At Ars Technica, senior policy reporter Ashley Belanger reports on a strange new trend — creating a chatbot of a deceased loved one in order to assuage one’s grief:

As artificial intelligence has advanced, AI tools have emerged to make it possible to easily create digital replicas of lost loved ones, which can be generated without the knowledge or consent of the person who died.

Trained on the data of the dead, these tools, sometimes called grief bots or AI ghosts, may be text-, audio-, or even video-based. Chatting provides what some mourners feel is a close approximation to ongoing interactions with the people they love most. But the tech remains controversial, perhaps complicating the grieving process while threatening to infringe upon the privacy of the deceased, whose data could still be vulnerable to manipulation or identity theft.

Because of suspected harms and perhaps a general repulsion to the idea of it, not everybody wants to become an AI ghost.

“How to draft a will to avoid becoming an AI ghost — it’s not easy,” June 13, 2025

Legally, she warns, preventing this from happening to one’s own reputation is not straightforward: “… for now, writing “no AI resurrections” into a will remains a complicated process, experts suggest, and such requests may not be honored by all unless laws are changed to reinforce a culture of respecting the wishes of people who feel uncomfortable with the idea of haunting their favorite people through AI simulations.”

Won’t some people also develop chatbots of departed lovers? What about reprogramming the chatbot of a deceased dad to be more like the daddy you wish you had had? The rational mind — committed to ground-level reality — boggles.

Why AI ghosts are a really bad idea

The biggest problem with an AI ghost is that it is a simulation, not the real person. It does not grow, shrink, or change, like the person who has now departed for eternity. It requires no forbearance or sympathy and can be destroyed or altered without consequence.

No, it will endlessly recycle, in an inhuman way, random or chosen impressions that person left while still alive in this world.

There are classical mythologies around simulacra like that and none of the stories end happily until or unless the spell is broken. Better not cast the spell in the first place.