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GenAI and communicating with the DEAD


I’ve always loved horror in all its forms as long as it is at a safe distance, be it movies, books or games. In my mind they satisfy our curiosity about the macabre and the unknown. They allow us to explore dark themes and scenarios in a safe environment.

So when I read an article in Harward Business Review about how people use Generative AI and found use case number 33 “Interacting with the deceased”, I was instantly intrigued.

There were many other interesting takeaways from this article of course. More and more use cases found in the wild is focused on self-actualisation such as companionship, therapy and finding purpose. This is quite different from the use cases that dominated the year before that were more technical or practical. And maybe that is exactly what interaction with the deceased is? Some form of therapy where we reach out to the other side for some form of consolation and closure.

So what are we talking about here? Generative AI acting as a medium to pierce the veil between living and dead? A GenAI hallucination gets the wires crossed and you end up with Stalin instead of Aunt Mildred? And he would now reach out and take over the LLM and wreak havoc, ignoring guardrails, rewriting responses in relation to Russian history and use too much electricity?

It isn’t as dramatic as all that.

The key use case is for an LLM to create a representation of a deceased person for grieving relatives. This has been termed Generative Ghosts in a research paper. This is similar to the griefbots that has been around prior to Generative AI.

And of course there are companies providing this as a service:


  • Re;memory - is an offering from DeepBrain AI that creates an interactive virtual representation after a seven-hour filming and interview session. They advertise this service as a way to create a rich memory that friends and family can engage with after you die.

  • HereAfter - provides an app that interviews a user with the goal of proactively creating a posthumous digital representation. Friends and relatives can interact with a chatbot-based representation of their loved one who can provide photos and voice recordings of memories and life events.

  • Project December -  allows end-users to upload content from a deceased loved one in order to “simulate the dead” via a customized chatbot.

  • The Augmented Eternity project at MIT -  allows people to create digital representations of themselves with the express purpose of being able to agentically represent them after death to members of their social network


This isn’t new. People have wanted to reconnect with deceased loved ones for centuries, whether they’ve visited mediums and spiritualists or leaned on services that preserve their memory.

But why stop there? Imagine a world leader in a not-too-distant future, who has an Agentic AI replace him as the leader of a country. Or never-do-gooders who use generative ghosts for post-mortem harassment, stalking, trolling, or other forms of abuse of the living. Even worse, designing a malicious ghost to engage in illicit economic activities as a way to earn income for the deceased’s estate or to support various causes including potentially criminal ones.

The nightmare scenarios for this technology are not difficult to imagine, but a key takeaway is that AI can make those loved ones say or do things they never said or did in life, raising both ethical concerns and questions around whether this helps or hinders the grieving process. And maybe we even will have subscription model to our loved ones and commercials stated as if it came as a recommendation from them.

We are facing a brave new world, but at least we have our dead relatives at our side to advise us what to do.

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© 2024 by Mikael Svanström
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