AI and the Monetization of Grief

Death in the era of the digital afterlife industry

Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash

Someone I know, let’s call her Jenny, recently updated their socials to show a picture of them with their dad. In the picture, Jenny’s father is holding her in his arms. If you knew Jenny, you might think the photo is recent. There’s some kind of filter adding an unnatural sheen to Jenny’s face, but she looks the age she does now. However, her dad does not look his age. That’s because her dad passed away a long time ago.

In case you haven’t guessed yet, Jenny’s new profile picture is AI-generated.

Now, it’s not my business what images Jenny chooses to “make” and upload to social media. However, I can’t lie, seeing this picture disturbed me. It made me sad for Jenny. But mostly, it filled me with a kind of existential dread I’ve been feeling too often lately.

But Jenny’s story is nothing new. Whether it’s AI tools that let you “speak to,” “see” or even “video call” the deceased, or subscription services that send you emails from the grave, an entire industry built upon imitating the dead has sprung up in recent years following the rise of AI.

That industry is the digital afterlife industry.

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

Two years ago I lost my Granddad. In dealing with my grief, I did what I always do when something is on my mind: I wrote about it.

At the time, I noted that the social media account my Granddad left behind felt akin to a strange memoriam to him. And it dawned on me that the web is increasingly filling up with the remnants of the deceased, to the point that “one day, the web pages and online content of the dead will greatly outnumber the creations of the living.”

Inevitably, I figured, this would change the way we grieve. It already had. But what I didn’t realise even just two years ago, was how bizarre, uncanny and commonplace the digital afterlife — or grieftech — industry would become.

Grieftech is still niche and growing, but it’s not exactly hard to find. Google something like “add a deceased person to a picture” or “talk to the deceased,” and your results will showcase a plethora of AI services, tutorials and sponsored links. And the companies cashing in on this emerging tech are both numerous and often well-funded.

Take ‘You, Only Virtual’ — a California-based startup that builds AI “versonas” of your deceased loved ones using texts, voice recordings and their digital footprint, enabling what the company’s homepage calls “authentic, AI-powered communication with those we’ve lost,” opening “new possibilities in how humanity preserves identity.”

How about HereAfter, which offers the “gift of being remembered,” by interviewing you about your memories so loved ones in the future can use an app to “hear your memories in your actual voice.” Then there’s Seance AI where “love endures beyond the veil” and whose premium tier (at an undisclosed price) offers “voice re-creation” and “animated images.”

These services, as odd as they may seem, have plenty of advocates. Some, such as Justin Harrison who lost his mother to cancer, says they’ve helped tremendously, telling Newsweek in an interview that “the alleviation of suffering comes from the comfort of knowing the bond me and my mum had — the ability to connect with her — isn’t completely severed. The hopelessness isn’t there. And that’s, in a nutshell, so much better than nothing.”

However, the potential for exploitation from grieftech and “griefbots” has some experts ringing the alarm bells. After all, for starters, it’s not like these companies are only providing these services from the goodness of their hearts.

While many of these companies offer free-tier services, those looking for more comprehensive packages, including say, voice calls or video calls with the deceased, often require signing up to various paid tiers, turning the illusion of an ongoing relationship with a loved one into a subscription service. The effect, critics argue, not only commercialises grief, but creates a profit-driven motive for companies to extend the grieving period — perhaps even indefinitely.

The result, Dr Sarika Boora, the director and head psychologist of Psyche and Beyond in Delhi, cautions in an interview with The Nod Mag, is that it can “delay the process of grieving” by trapping people in the denial stage. The perceived presence of the deceased ensures that “absence is never really processed.” “You get stuck,” she says. “You don’t let go.”

Meanwhile, a study published in the journal Philosophy and Technology warns that griefbots could ‘haunt’ the living with unwanted messages. It also highlights the risk that these bots might ‘surreptitiously influence the end user’s consumption behaviour’ by using the likeness of deceased relatives to push advertisements.”

Then there’s the question of who really owns the data of the deceased when it’s passed on to these grieftech companies. Can we really trust tech bros with your grandmother’s digital remnants? What happens when a startup refuses to delete a griefbot? Or, perhaps even worse, unceremoniously deletes one without warning?

But there is another, perhaps more terrifying, issue with the grieftech industry: what it could do to our memories.

Photo by Tymofii Tarasov on Unsplash

Let’s imagine for a moment a grieftech industry that is built upon ethical grounds. Could it become a healthy part of our grieving process?

It’s not like holding on to some part of the people we have lost is anything new. Over the centuries we’ve used altars, lockets, pictures, rituals, keepsakes, and gravestones alike to hold on to our memories of the deceased. Only in the last century, technological advancements have allowed family videos, voicemail and webpages to become part of that process with little controversy.

But AI is different than all these things. It doesn’t just fill that feeling of absence or provide the illusion that the absence is not there. Instead, it interacts and adapts. In other words, it doesn’t so much preserve the memories of the deceased, but creates new memories and potentially distorts the old ones.

Our memories — particularly episodic memories — are fragile things. Research shows that we don’t so much recall our memories as reconstruct or “re-encode” them, with newer experiences, emotions and interactions altering these reconstructions every time they occur. Or, as Professor Louis Renoult, from UEA’s School of Psychology puts it,

“[a memory] can include extra details from our general knowledge, past experiences, or even the situation we’re in when we remember it. […] the brain updates or reshapes the memory over time. This creates a chain of connections from the original experience to the version of the memory we can access now.”

So, what happens to our experiences with loved ones when they were living are merged with simulations over a long period?

Well, a 2025 study that examined the impact of AI images and videos on memories, found some damning evidence on the matter, concluding that “exposure to AI-altered images substantially increases the likelihood of false memory formation.”

Just how far AI could go in distorting the memory of a loved one is hard to quantify. But imagine for a moment if you were to talk every day to a bot that has your mother’s voice, mannerisms, and likeness. How long would it be before your original memories of your real parent were potentially tainted by the replica? Weeks? Months? A year? Since some people have already spent years talking to AI Doppelgängers, an uncomfortable possibility emerges.

Here’s the thing with griefbots: it doesn’t matter how many photos you upload, the personality traits you input, or the memories you recall, no amount of data can remake a person as they were. It can perform a good imitation, perhaps enough that a person in distress wouldn’t know the difference. But a bot is never a sufficient replacement for a human being — let alone a person you loved.

Photo by Ann on Unsplash

Of course, we would do well not to judge the way anyone grieves. Losing a loved one is often the hardest thing anyone goes through. The promise of any kind of relief from that is understandably a near irresistible proposition. Point being, I don’t look down on anyone for using a griefbot.

Nonetheless, I find myself unable to sit on the proverbial fence here. The potential for grieftech to emotionally hijack, terrorize, manipulate, and psychologically harm users should, in my view, be perceived as a likelihood until fundamentally proven otherwise.

Of course, I know such a viewpoint is unlikely to make a difference.

The digital afterlife industry is no fad, and it’s not a passing trend. It’s here to stay, and it’s growing. From here on out, things are only going to get stranger.

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