May 15, 2026 (Friday) – Lea Frey
Startups are charging families monthly fees to keep AI clones of their loved ones running. Nobody knows what that does to the people paying.
When the lights dimmed at Jaideep Sharma's wedding reception in the north Indian city of Ajmer, guests expected a slideshow. Instead, they saw Sharma's father, dead for more than a year, smiling on a screen and blessing the newlyweds. The video was made by a creator Sharma found on Instagram, assembled from photographs over about a week. It cost roughly $600. "It was like a bombardment of emotions for everyone," Sharma, a 33-year-old garment trader, told Rest of World.
His story is increasingly common. A fast-growing industry known as "Grief Tech" is selling families on the idea that the dead don't have to go quiet. Startups are training large language models on a deceased person's texts, emails, voice notes, and social media posts to generate conversational chatbots, called "griefbots," "deadbots," or "generative ghosts", that respond as if the person were still alive.
How It Works
The services differ in scale but share the same basic approach. Companies, including HereAfter AI, StoryFile, Eternos, and You, Only Virtual feed a deceased person's digital history into an AI model. The model learns to predict responses in that person's voice and manner. Results range from a text chatbot to a three-dimensional avatar that holds a video conversation.
In China, the market has moved faster than anywhere else. Zhang Zeiwei, founder of AI firm Super Brain, told the South China Morning Post that since mid-2023, his company has helped thousands of people digitally revive deceased relatives using as little as 30 seconds of footage. Chinese AI company SenseTime went further; it created an avatar of its late founder, Tang Xiao'ou, who died in December 2023, to address the company's annual general meeting three months later.
You Only Virtual builds what it calls "versonas" trained on texts, voice recordings, and digital traces. Its founder, James Harrison, built one of his mother's homes after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The company offers a free text-based tier and paid tiers that unlock voice calls, converting an ongoing bond with the dead into a monthly subscription.
Weddings, Funerals, and Kept Secrets
The technology has pushed into public life. In India, families are paying for AI-generated videos in which deceased relatives appear to bless brides or speak at funerals. One creator, Akhil Vinayak, made a video of a dead woman stepping down from heaven to hold a grandchild she had never met. It got more than a million likes on Instagram.
In some cases, families have used digital clones to conceal a death from elderly relatives, substituting an AI version for continued communication, with the real person already gone.
The practice has no clear legal footing in any country. Some people are now adding clauses to their wills explicitly banning AI resurrection of their likeness after death.
What Happens When You Stop Paying
The economic model behind grief tech has drawn scrutiny from researchers.
A University of Cambridge study warned that the digital afterlife industry could charge subscription fees to keep deadbots running, insert advertisements, or have avatars push sponsored products. In one scenario outlined by researchers, a company might refuse to deactivate a deadbot, sending surviving family members a stream of messages from a simulation of someone they've lost.
Project December charges $10 per 500 text exchanges with a chatbot built on a deceased person's speech patterns. You, Only Virtual gates voice calls behind a paid tier. The financial relationship is built on loss.
And if a company goes under, the situation gets worse. 966 U.S. startups shut down in 2024, a 25.6% jump from the year before. Standard AI vendor contracts let customers request data deletion on termination, but if the company has already collapsed, there may be nobody left to receive the request. A family's voice recordings, personal messages, and private history could end up as an asset in a bankruptcy estate.
On most platforms, a deceased person's account falls under corporate control regardless of what a family wants. Facebook freezes accounts under a "Memorialized Account" status with limited access. Families using third-party grief tech platforms have little recourse if those platforms disappear.
What Psychologists Say
Alan Wolfelt, a clinical psychologist and director of the Center for Loss & Life Transition in Fort Collins, Colorado, told Medscape that acknowledging the reality of a death is a foundational part of grief. Griefbot technology, he said, is "another invitation, instead of outwardly mourning and acknowledging the reality of the death, to stay stuck."
Psychology Today put it more directly: the bots may lock users in denial, blocking the natural stages of mourning. The simulations currently achieve about 70% accuracy, which means the AI may produce phrases the deceased never used, hallucinate facts about their life, or fall back on the generic language of the underlying model.
A May 2025 study in Frontiers in Human Dynamics found that while digital grief tools can stabilize someone in the early period of loss, that same continuity "becomes a liability when it begins to substitute rather than support the natural mourning process." Researchers said practitioners should watch for dependency and emotional stagnation.
Scottish Care noted that griefbot systems are built to maximize engagement, which is not the same thing as promoting recovery. The commercial interest of the platform and the psychological interest of the user may point in opposite directions.
There are researchers who disagree with the most pessimistic assessments. A 2026 paper in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences argued that griefbots, seen alongside centuries of grief ritual and memorial practice, can complement rather than displace healthy mourning. A University of Kent study found that most participants reported the simulations as beneficial. One woman who used a version of her father two months after his death called it a useful outlet, but said talking to real people worked better.
Mary-Frances O'Connor, professor of clinical psychology and psychiatry and author of The Grieving Brain, told Dazed that grief runs on some of the brain's most powerful neurochemicals, making bereaved people especially susceptible to technology engineered to keep them coming back.
No Rules
No country has enacted comprehensive regulations covering the grief tech industry. Consent after death, data ownership, and psychological duty of care are all unresolved. Dr. Elaine Kasket, a psychologist and author of All the Ghosts in the Machine, has argued that tech companies have become the custodians of people's most intimate memories, with their own assumptions about what mourners need built into products designed, like everything else, to hold attention.
Whether holding that attention is the same as helping is something the industry cannot currently answer. Researchers say the evidence to settle the question doesn't exist yet.
