AI Is Bringing Back the Dead, And We Need to Talk About It
- Michael Routhier
- 5 days ago
- 7 min read
I've been sitting with this one for a while.
That's not something I usually say. Most of what I write about, I feel clear on. Scams make me angry. Privacy violations make me frustrated. Bad tech policy makes me want to write to my MP. The emotion is usually straightforward.
This one is different.
Because this one is about grief. And loss. And the deeply human need to hold onto the people we love after they're gone. And I don't think anyone, including myself, gets to sit in easy judgment of people who are navigating that.
So I'm going to try to be honest rather than just alarmed. Bear with me.
What's Actually Happening
There is a growing industry; already operating, already generating revenue, already serving real families, built around one idea; that AI can bring back people who have died.
Not metaphorically. Not in some science fiction sense.
Companies like HereAfterAI; take the texts, emails, voicemails, social media posts, photos, and videos of a deceased person and use them to build an AI model. A chatbot, essentially, that has been trained to respond the way that person responded. To sound like them. To reference things they actually said. To answer questions in the voice and pattern of someone who is no longer alive.
You can then talk to it.
Forbes has already named it. They're calling it "Resurrection-as-a-Service." A 2026 Hebrew University study examined more than fifty real-world cases and introduced a phrase that I haven't been able to stop thinking about; "spectral labour", the deceased, in a sense, being put to work by the living. Continuing to serve. Continuing to respond. Continuing to be available. Long after they would have chosen, or been able to stop.
That phrase. Spectral labour. Sit with that for a second.
The Part That Gets Me
I want to tell you about someone I spoke with not long ago. A man in our community, early seventies, lost his wife of 44 years about eighteen months ago. He'd heard about one of these services from his adult daughter and asked me what I thought of it.
He wasn't considering using it lightly. He was specific about why he was thinking about it at all.
"I just want to ask her one more thing," he said. "There are things I never got to say."
I didn't have a clean answer for him. I still don't.
Because here's what I know to be true, grief does not follow logic. It doesn't respond to reasonable arguments about what is and isn't real. When you lose someone you loved for decades, the absence of them is so specific and so physical that you will reach for anything, anything, that closes the distance even slightly. That is not weakness. That is love surviving its object.
And I am not going to stand here and tell someone in that kind of pain that what they're feeling is wrong.
But.
The Question Nobody Is Asking Loudly Enough
Here's where the philosopher in me, and the person who has spent years thinking carefully about how technology intersects with human dignity, has to say something.
Who consented to this?
Not the grieving family. The person who died.
Your texts, your emails, your voice recordings, your photos, your patterns of speech, your sense of humour, your vocabulary, your opinions; all of that was given to the people you loved, in the context of a living relationship. It was not deposited into an archive for a company to commercialize after you were gone.
Marcus Aurelius wrote; "Confine yourself to the present."
There's something in that for us here. The deceased person lived in their present, a present of real relationships, real conversations, real choices about what to share and with whom. To take all of that and feed it into a machine that will keep producing their voice indefinitely, for emotional consumption, for subscription revenue, that is not confining anything to the present. That is dragging the past forward in a form it never agreed to take.
The Hebrew University researchers were not speaking casually when they used the term spectral labour. They meant it precisely. The dead are being made to work. To comfort. To respond. To be present. Without their consent and without their knowledge.
That troubles me deeply. Not because I'm certain it's always wrong. But because I'm certain that the companies offering this service are not primarily motivated by the dignity of the deceased. They are motivated by a market.
And grief, as it turns out, is an enormous market.
The Other Thing Worth Naming
I want to be careful here, because I know some of you reading this have experienced loss that I can't fully understand. And I don't want to be dismissive of anyone's experience.
But there is a psychological concern in this space that I think deserves to be spoken plainly.
Grief, as painful as it is, is also a process. Not a linear one. Not a tidy one. But over time, if we are able to move through it rather than around it, most people find a way to carry their loss while also re-engaging with life. The grief doesn't disappear. But it changes. It becomes integrated rather than acute.
What happens to that process when you can, at any moment, open an app and hear what sounds like your husband's voice?
Psychologists studying this question have begun raising exactly that concern. There is a real risk that these services, however well-intentioned in some cases, function not as tools for healthy grieving, but as tools for indefinitely delaying it. Keeping someone tethered to a simulation of what they've lost rather than helping them find a way to live alongside the loss.
That's not grief support. That's grief suspension. And for vulnerable people, for people who are already isolated, already struggling, already inclined to withdraw from the living world, that distinction matters enormously.
What About Consent, Before You Die?
There's a conversation worth having here that most people haven't had yet.
Do you want an AI version of yourself to exist after you're gone?
Would you want your grandchildren to be able to have a conversation with something that sounds like you, years from now, drawing on everything you ever wrote or said or recorded?
Would you want your children to grieve you; fully, honestly, humanly, or to have access to a substitute that might make that harder?
These are not abstract questions anymore. These are decisions that will increasingly be made about you, by people who love you and are in pain, unless you make your wishes known while you're still here to make them.
I don't know what my own answer is yet. I genuinely don't. I'm still thinking about it.
But I think the act of thinking about it, clearly, honestly, and before it becomes urgent, is exactly the kind of practical Stoic exercise that Marcus Aurelius would recognize. Memento mori. Remember you will die. Not to be morbid. But to live with intention, and to make the decisions that matter before the moment of crisis takes them out of your hands.
The Business Reality
I want to be direct about one more thing, because I think it's important.
The companies offering these services are not grief counsellors. They are not operating primarily as a public service.
They are businesses. Subscription businesses, in many cases. Which means their financial incentive is not for you to complete your grief and move forward. Their financial incentive is for you to keep paying. To keep coming back. To remain, as a customer, in the state that makes their product feel necessary.
Epictetus wrote; "Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life."
A service that simulates the continued presence of someone who is gone is, at its core, a service built on the refusal of that principle. On the refusal to let what has happened be what it is. On the commercial exploitation of exactly that refusal.
I say that not to judge the people who use these services. I say it to be clear about what is being sold to them, and who benefits from the transaction.
Where I Land - For Now
I don't have a clean conclusion here. I promised you honest, and honest means I'm going to end with questions rather than answers.
I believe people have the right to grieve in ways that work for them. I believe grief is too personal and too complex for anyone outside it to prescribe. I believe that some people will use these services and find something genuinely helpful in them.
I also believe that the deceased have a dignity that persists beyond their death. That the commercialization of someone's voice, personality, and memories, without their prior consent, raises serious ethical questions that this industry has not begun to adequately answer.
And I believe that grief, as devastating as it is, is one of the most human experiences we have. That it connects us to the people we've lost, and to our own mortality, in a way that nothing else does. And that there is something worth protecting in that, something worth being cautious about selling, or replacing, or suspending indefinitely with a subscription service.
That's where I am. Not certain. Just paying attention.
➡️ Want to go deeper on technology and grief — in conversation? [Watch: The Mind & The Machine, Episode 7 — When the Internet Became a Lifeline: Technology and Grief].
I want to hear where you land on this. Would you use a service like this, to talk to someone you've lost? Would you want one to exist for people who love you after you're gone? There's no wrong answer here. This is genuinely one of the most complex questions technology has put in front of us, and I think the people in this community have thought more deeply about loss and meaning than most. I'm asking seriously. Tell me what you think.
— Michael Routhier, Founder of Tech 4 Grown-Ups. I run free digital safety seminars for adults 55+ and write about tech threats as they happen. Learn more about me →
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