Scitech editor Wiliam Hunter at the Daily Mail tried making an AI avatar of himself, in case he dies, for his family to remember him by.

He wasn’t very happy with it himself. But what did his family think?:

I popped my AI clone into the family group chat and set my parents and siblings up for a conversation with the future me – and they absolutely hated it.

My mum called the clone ‘creepy’, and complained that its jerky movements were strange and off-putting.

She said: ‘It didn’t speak like you and it didn’t have the same intonation.’

Adding: ‘I thought that if you were trying to connect with a parent who had passed away, something like that would be quite spooky.’

My partner described my clone as ‘unnatural’, adding that its sense of humour was ‘clearly AI-generated’.

“I made an AI ‘grieftech’ clone to replace me when I die – but my friends and family absolutely hate it,” August 16, 2026

One issue Hunter noted is that the sophisticated new genAI chatbots simply make things up (hallucinations) to fill in gaps: “This led it to make a bunch of strange remarks, telling people that my cat hates my sister because she’s always carrying around plates or raw fish, or claiming that I can’t get drunk because I would ‘feel it in my knees.’” False claims and anecdotes would hardly be much of a help in a genuine moment of grief.

Still, an attractive new business opportunity

The BBC looked into the beginnings of this trend two years ago:

James’ father John passed away in 2017, but not before James had turned what he’d recorded into an AI-powered chatbot that could answer questions about his dad’s life – in his father’s voice.

Such use of AI to artificially bring people back to life has long been explored in science fiction, but developments in AI technology have now made it possible in real life. In 2019, James turned his chatbot into an app and business called HereafterAI, which allows users to do the same for their loved ones.

He adds that while the chatbot didn’t remove the pain of his dad’s death, it does gives him “more than I otherwise would have”. “It’s not him retreating into this very fuzzy memory. I have this wonderful interactive compendium I can turn to.”

Egon Cossou, “The man who turned his dead father into a chatbot,” May 15, 2024

No surprise, he started a business. Others have too, and they are much bigger concerns.

The Grieftech firm explains, “Technology is transforming the way we grieve.” It’s become part of culture in South Korea:

As Jang Jisung stood crying in front of her daughter, she desperately wanted to hug her one last time.

Her daughter, Na-Yeon, offered comfort.

“Don’t cry mummy.”

The emotions Jisung felt were overwhelming.

She reached out to touch her daughter’s face.

But her hands simply passed through.

This, after all, was not a real encounter.

James Oaten, Sookyoung Lee “In South Korea, people use AI bots to ‘chat’ with dead loved ones,” ABC News, March 21, 2025

No, it wasn’t. The child had died some time earlier of a rare blood disease.

The counselors ABC interviewed had mixed feeling about it all. It could help some, they conceded, but the red flags are evident. Meanwhile, South Korea’s DeepBrain AI “believes such technology can be an important part of developing a ‘well dying’ culture – where we prepare for our death in advance, leaving family histories, stories and memories as a form of ‘living legacy.’”

We’ve been here in fiction too

Editor Ken Francis notes that the whole thing bears a haunting resemblance to his short story, “The Ghosts of Hologram House” in Cities of the Absurd (2025):

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. “Hologram House”

Tech probably helps some people cope with grief. But…

The problem is, of course, that there is no reality check. A living friend is always there to correct and deepen our impressions of him; a deceased one is never there. He himself is not responding to the things that are happening to us today. The avatar is a pretence.

The distinction is important. Digital representations do not grow and change independently of us. as he would.

Perhaps we could change how our personal griefbot responds, to better suit what we consider our needs to be. After all, death is final; grieftech is not. Then, over time, his avatar becomes less and less a capture of anything that he actually was. It is a myth at best, an idol at worst.

Grieftech may end up interfering with what we need to learn about the true finality of death in this transient and uncertain world. We needn’t be surprised if we start hearing a lot of boosterism from the industry — and a number of cautionary tales.