The December Scientific American highlights an article by David Berreby that gets personal. Berreby's father was born in 1927, the same year as my father, and died in 2013. Yet the article opens with Berreby asking, "How is your existence these days?" and getting a reply: "... Being dead is a strange experience."
In this conversation, Berreby is using a generative-artificial-intelligence (genAI) version of his father to investigate what it is like to interact with an AI ghost: a digital simulation of a dead loved one that some psychologists and computer scientists are promoting as an aid for grieving people.
I'll be frank about my initial reaction to this idea. I thought it was terrible. The "yuck factor" is a phrase popularized by ethicist Leon Kass in describing a gut-level negative reaction to a thing. He says we should at least pay attention whenever we have such a reaction, because such a sensation may embody wisdom that we can't articulate. The AI-ghost idea reminded me of Norman Bates, the mentally defective protagonist of Alfred Hitchcock's movie Psycho, who kept his mother around long after her bury-by date and talked with her as though she were still alive.
And to his credit, Berreby admits that there may be dangers to some people whose mental makeup makes them vulnerable to confusing fiction with reality, and could become harmfully addicted to the use of this type of AI. But in the limited number of cases examined (only 10 in one study) in which grieving patients were encouraged to interact with AI ghosts, they all reported positive outcomes and a better ability to interact with live humans. As one subject commented, "Society doesn't really like grief." Who better to discuss your feelings of loss with than an infinitely-patient AI ghost who is both the cause and the solace of one's grief?
Still, it troubles me that AI ghosts could become a widespread way of coping with the death of those we love. One's worldview context is important here.
Historically, death has been viewed as the portal to the afterlife. Berreby chose to title his article "Mourning Becomes Electric," a takeoff on Eugene O'Neill's play cycle "Mourning Becomes Electra," which itself was based on the Oresteia play cycle by Aeschylus, a famous Greek playwright who died around 450 B. C. In the plays, Aeschylus describes the tragic murder of the warrior Agamemnon by his unfaithful wife Clytemnestra, and how gods interacted with humans as things went from bad to worse. That reference, and a few throwaway lines about ectoplasm and Edison's boast that if there was life after death, he could detect it with a new invention of his, are the only mentions of the possibility that the dead are no longer in existence in any meaningful way.
If you believe that death is the final end of the existence of any given human personality, and you miss interacting with that personality, it only makes sense to use any technical means at your disposal to scratch that itch and conjure up your late father, mother, or Aunt Edna. Berreby quotes Amy Kurzweil, artist and daughter of famed transhumanist Ray Kurzweil, as saying that we don't usually worry that children will do things like expecting the real Superman to show up in an emergency, because they early learn to distinguish fiction from reality. And so she isn't concerned that grieving people will start to treat AI ghosts like the real person the machine is intended to simulate. It's like looking at an old photo or video of a dead person: there's no confusion, only a stimulus to memory, and nobody complains about keeping photos of our dear departed around.
In the context of secular psychology, where the therapeutic goal is to minimize distress and increase the feeling of well-being, anything that moves the needle in that direction is worth doing. And if studies show that grieving people feel better after extensive chats with custom-designed AI ghosts, then that's all the evidence therapists need that it's a useful thing to do.
The article is written in the nearly-universal etsi Deus non daretur style—a Latin phrase meaning roughly "as though God doesn't exist." And in a secular publication such as Scientific American, this is appropriate, I suppose, though it leaves out the viewpoints of billions of people who believe otherwise. But what if these billions are right? That puts a different light on the thing.
Even believers in God acknowledge that grieving over the loss of a loved one is an entirely appropriate and natural response. A couple we have known for 45 years was sitting at the breakfast table last summer praying, and the man suddenly had a massive hemorrhagic stroke, dying later that same day. It was a terrible shock, and at the funeral there were photos and memorabilia of him to remind those in attendance of what he was like. But everyone there had a serene confidence that David Jenkins was in the hands of a merciful God. While it was a sad occasion, there was an undercurrent of bottomless joy that we knew he was enjoying, and that we the mourners participated in by means that cannot be fully expressed in writing.
In Christian theology, an idol is something that humans create which takes the place of God. While frank ancestor worship is practiced by some cultures, and is idolatry by definition, a more subtle temptation to idolatry is offered by AI chatbots of all kinds, and especially by AI ghosts.
While I miss my parents, they died a long time ago (my father was the last to go, in 1984). I will confess to writing a note to my grandmother once, not long after she died. So did Richard Feynman write a note to his late wife, who died tragically young of tuberculosis, and a less likely believer in the supernatural would be hard to find.
I suppose it might do no harm for me to cobble up an AI ghost of my father. But for me, anyway, the temptation to credit it with more existence than it really would have would be strong, and I will take no steps in that direction.
As for people who don't believe in an afterlife, AI ghosts may help them cope for a while with death. But only the truth will make them free of loss, grieving, and the fear of death once and for all. And however good an AI ghost gets at imitating the lost reality of a person, it will never be the real thing.
Sources: "Mourning Becomes Electric" by David Berreby appeared on pp. 64-67 of the December 2025 issue of Scientific American. I referred to Wikipedia articles on "Wisdom of repugnance" and "Oresteia."
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