Earlier this month, we noted an item at Ars Technica about AI ghosts — chatbot “reconstructions” of deceased loved ones.

At Neuroscience News, we encounter a curious piece that asks some hard questions about the idea:

A new paper explores how generative AI is transforming the way we interact with the dead, from virtual reality reunions to lifelike digital avatars. These “generative ghosts” can remember, plan, and even evolve, offering real-time conversations that go far beyond pre-recorded memorials.

While the technology holds promise for comfort, creativity, and historical preservation, it also raises ethical questions about grief, consent, and digital identity after death. Researchers are urging society to begin serious discussions about how to responsibly shape this emerging frontier.

“Death Isn’t the End: AI Brings Lost Voices Back to Life,” June 27, 2025

The paper is open access. Here’s part of the Abstract:

In this paper, we reflect on the history of technologies for AI afterlives, including current early attempts by individual enthusiasts and startup companies to create generative ghosts. We then introduce a novel design space detailing potential implementations of generative ghosts. We use this analytic framework to ground a discussion of the practical and ethical implications of various approaches to designing generative ghosts, including potential positive and negative impacts on individuals and society. Based on these considerations, we lay out a research agenda for the AI and HCI research communities to better understand the risk/benefit landscape of this novel technology to ultimately empower people who wish to create and interact with AI afterlives to do so in a beneficial manner.

Meredith Ringel Morris and Jed R. Brubaker. 2025. Generative Ghosts: Anticipating Benefits and Risks of AI Afterlives. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 536, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713758

The problem is implicit in the description:

Powered by large language models that can generate and understand human language, and other features that enable them to remember, plan and exhibit other complex human behaviors, they can do far more than regurgitate old stories fed to them by the once-living.

For instance, they could have a conversation with their kids about current events which occurred after their death, write a new song or poem (that their family could potentially earn royalties from), or even help their kids manage their estate.

Right now, most ‘generative ghosts’ are rudimentary, and text based. But ultimately, we could get very close to that candid chat with grandpa by the fire, Brubaker says. “Lost Voices Back to Life,”

Except, it’s not Grandpa. In reality, Grandpa is dead and we don’t know what he would have said if he had lived, grown, and changed along with the rest of us. Death is not the end but it is real.

Worse, the AI can easily be manipulated for control, along the familiar lines of “Your dear dead grandfather’s dying wish for you was that you [do something that doesn’t feel right]” … Except now, we will have a simulacrum of Grandpa — projecting the manipulator’s wishes.

You may also wish to read: Will you become a chatbot for grieving relatives? Maybe…