☀️ AI Morning Minute: Digital Necromancy
AI can now talk back in a dead person's voice. The question is whether it should.
People have always used technology to hold onto the dead. Photographs, voice recordings, home videos. Each new medium made the connection feel a little more real. AI takes that instinct and adds something the other mediums never had: the ability to respond.
What it means:
Digital necromancy is the practice of using AI to conjure the dead from the digital traces they leave behind. Startups like Seance AI, HereAfter AI, and Eternos train models on a person's writing, voice recordings, photos, and videos to create chatbots, voice clones, or video avatars that simulate conversation with someone who has died. The concept first sparked debate in the 2010s when deep-fake technology was used to reanimate artists like Tupac Shakur and Bruce Lee, but generative AI has made it personal, cheap, and accessible.
Why it matters:
Chatbots have encouraged suicidal people to carry out their plans, affirmed that other users were prophets, and misled a 76-year-old man with dementia into believing he was texting with a real woman. Grief makes people more vulnerable to these failures, not less.
Cambridge researchers warn that companies could use deadbots to advertise products in the voice of a deceased loved one, or that children could be told a dead parent is “still with you” by a chatbot that has no off switch. The “digital afterlife industry” has no design safety standards.
Sociologists studying remembrance practices argue the concerns are overblown, pointing out that people have always used objects and images as conduits to the dead without confusing the medium for the person. But the difference is that a photograph can’t say something your loved one never would have said.
Simple example:
You have a box of letters your grandfather wrote. You can reread them, hold the paper, recognize his handwriting. The letters only contain what he actually put down. A grief chatbot trained on those letters does something different.
It generates new sentences he never wrote and answers questions he never heard. Ask it what he thinks about your new job and it'll respond in his voice, confidently, with no way for you to know if he'd have actually said that. The letters are a record. The chatbot is a guess dressed up as a memory.