‘Fredbot’ is one example of a technology known as chatbots of the dead , chatbots designed to speak in the voice of specific deceased people. Other examples are plentiful: in 2016, Eugenia Kuyda built a chatbot from the text messages of her friend Roman Mazurenko, who was killed in a traffic accident. The first Roman Bot, like Fredbot, was selectiv... See more

But in the industrialised West, communities of support are collapsing. Our spiritual institutions, practices and beliefs have been denuded by centuries of disenchantment. This may suggest that technological modernity, with its commitment to scientific rationalism, is to blame for the Western world’s often-impoverished relationship to death.

Another worry relates to chatbots’ lack of inner lives. Critics, like the philosopher Shannon Vallor in The AI Mirror (2024), argue that there is something defective about emotional bonds with entities that cannot reciprocate affection or interest, about love that is kept alive by ‘the economic rationality of exchange’ rather than a more precarious... See more

Because chatbots are not people but props that help us generate imaginary conversations, the user’s interlocutor – a character based on the deceased – does not exist independently of the conversation. Chatbot users create their imaginary interlocutors through their interactions with their prop chatbots. In this way, chatbots bestow a special form o... See more

Many critics view this technological endeavour as an especially abject form of death denial. A common objection to these bots is that emotionally vulnerable users may become so invested in their interactions that they will conflate their chatbot with the deceased person, or lose sight of the fact that the person is gone. As the philosopher Patrick ... See more

Like human mediums and Ouija boards, these bots appear to meet one of our deepest desires: to speak with the dead once again.

To some, chatbots of the dead are useful tools that can help us grieve, remember, and reflect on those we’ve lost. To others, they are dehumanising technologies that conjure a dystopian world. They raise ethical questions about consent, ownership, memory and historical accuracy: who should be allowed to create, control or profit from these represen... See more

The assumption that a chatbot delivers – or seeks to deliver – an authoritative replication of a deceased person makes as much sense as the assumption that an actor’s portrayal of a historical figure in a drama represents the sole faithful depiction of that figure.

A chatbot based on someone’s data is like an improv actor who has studied a backstory or character sketch in order to performatively represent a character based on that person, like a Civil War soldier at a historical reenactment, an Elvis impersonator, or King Pentheus in Dionysus in 69 (1969), the participatory rendition of Euripides’ play The Ba... See more