Deadbot
A deadbot, deathbot, or griefbot is a digital avatar, created with artificial intelligence, which resembles a person who is dead.[1] [2] [3] Griefbots employ natural language processing and machine-learning techniques to approximate the style and personality of a deceased person. They may appear as chatbots, voice assistants, or animated avatars, and are often trained on an individual's digital remains.
History
[edit]Among the earliest researchers, Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad of the University of Washington, developed the Grandpa Bot project, a conversational simulation of his late father designed for his children to interact with.[4]
Other efforts include journalist James Vlahos's Dadbot, which evolved into the commercial platform HereAfter AI. Hossein Rahnama's Augmented Eternity research at MIT Media Lab and Toronto Metropolitan University, and game designer Jason Rohrer's "Project December", have enabled users to converse with language-model representations of loved ones. Early commercial projects such as Eternime, founded by Marius Ursache, also popularized the notion of interactive digital immortality.
Cultural and societal impact
[edit]Several scholars have approached the phenomenon from different perspectives. Jiménez-Alonso and Brescó de Luna (2022) examined griefbots from the standpoint of the cultural psychology of grief and the theory of technological mediation, exploring their role in the reconstruction of the relationship with the deceased and the psychological and ethical implications of these technologies. Subsequently, Hollanek and Nowaczyk-Basińska (2024) developed an ethical design taxonomy centred on the different actors involved (data donors, data recipients, and interactants). Edina Harbinja and Lilian Edwards formalized the concept of post-mortem privacy, and Carl J. Öhman at the Oxford Internet Institute studied the management of large-scale digital remains.
Cultural acceptance varies: while some view them as expressions of remembrance, others regard them as unsettling or ethically problematic. Concerns have been raised about deadbots' potential for creating psychological harm.[5] Griefbots are considered part of the phenomenon of artificial intimacy.
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- ↑ Chloe Veltman (August 26, 2025). "AI 'deadbots' are persuasive — and researchers say they're primed for monetization". NPR.
- ↑ Jiménez-Alonso, Belén; Brescó de Luna, Ignacio (June 2023). "Griefbots. A New Way of Communicating With The Dead?". Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science. 57 (2): 466–481. doi:10.1007/s12124-022-09679-3. ISSN 1932-4502.
- ↑ Hollanek, Tomasz; Nowaczyk-Basińska, Katarzyna (2024-05-09). "Griefbots, Deadbots, Postmortem Avatars: on Responsible Applications of Generative AI in the Digital Afterlife Industry". Philosophy & Technology. 37 (2): 63. doi:10.1007/s13347-024-00744-w. ISSN 2210-5441.
- ↑ Ahmad, M. A. (2016). After Death: Big Data and the Promise of Resurrection by Proxy. CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. doi:10.1145/2851581.2892591.
- ↑ Hern, Alex (2024-05-09). "Digital recreations of dead people need urgent regulation, AI ethicists say". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2025-09-16.
External links
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