At Aeon, cartoonist and author Amy Kurzweil and philosophy prof Daniel Story report on a chatbot trend that is catching on, especially in the arts and culture crowd: Making a chatbot out of all of the saved writings, etc., of a deceased person of interest.

Kurzweil thus helped her father digitize her pianist grandfather Fredric Kurweil’s writings, producing a Fredbot:

This chatbot was selective, meaning that it responded to questions with sentences that Fred actually wrote at some point in his life. Through this chatbot, Ray was able to converse with a representation of his father, in a way that felt, Ray said: ‘like talking to him.’ And Amy, who co-wrote this essay and was born after Fred died, was able to stage a conversation with an ancestor she had never met.

“Chatbots of the dead,” February 21, 2025

As she and Story go to note, many don’t stop there:

One resource-intensive method involves creating a new chatbot by training a language model on someone’s personal writing. A technically simpler method involves instructing a pretrained chatbot, like ChatGPT, to utilise personal data that is inserted into the context window of a conversation. Both methods enable a chatbot to speak in ways that resemble a dead person by ‘selectively’ outputting statements the person actually wrote, ‘generatively’ producing novel statements that bear some resemblance to statements the person actually wrote, or some combination of both. “Chatbots of the dead”

With leeway granted for fiction, an industry is, of course, springing up:

The creative design possibilities are immense and must be explored in artistic practice. Practitioners should look to the arts and other cultural resources that help people deal with loss and memorialise history. For example, a chatbot could be designed to speak as a spiritual medium channelling the deceased from a spiritual realm in order to emphasise the separation of death and impart a sense of mysticism to the imaginative experience. Or chatbots could be designed to employ Brecht’s ‘alienation effect’, which involves acting techniques designed to inhibit immersion and promote aesthetic distance between an audience and the events on stage, making room for reflection.

“Chatbots of the dead”

Kurzweil and Story have written a longish essay, raising many concerns about inappropriate uses, along with moral reflections and guidelines that are certain to be ignored. But it is certainly an informative sign of the times.

At worst, the chatbots of the dead will turn out to be a way of making loved ones die a second time in one’s own mind: Death by a thousand manipulations and misrepresentations until memories are corrupted by far more than merely natural processes.