In Cities of the Absurd: Strange Tales from the Dark Metropolis (En Route 2025), Ken Francis tries to capture the spirit of our age — one in which nearly half (49 percent) of generative AI users with self-reported mental health conditions were using AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Woebot, or Wysa for emotional support. In many cases, this was without any prompting from healthcare providers. In other words, they were seeking emotional support from a source that is actually just a computer program. No wonder a book that attempts to capture the culture is called Cities of the Absurd.

One story, “The Ghosts of Hologram House” addresses the problem in a surreal way: It offers a type of premise similar to that of the 1952 short story “A Sound of Thunder” and the resulting 2005 movie: For a wad of cash back then, the client could travel back in time and shoot a dinosaur.

In “Hologram House,” the reality-altering premise is updated to reflect our age of artificial intelligence. For a wad of cash, we can see our dearly departed again in this life via holograms and LLMs. Our lonely story character wants to see his dearly missed parents again…

The deal is straightforward: For $6,000, a person requests a meeting to interact with a dead person for a short period of time, in my case an afternoon, with such a deceased person(s) recreated into a hologram. I had to supply the company with old film footage, complete with sound, of my parents at family events. The company also required two written anecdotes at such family events, which they inputted into the narrative of the algorithms AI for my parents’ hologram to respond to. The script was recorded by a male and a female actor, then the voiceover was digitally converted to that of my mother and father’s voices.

Such stories are never meant to end well and this one is no exception. No spoilers here but if you have been following Gary Smith’s real-life reporting on AI hallucinations, you won’t be quite as surprised by the unsettling outcome.

And it’s not even science fiction

Perhaps we had better get used to the fallout. These “deadbots” are going live in our culture, as Chloe Veltman noted a few days ago at NPR, powred by dreams of immense profits:

The digital afterlife industry, which manages a person’s digital assets after their death, is expected to quadruple in size to nearly $80 billion over the next decade. That includes the creation of deadbots. The more immersive these bots become, the more technology companies are exploring their commercial potential, causing concern in the research community and elsewhere.

“There is powerful rhetoric with a deadbot because it is tapping into all of that emotional longing and vulnerability,” said New Yorker cartoonist Amy Kurzweil. Kurzweil’s work frequently explores technological topics, including her 2023 book Artificial: A Love Story. The graphic memoir recounts how she and her father, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, created a text-based chatbot of her dead grandfather in 2018 using written materials from his archives. “I could feel like I had some communion with his presence,” she said.

“AI ‘deadbots’ are persuasive — and researchers say they’re primed for monetization,” August 26, 2025

Not all of Francis’s stories end with disappointment (see “The Busybody” or “Kingdom of the Moon” for a pick-me-up). Just enough of them to make you wonder where all this modern urban life is heading.

Kenneth Francis is a Contributing Editor at New English Review. For the past 30 years, he has worked as an editor in various publications, as well as a university lecturer in journalism. He also holds an MA in Theology and is the author of The Little Book of God, Mind, Cosmos and Truth, The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd (with Theodore Dalrymple), and Neither Trumpets Nor Violins (with Theodore Dalrymple and Samuel Hux). His most recent books are Theology in Music: How Christian Themes Permeate Classic Songs, Theology in Film: How Christian Themes Permeate Classic Movies, and Cities of the Absurd: Strange Tales from the Dark Metropolis.