A matter of life and deathbots How 'digital resurrection' is altering the grief process

A matter of life and deathbots

- Harriet Sherwood

Rod Stewart welcomed some surprise guests at a recent concert in North Carolina. His old friend Ozzy Osbourne - the singer with Black Sabbath who died last month - was seemingly beamed in from rock 'n' roll heaven, where he was reunited with other departed stars including Michael Jackson, Tina Turner and Bob Marley.

The AI images divided Stewart's fans. Some denounced the stunt as disrespectful and distasteful, while others found the tribute beautiful.

At about the same time, another AI controversy erupted when Jim Acosta, a former CNN White House correspondent, "interviewed" a digital re-creation of Joaquin Oliver, who was killed in 2018, at the age of 17, in a high school shooting in Florida. The avatar of the teenager was commissioned by his parents, who said it was a blessing to hear his voice again.

In June, Alexis Ohanian, one of the founders of Reddit, used X to share an animation of his late mother hugging him when he was a child, created from a photograph.

"Damn, I wasn't ready for how this would feel. We didn't have a camcorder, so there's no video of me with my mom... This is how she hugged me. I've rewatched it 50 times," he wrote.

These are just three examples of the growing phenomenon of "digital resurrection" - creating images and bots of people who have died using old photographs, videos, voice messages and other material. Companies offering to create "griefbots" or "deathbots" abound, and questions about exploitation, privacy and their impact on the grieving process are multiplying.

"It's vastly more technologically possible now because of large language models such as ChatGPT being easily available to the general public and very straightforward to use," said Elaine Kasket, a London-based cyberpsychologist.