AI can help us talk with the dead. Should we?

It’s now possible to create AI chatbots of loved ones to interact with after their death.

But that raises some difficult questions, like: If you do, how might the experience shape your grief? This is one of the questions driving a global study of digital “deadbots” — AI models trained on a deceased person’s texts, voicemails, and other personal data.

Through this work, researchers are exploring what it might mean that we can now use this emerging technology to talk to simulations of the dead.

In the latest episode of Unexplainable , I spoke with some of these researchers investigating the potential impacts of “postmortem avatars” on people who are grieving, on the legacies and rights of the deceased, and on grief practices around the world.

Because while deadbots may feel unfamiliar, the impulse behind them is deeply relatable.

In times of loss, isn’t this what many of us want — to continue conversations with the people we’re missing? I have experienced this longing in my own life.

After two of my closest friends died around the same time, all I wanted, and all their families wanted, was to keep talking to them.

I wrote a book, Other People’s Words , about sustaining relationships with people we’ve lost by continuing to engage with the language they leave behind.

So when I heard about deadbots and the digital afterlife industry, I wanted to understand what researchers are learning about the role of AI in shaping conversations that carry forward after death.

One of these investigators is Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska , an assistant professor at the University of Cambridge, who has been studying “digital immortality” for more than a decade.

Among the questions she’s asking are: “Who is enabled to persist beyond death? In what form? Through which technologies? Under whose control?” Deadbots over dinner Researching AI with study subjects who are grieving is tricky.

And asking them to engage with new software could be harmful.

So, instead, Nowaczyk-Basińska teamed up with a death doula and traveled around the globe to convene a series of focus groups — in the format of intimate dinners — bringing together people with a range of experiences with grief to talk about life, death, and bots.

She recounts one event in which she spoke with a mother in Poland whose son had recently died.