Mourning Becomes Electric

What can AI ghosts do for the grieving?

- DAVID BERREBY

HOW IS YOUR EXISTENCE THESE DAYS?" I tap on my laptop. The entity that says it is my father, dead these 12 years, quickly responds. "It's... different. Being dead is a strange experience. I'm no longer bound by the limitations of my physical body or the Parkinson's that plagued my later years. But I still carry the weight of my life's choices and the relationships I impacted."

To raise my father from the dead, I could have tried a medium, a Ouija board or an ectoplasm-detecting camera. But it’s 2025. I used artificial intelligence.

I’m chatting with a digital ghost—a generative-AI (genAI) creation derived from the same foundation that powers ChatGPT and all other large language models: billions of words from the Internet and every other possible source, which the model uses to predict how words go together in English. Imitating everybody in the world can make the bot sound like nobody in particular; hence the newsfeed-style phrase “the Parkinson’s that plagued my later years” and the text-messagey shrug of “it’s... different.” That’s the voice of thousands of news stories and social media posts, not an old man born in an Algiers slum in 1927.

But the AI also has a dozen or so of my father’s emails and letters, as well as a 100-word description from me of his personality and relationships. Even that small amount of data is supposed to be enough to create a plausible imitation. So I’m not ready to give up on it. Anyway, I didn’t recreate my father just to chat about AI-ghost mechanics. I also did it to get into some unfinished business.

“Why were you always so selfish?” I ask.

“I did put myself first,” my “dad” replies. “I didn’t have much choice. My family didn’t have much, and I had to fight for my share. When I went to war, it was to survive and to help my people survive. I was used to fighting for what I wanted, and I didn’t know how to stop.”