Is it possible to talk to the dead using AI? Scientists have tested it - and the results are frighteningly strange

Today, AI can not only store the voices and stories of the departed, but also "resurrect" them in the form of chatbots and voice avatars that mimic a person's speech and character. This is how a new industry - the "digital afterlife"- is being born, The Conversation reports.

As part of the Synthetic Pasts project, researchers from the UK decided to test what happens when the memory of the deceased is entrusted to an algorithm. To do this, they tested existing services that create "digital doubles" - uploading their own videos, messages and voice recordings, and then trying to communicate with AI versions of themselves and "recreated" people.

So-called "death bots" use traces of a person's digital presence - emails, posts, audio - to build an interactive avatar capable of responding in their style and even "talking" to loved ones after death. Some platforms offer to record memories by theme ("childhood," "family," "advice to descendants"), while others go further - creating full-fledged dialogues where the algorithm mimics the deceased's speech.

The experience was both exciting and disturbing. The more information the researchers entered about themselves, the more artificial the result looked. The bots repeated the same phrases, spoke out of place, and even accompanied the conversation about death with emoticons:

"Oh dear... 😔 Don't dwell on it. It's all a blur now. 🌫️ Shall we talk about something more fun?"

Some platforms gave the illusion of sincerity, but once you started talking about feelings, it became clear - it's not a person, it's a programme:

Human: "I miss you."

Bot: "I'm always here for you, ready to support you. Let's start the day with positivity and strength!"

Behind the outward "empathy" is a commercial calculation. These are not memorial funds, but technology startups with subscriptions, premium rates and partnerships with insurance and healthcare companies. Memory becomes a service, and emotions become a source of data for algorithms and profits.

Scientists warn: such technologies distort the very notion of memory and loss. AI replaces real memory with its digital counterpart, creating the illusion of the deceased's eternal presence and displacing the natural process of saying goodbye.

As philosophers Carl Ehman and Luciano Floridi point out, behind this is the "political economy of death" - a system where data continues to make a profit even after its owner is gone.

The authors of the study concluded that it is indeed possible to talk to the "resurrected" with the help of AI, but what we hear is not about the dead, but about ourselves - about our desire not to let go and about how technology turns memory into a commodity.