I Shall Go to Him, but He Will Never Come Back to Me

Peter Listro was diagnosed with blood cancer at the age of eighty-three and told he had less than a year to live. His son, Matt, persuaded him to work with a company called StoryFile to create an AI avatar of himself—a digital facsimile with whom the family could “speak” over video chat after his death. As recounted by Susan Dominus for the New York Times Magazine, Peter soon found himself surrounded by camera equipment in his living room. A producer directed him to utter stock phrases such as “I love you too,” “it was nice talking with you,” and “bye for now.”

StoryFile is one of countless companies offering “grief tech” products—from chatbots trained to sound like the deceased to three-dimensional holograms of lost loved ones. Grief tech is everywhere: the former CNN contributor Jim Acosta recently “interviewed” an AI-generated avatar of Joaquin Oliver, one of the seventeen victims of the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Oliver was murdered at the age of seventeen; the interview aired on what would have been his 25th birthday. The 2019 film Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker employed an AI version of the deceased actress Carrie Fisher for scenes with her character, Princess Leia. In 2020, Kanye West surprised his then-wife, Kim Kardashian, with a hologram of Kardashian’s father, who had died in 2003.

Debates over grief tech differ from those over AI “deepfakes,” though the technologies are functionally similar. The term “deepfake” refers to synthetic audio or video products that realistically mimic the likenesses or voices of real people, with the intent to deceive or manipulate. A deepfake of Martha Stewart might appear in a tacky video advertisement for nutritional supplements, without the real Martha Stewart ever knowing. Deepfakes can also be used in sophisticated crimes; in March 2019, the CEO of a UK-based energy firm was ordered over the phone, by a voice that sounded like that of his boss, to transfer hundreds of thousands of pounds to a company in Hungary. The “caller,” of course, was a deepfake.