize social media pages, scroll through digital memories, and revisit texts and emails. These remnants bring comfort and ache in equal measure. But AI technologies go further, promising conversations with the dead by turning our loved ones’ data—texts, voice recordings, social posts—into living simulations.
One story that sticks with me is that of Joshua Barbeau. In 2021, The San Francisco Chronicle shared how he used Project December, an AI chatbot, to simulate conversations with his late fiancée, Jessica. He uploaded her old messages and began “talking” to her again. The bot responded in her voice—her tone, humor, and personality reconstructed through language. Joshua said it helped him grieve. But reading through their exchange, I felt a deep dissonance. The experience was undeniably powerful, but also chilling. Was that Jessica—or a code wearing her face?
As a grief educator, I can understand the appeal. Truly, I can. When I miss my mom, I listen to her voicemails. When I grieve friends gone too soon, I write them letters and hope for a dream to bring them near. But all of this is rooted in memory—imperfect, beautiful, aching memory—not in simulation.
A griefbot doesn’t just live in memory. It mimics. It fills the silence that grief demands we learn to live with. And that, to me, feels dangerous.
There’s a difference between remembering someone and recreating them. When we outsource our grieving process to a machine, we risk reducing our loved ones to a collection of data points. Their essence—their spontaneity, contradictions, humanness—is flattened. And in doing so, our own process of mourning is flattened, too.
I think about Margaret McCollum, whose husband Oswald was the voice behind the iconic “Mind the Gap” announcement on the London Underground. After his death, she visited the station just to hear him. In 2012, the recording was abruptly replaced. It was eventually restored after a handful of thoughtful employees tracked down and restored the recording in her single, local terminal—but her grief story reminds us that real presence, even in something small, matters. Oswald actually recorded that voice. What we’re offered now is artificial presence—something built to soothe, but not to stretch us.
If healing in grief means integrating loss into the landscape of our lives, then any attempt to simulate presence might interrupt that process. It might delay our acceptance of absence. And it may give us a false sense of continued relationship—without the messiness real relationships require.
Because let’s be honest: If the bot only says what we want to hear, is it really our person?
My people were flawed, complex, sometimes irritating and contradictory. That’s part of why I loved them. There’s dignity in the full picture. But these avatars? They are only shadows. Programmable comfort. And while that comfort might feel good, especially in the acute stages of loss, I worry it’s a form of emotional displacement. A way to avoid the grief work that helps us metabolize pain, grow in self-awareness, and move toward wholeness.
When we simulate the dead instead of honoring them, what else do we lose?
We lose mystery. We lose the liminal, tender edge of grief that keeps us human. We don’t lose our emotional expressions outright by engaging with these avatars—but we do minimize them. We shrink our grief to fit the comfort of a make-believe conversation. In seeking that fleeting balm, we may sideline the raw, unfiltered truth of our mourning for something more “manageable.” This is where my concern sharpens.
When we simulate human interaction, we risk reducing our loved ones to code—flattening their complexity, polishing their quirks, and sanitizing their contradictions for the sake of digital ease. The result isn’t remembrance. It’s emotional displacement.
Aldous Huxley wrote in Island, “What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past. How to be there with the dead and yet still be here, on the spot, with the living.” That’s the invitation of real grief—the aching pull of memory without being consumed by it. Griefbots risk tipping us toward fixation rather than freedom. They offer presence, but it’s performative. They offer voice, but not volition.
And again in his imaginary utopian novel, Huxley warns us again: “We have always chosen to adapt our economy and technology to human beings—not our human beings to somebody else’s economy and technology.” But what happens when that choice flips? When our deeply human processes—grief, memory, healing—are reshaped to serve subscription models and artificial emotional ease? We begin to mistake simulation for connection. We adapt our sorrow to suit an algorithm.
Francis Weller, in The Wild Edge of Sorrow, speaks directly to this distortion: “We are remade in times of grief, broken apart and reassembled. The work of grief is soul work.” That’s what I fear we’re giving up. The breaking. The reassembling. The deeply embodied process of being changed by loss. No bot can remake us. It can only reflect back the pieces we uploaded before the fracture.
Even Barbeau, when asked about his experience with the AI version of Jessica, said, “I’ve been trying to decide whether this is healing me or deeply disturbing me.” That tension matters. And if we bypass that disturbance for the sake of comfort, we bypass the meaning, too.
So no—I don’t think griefbots are the solution. Not for me. Not for those I love. And not for a culture already desperate to avoid its own shadows. We need space to ache. To remember without reconstruction. To feel the real contours of our sorrow. Grief deserves space for depth, not simulation. Your love is real, and your loss doesn’t need to be made palatable through programming. While AI may offer a sense of closeness, it risks replacing the messy, sacred work of grief with something tidy and false. True grief is not a glitch to fix or a discomfort to eliminate—it is the evidence of our love, and of our capacity to grow around what we’ve lost.
Thank you for listening to episode 194 of Restorative Grief. Shout out to my friend Marty, from the streets of Twitter, who reminded me it was time to speak on the impact of AI in the world of grief literacy. I’ve long thought about writing something but just hadn’t gotten there yet. Thanks for the push!
I realize this conversation is a sticky one. If you’re like me, waiting to figure out what you think before you speak, good. Important conversations should set us back on our heels, asking us to think critically before putting our wholehearted yes or no into motion. I don’t want to shame anyone who finds AI chatbots to be a resource, but I do want to lovingly invite into connection with real people online – and The Restorative Grief Project is a perfect place to find compassionate humans ready to respond and treat you with the dignity and compassion you need as you grieve. Find a link in the show notes for The Restorative Grief Project, as well as the Patreon and other free or paid resources to support your grieving process with intention. Shoutout and thank you to all my patrons as well, as you know you’re such a support for this work. If you’re new to this show, learn more about what we do at MandyCapehart.com and be sure to subscribe for a fresh episode each week. And as always, before we go, one last thing. Please remember, the only solution for grief is to do the work of grieving. Thank you for listening. I’ll see you next week.
Links + Resources from this epsiode: