Transcript: Episode 14 - When AI Brings Back the Dead, And Who Really Benefits

A man. A tablet. A glowing simulation of someone he loved. And a mug that says "Love never ends." This episode asks who really benefits when grief becomes a product.

Hey, welcome back to today's show. This one is going to be a tough one for us today. I've been sitting with this one for a while and that's not something I usually say.

Most of what I talk about on the show, I usually feel clear on, you know, scams make me angry. Privacy violations make me frustrated. Bad tech policy makes me want to write to my MP.

And the emotion is usually straightforward, but this one is different because this one is about grief and loss. And the deeply human need to hold on to 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 alarm. And again, like I said, this episode also might even be difficult for some of you listening, but bear with me. Here's what's actually happening.

There's 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 Here After AI take the texts, the 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 when they were alive.

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 this resurrection as a service. And a 2026 Hebrew University study, which examined more than 50 real world cases, introduced a phrase that I have not been able to stop thinking about. It's called spectral labor.

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. Now I want you to sit with that for a second.

The part that gets me, I want to tell you about someone I spoke with not long ago. There's a man in our community. He's in his early 70s.

He lost his wife of 44 years about 18 months ago. He'd heard about one of these services from his adult daughter. And he asked me what I thought of it.

He wasn't considering it lightly. He was very specific about why he was thinking about it at all. I just want to ask her one more thing, he said.

And there are things I never got to say. And I honestly did not have a clean answer for him. And even as I'm making this podcast with you today, 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'm not going to stand here and tell someone in that kind of pain that what they're feeling is wrong. But here's the question no one, no one, nobody is asking loudly enough.

Who consented to this? Not the grieving family, the person who died. No, no, your text, your emails, your voice recordings, your photos, your patterns of speech, your sense of humor, your vocabulary, and your opinions. All of that was given to the people you love in the context of a living relationship.

It was not deposited into an archive for a company to commercialize after you were gone. Now, Marcus Aurelius wrote, confine yourself to the present. And 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. Now the Hebrew University researchers were not speaking casually when they used the term spectral labor. 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. And that troubles me deeply. Not because I'm certain it's always wrong, but because I'm certain that the companies offering the 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. There's something else worth naming in all of this.

Grief, as painful as it is, is also a process, not a linear one, and it's not a tidy one by any means. But over time, if we're able to move through it rather than around it, most people find a way to carry their loss while also reengaging with life. The grief doesn't disappear, and I can attest to that, but it does change.

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? You know, psychologists studying this question have already begun raising 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 people who are already isolated, already struggling, already inclined to withdraw from the living world, that distinction matters enormously.

Now, a question worth thinking about, but before you need to, 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? Would you want the people who love you 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, and 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 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. And one more thing.

I want to be direct about this. The companies offering these services are not grief counselors. 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.

Now, 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 commercial exploitation of exactly that refusal.

I say that not to judge the people who use these services. Please don't get that confused. Don't confuse that, please.

I say to be clear about what is being sold to them and who benefits from the transaction. And where I land for now, I don't have a clean conclusion. 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 many ways that work for them. I also believe that the deceased have a dignity that persists beyond their death.

That the commercialization of someone's voice, their personality, their memories, without their prior consent, it 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 even replacing. Or suspending indefinitely with a subscription service.

That's where I am. I'm not certain. I'm just paying attention.

I want to hear where you land on this. I really do. Would you use a service like this to talk to someone you've lost? Would you want one to exist for the people who love you after you've gone? There's no wrong answer here.

This is genuinely one of the most complex questions technology has ever 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. And the links to everything we talked about today are in the show notes and in the full post at tech4grownups.com. This is Tech 4 Grown-Ups. Subscribe wherever you're listening from and I'll talk to you in the next one.

Have a great day.