AI once promised to assist in healthcare advancements and streamline arduous admin tasks, yet its most notable offerings thus far seem to be deepfake porn, job losses and brainrot Instagram reels. Now, our tech overlords are happy to sacrifice further gallons of fresh water so you can comment “slay” on your friend’s selfie from beyond the grave. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given their vampirish penchant for sucking away at our reality, more and more of the tech world have begun dipping their toes into the so-called “digital afterlife” industry, promising us that our souls – albeit meagre, digitised renderings of them – can live on eternally. Last year, the AI app 2wai launched, with the USP that it could create avatars of our loved ones that will live on after them. In a viral ad, a grandson is able to speak to his dead grandmother at each stage of his life – from his first words to the day he has a child of his own. Arguably more significantly, a few weeks ago, news broke that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has secured an AI patent that would simulate a person’s social media activity after they die, allowing them to post, like and comment on the platform eternally.

These emerging ‘grief bots’ can be split into two categories: archival and generative. The former allows the user to essentially organise details from somebody’s life, uploading audio, video, photos and more, to be browsed at a later date. The Meta patent and 2wai fall into the generative category, eerily promising new memories with someone who is no longer breathing. “Instead of just serving authentic content, it fabricates responses that feel like the person but are not grounded in their actual thoughts, values, or intentions,” explains Dr Jenny Kidd and Dr Eva Nieto McAvoy, who are exploring the digital afterlife industry through the project Synthetic Pasts.

Mired in ethical issues, both systems “commodify grief and memory within a platform economy, turning emotional experiences into data,” they say. “Generative bots are significantly more ethically fraught, however, because they create the illusion of continuity and agency where none exists, misleading users and monetising emotional attachment to something that was never truly there.”

Though seemingly a symptom of our dystopian times, commodifying grief is nothing new. Mediums have long accepted cash in exchange for cryptic messages from our dearly departed, and even Catholic priests once charged mourners to say the right prayers that would guarantee a deceased family member entry to heaven. “Throughout history, we’ve known that those continuing bonds with our deceased loved ones are a very powerful motivator for people,” says Mary-Frances O’Connor, professor of clinical psychology and psychiatry and author of The Grieving Body and The Grieving Brain. “Neurochemically, [grief] uses the strongest chemicals we can create in the body – dopamine and oxygen.”

What’s different in 2026, though, is that tech companies like Meta will be able to utilise the incomparably traumatising experience of grief to gather data that can be used for their own financial gain. For example, a very common experience of grievers is to have conversations with their deceased loved one in their head. “Now, suddenly, that information is owned by a company that knows our deepest desires, our biggest worries, our most tender moments, to use however they want to, to capitalise on our motivation to sway us and sway our attention and our spending,” O’Connor explains.

Some grief bots, Kidd points out, “position themselves as facilitating comfort, continuity, or even comfort,” but it doesn’t seem that they’re actually beneficial in the grief process, nor are their current forms designed with psychological care in mind. Rather, it is likely profit and data that they are primarily chasing.

They create the illusion of continuity and agency where none exists, misleading users and monetising emotional attachment to something that was never truly there

So what does that actually mean for grief? O’Connor explains that, when a loved one dies, our brains have two streams of information: “One side says they’re gone forever, the other side says they’re everlasting, and those are both true in some sense,” she explains. “We know they’re gone, but we also just feel like they’re going to walk through the door again.”

Death bots, she fears, will emphasise only one aspect of those two realities, in feeding the brain the impression that the loved one is still alive. “That could be a problem, because you have to live in a world where they’re not going to give you a hug, where they’re not going to come pick you up if your car breaks down, and they don’t have a physical form anymore. There is real concern that this could create more difficulty in learning that they're really gone.”

And besides, technology is fickle. With each innovation comes the collapse of something else. Even if you meticulously preserved your loved one as a death bot, archiving their every quirk and mannerism, tech startups are notorious for collapsing as quickly as they emerge, meaning there will, almost inevitably, eventually be another thing to grieve.

In January, comedian Meghana Indurti wrote a fictional account of a day in a “highly optimised, convenient life” for the New Yorker, where technology takes over even her smallest responsibilities – from watering her plants to responding to messages from friends and family. Though satirical, her piece doesn’t seem too far a stretch from the future Silicon Valley companies envision for us. From gleaming San Francisco offices and studio apartments, tech bros spend days and nights pondering new ways to smooth out the creases in our lives until we finally glide through a frictionless existence. Today, thanks to ChatGPT, you no longer need to use your own brain to draft grocery lists, write wedding vows or complete university assignments. Many things we never considered extreme challenges are now so effortless that to do them the ‘old-fashioned way’ seems strenuous. 

Grief, though, is not a daily task to be simplified or streamlined. Unfortunately, it is unavoidable, hard to bear and heavy to hold. The painful absence of somebody you love never truly diminishes, though the gaping hole they leave in your life does eventually become less all-consuming. The journey towards that is well trodden; it is something that humans have always faced and always will. In creating this technology, it is as if the tech companies responsible believe we can bypass the crushing reality that people simply stop existing. 

However, in a world where well-established mourning rituals are already embedded in our cultures, there may not ever be a widespread desire for these grief bots. “The fact that something is technically possible does not make it socially necessary or ethically defensible,” Kidd says. “The more urgent question is not whether we can build this, but who decides that we should – tech giants, who stand to gain from it – and the rest of us, who bear the risk. Death and memory are not neutral design spaces. They are socially and ethically charged.”

As humans, we spend most of our lives quietly facing loss and change anyway, from the constant changing of the seasons to a breakup of our favourite band, or even the collapse of societal structures that once seemed stable. Everything ends, and so, eventually, will the tech companies that are mistaken to imagine we can run from, or avoid, the pain of grief. It’s just a matter of bracing for what damage they will do in the meantime.