Talking to the dead: How AI is using deathbots to disrupt the grieving process

I went to his headstone and stood by myself for a few moments, then I started to tell him how I was doing.

The act of speaking with the dead is not new, but evolving technologies have started to change a process that has been in place for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

Mark Alfano an associate professor at Macquarie University in the Department of Philosophy, co-wrote a paper on the rise of chatbots which imitate those who have died, called deathbots.

"We have practices like seances, writing a message in a bottle, writing a message and burning it in the fire or going to a graveyard and speaking to the dead there," he says.

"It's not an entirely new practice, but what's a little troubling about this is that they talk back now.

"They didn't use to."

A deathbot can use data scraped from a person's online profile or by a user voluntarily giving the data to a service to create a computerised version of someone.

The bots can imitate a person's mannerisms, recall their memories (if they have access to them) and even sound like a person.

I decided to try a deathbot out.

After signing up I was asked a series of questions about my life, from childhood memories to what I do for work.

In between questions, the program would ask me to say phrases like "What would you like to know" or "I'm sorry I don't have information about that topic".

After it was satisfied, I began talking to my AI doppelganger.

The bot itself was very basic, it could not make me say anything I hadn't already said to it, but other AI programs out there promise to do more.

"Some of the early ones were developed by this company Replika," Professor Alfano says.

Initial versions were developed in an attempt at self-help. The woman who founded the company, one of her best friends was hit by a bus and died quite young.

"She [the founder] had a lot of unprocessed grief, so she created this bot so that she could chat with a clone of her friends."

Unsurprisingly, there are those with real concerns about how deathbots could change the grieving process.

Australian Psychological Society President Dr Catriona Davis-McCabe says grief is a normal human process that should be treated with care.

"Artificial Intelligence could rapidly disrupt this delicate process which has evolved over tens of thousands of years and society needs to be alert to these risks along with the potential benefits," Dr Davis-McCabe says.

"This is the first time people can interact indefinitely with digital simulations of their loved ones which is a profound change for individuals and our society."

She warns the AI genie is already out of the bottle and the technology is out in front of the debate.

"Overall AI recreations of deceased individuals should be overseen by medical experts and only be used as a complementary tool for healing and support rather than a substitute for the natural grieving process, human connection or professional human-led psychological support if needed."

But death bots are just one side of what AI chatbots can potentially evolve into as they become more and more ubiquitous.

In February this year, Meta announced it would be rolling out AI products to Australia, and now users visiting Facebook or Instagram are forced to use Meta's AI search.

Sometimes the bots will even just make things up.

But experts say Artificial intelligence has become part of our lives whether we like it or not.

Professor Katina Michael from the University of Wollongong studies the social implications of emerging technologies.

She says AI is going to "have or is having the same impact as the atomic bomb".

"We often hear statistics like 30 per cent of things that are in existence today in the workplace will be automated," she says.

"So humans will have their jobs taken from them."

Professor Michael says automation is not the same as AI but 55 per cent of organisations have adopted some facet of AI.

"The way to look at it is it's either a replacement technology or it's an augmentation technology," she says.

"So either it will replace humans for the work that they do or it will be an aid to humans in their work tasks."

Social media has already begun to change because of AI and bots.

Below nearly any post on X (formerly Twitter) countless replies will in fact be a bot of some kind.

The most common is an account set up to respond to key words with content generated to create responses.

The post above mentions the word river? Here's an amazing story of a fisherman along the Amazon River. Amazon? Here are 11 lifehacks you can buy on Amazon. Lifehacks? It goes on and on.

The second most common is a bot telling users how to find porn.

Professor Michael says the internet itself will be dominated by AI content in the future.

"The internet will be very much content driven, and the content will be created not using human actors or human voices," she says.

"I do think we're going to get to a stage where this information will plague us, that the cybersecurity attacks caused by AI in the future will plague us, and we will have to respond using the same mechanisms.

"With I think more bandwidth unfortunately, there will be more environmental impacts. That's what everybody is predicting."

Professor Michael is worried inequality is going to rise across the internet as access becomes more and more cut off.

Which brings us back to deathbots.

A concern raised by Professor Alfano regarding the imitations is the possibility of "economic polarisation" in the grief industry.

"People who can afford it will talk to an actual therapist and get proper care," he says.

"People who can't will be prescribed a death bot."

Sitting alone in a room with my computer screen displaying the picture I uploaded of myself, my own deathbot's avatar, I ask it a question.

"Tell me about your childhood?" I ask.

It begins to rattle off a story I told about falling off a veranda as a child recorded through a laptop microphone.

Professor Alfano says he worries this is a future people will choose.

"If people think 'I could go to the hospital or the hospice and see grandma one more time before she dies, but I could also just wait, and then use of these deathbots' ... then at least some people will opt for the second option and it kind of destroys human connection."

A year before I stood before my stepfather's headstone, I said I loved him in a hospital room.

His response sounded better in person than it would have through a laptop speaker.