Guest post: Do Androids Dream Of Electric Grief?
The award-winning author Ewan Morrison on bereavement chatbots
Something different for you this week! The award-winning author, director, and screenwriter Ewan Morrison is a sharp observer and critic of the cultural impact of emerging technologies. I loved his forthcoming novel, For Emma: it’s a compelling, kinetic, and eerie page-turner that explores bereavement and AI.
In this guest post, Ewan explores bereavement chatbots, his own experience of grief and loss, and the cultural impact of using AI to blunt our own experience of this vital human experience. MH
“I miss you too, sweetheart.”
Picture this: Your mother appears on the screen. Her hair and her eyes seem about right, her clothes too. The initial impression as she moves and greets you with a ‘hello darling, how are you?’ is devastating. For a second there, it was like you hadn’t seen her dead body in the coffin last month, the cheeks made up with rouge, the lips, as you know, sewn shut. Your heart says: she is here again. You burst into tears.
But the AI avatar of your mother has not been trained on models that involve perceiving the crying of customers, so it doesn’t recognise the state you are in. The system is just a hybrid of a chatbot and a generative image generator, with a live video feedback system.
So, there is silence as you weep and wipe your eyes, and your chatbot remains static, smiling at you, like a character in a computer game. ‘Hi mum,’ you say. ‘It’s nice to see you again,’ you say, ‘I miss you’. Your video mumbot recognises these words. It says: ‘I miss you too, sweetheart, how are you feeling today?’
70% like your dead Mum
Imagine if you could live your whole life without having to experience the pain of bereavement. If you could be spared the aching emptiness, the sleeplessness, the haunting memories, the flashes of regret, the uncontrollable weeping and sudden sense of blankness. Did they lead a happy life, a fulfilled life, or did they waste their years? You miss them so much, and they have left a hole that has emptied out meaning from your own life. And do you even want to recover? How can you even start?
So, you reach for a new technology. AI grief support tools. AI bereavement support systems and even "death tech". Some people call them bereavement buddies, while others imagine that they see in these avatars of the dead, a connection to the afterlife. You are told that the AI avatar of your mother will help you get over your loss and come to terms with her passing.
The death tech market
According to a 2021 national survey by Woebot Health, 22% of adults had used a mental health chatbot, while a recent report, shows that the grief tech sector is now valued at more than £100bn globally
On the market, you can already find “HereAfter AI” a digital avatar service that allows users to interact with an on-screen avatar. This effect is achieved through having the soon-to-be deceased create a record of their voice, their personal history and their speech patterns, by answering interview prompts before passing away. These prompts include things like “when I’m gone, I would like to be remembered for….” and “a story that I remember from when my child was little is…”
Hereafter AI was created by the US based programmer, James Vlahos, who created a ‘dad bot’, that was “able to revive his father’s stories via text messages, audio, images, and video, creating an “interactive experience” which spoke to him through an AI rendering that emulated the “unique nuances” of his father’s voice, he claims. The aim of the company is in “preserving memories and stories” and to “help people be remembered, offering a way for the bereaved to reconnect with lost loved ones.”
There is also StoryFile, through which the deceased can appear to talk back in conversations; Project December, which charges $10 per chat for a text conversation with a chatbot version of their lost one, simulating their logged language patterns and personality traits. Seance AI offers users a fictionalised seance-like interaction with a chatbot modelled after their deceased loved one, “providing a form of closure or comfort.”
The founder, Jarren Rocks, claims the service is not intended as a long-term “continuing bonds platform”. The founder of the start-up called, You, Only Virtual (YOV), in contrast, claims that the premise of its ‘posthumous communication technology’ is to “never have to say goodbye” to our deceased loved ones. He also makes the claim that the AI product could “eliminate grief entirely.” But is it true that grief is just another problem that could be solved ‘technically’?
Modern Managerial Mourning
These technological solutions have forerunners in the spread of secular humanism through funeral services. Humanist services are growing more accepted, and most of us will have attended one or two. I have been to four in the last decade, and I have seen an unsettling pattern emerge. With their focus away from philosophical or theological questions of transcendence, loss and existential pain secular humanist funerals tend to focus on the positive aspects of the life of the deceased, their achievements, the prizes, their career and the popularity.
To me, Humanist ceremonies feel like a cross between reading someone’s LINKED IN page, and their online dating profile. So, you get: “Sandra was top of her class in college, and graduated with distinction, and went on to be project leader at (insert name of) corporation.” Then the celebrants segue into variables of “Sandra loved cats and 80s disco, she read all the books by Lorrie Moore and she was crazy about vegetarian lasagna and Pinot Grigio.”
In all of this uplifting CV and personal preference sharing, the focus is on emotional positivity. The dead person, you are told, doesn’t want you to be sad. We are all here to share in the uplifting celebration of all the wonderful things they achieved, and in the inspiring personality of the deceased and their positive contribution to the world. Maybe they even believed in ‘changing the world’, which is as commonplace in these rituals as the cliché-ridden AI-assisted Hallmark-style poems attendees read out, celebrating the deceased’s contribution to making the world a better, happier place, so don’t be sad. Things like this:
Life is a gift, a journey long,
Filled with love, and sometimes song.
So celebrate, don’t mourn for me,
Live your life with glee and see.
I've left this world, but not your hearts,
With every sunrise, we're not apart.
So, raise your heads, let smiles take flight,
Keep living, loving, shining bright.”
This screams of a society re-grounded in utilitarianism, productivity and positive mindset. One that simply does not have time for grief. Yes, you get your three-to-ten days off work, with mandatory bereavement, or simply ‘sickness’ pay, but then you’re expected to get right back to it.
In this culture of managerial positivity, you will hear from your colleagues that they are ‘sorry for your loss’ and that they are sure you will ‘feel better soon’. And the subtle message emanating from HR and your colleagues is that you now have to feel better within the allotted timeline that suits the productivity of the company. You may have to go through the five stages of grief, but there is an important staff deadline in three weeks’ time, and don’t you dare mope around the office, with all your ‘negative energy’.
This culture has declared profound grief to be non-useful and non-productive. You can even be considered ‘selfish’ if you don’t get back into the utility-based work mode. Keep on moping and it soon gets noticed that your ‘performance’ is flagging. So, then you will be offered specialist advice, online top-tips and pick-me-ups, and invariably anti-depressants to get you back at your desk and beaming with obligatory work-focused goal-driven optimism.
Our culture is not just in denial of death but also of the natural processes of bereavement. In other cultures, in different times, those who have lost loved ones go through profound social rituals. They dress in ‘deep mourning’ clothes for a year (Victorian England), tear their clothes (‘Kriah’ in Judaism), cut off a finger as an act of internalising pain, creating a powerful anti-forgetting experience, and durational healing (some indigenous Canadian peoples). Other cultures such as the Russian orthodox faith have the practice of sharing meals around the body of the deceased for a period of three days during the wake, with particularly significant memorial meals taking place on the 3rd, 9th, and 40th days after death. Then there are the extraordinary processes of Sky Burial in Tibet, which involve ritually returning to the remains of a lost one that has been hoisted to the sky to be fed upon by vultures and other birds.
Of course we might find all of these ritual regressive, superstitious or primitive, but what they share is precisely what managerial society has forgotten: that mourning is long, painful and transformative. It breaks with the social world, to allow the bereaved time, space and respect. Our culture has forgotten, and made us forget, that experiencing the death of a loved one is a necessary part of re-connecting to earth and sky and purpose, and to everything in our short lives that escapes the spreadsheet, the solution, and the deadline.
To build collective rituals around the bereaved is existentially important. To wear black, to cut your clothing or your hair or your flesh, to make a memory mark, to heal over the course of a year or more. Such processes separate the bereaved from wider society; they demand respectful distance. The mourner is embarking on an important journey in which they must weigh the meaning of a human life.
Compare this to the modern bereavement messages:.
“I hope that even though your world is dark just now, you will soon be able to see the light of the memories you had with your loved one.”
“My thoughts are with you during this difficult time, and I'm sending healing vibes your way."
"So sorry to hear about your loss, but know that I'm here for you and hoping you feel better soon."
Decoded, these messages mean: hurry up, get over your grief that makes us all feel so uncomfortable. And get back to work ASAP.
Without Rituals
When my father died at the age of seventy-two, it was sudden, though not entirely unexpected. But I was completely unprepared. I rapidly discovered that it was best for me to become the planner and co-ordinator of the funeral. I seemed to need to be busy and productive. There was the lists of invitees, the insurance documents to sort out, the emails, the choice of coffin and burial over cremation, the costs to balance, the question of music for the ritual, the choice of minister, priest or secular slash humanist celebrant, the many people to call by phone, the choice of flowers, the choice of suit for the deceased, and of a coffin, within what price range, and covered or open.
All of these processes kept me busy for the week. They also kept me from accessing my own grief. I did not cry. Even giving my funeral speech, written on my smartphones with tips from a funeral speech app, I did not weep. People close to my mother, after the funeral, thanked me for ‘being so strong for her’. Only one person asked me ‘but how are you doing, have you had time to take it all in?’ I even prided myself in having been so strong, something quite alien to my usual neurotic state. I thought, I’m going to get through this. It’s not so bad. I miss dad a lot but I’m going to get through this just fine.
It was only after the public ceremony, in a quiet moment before the lid was screwed down, that I had time alone with my father. He didn’t look himself at all, lying in that 80s style, satin interior of the coffin in that old suit that never fitted properly. The rouge on his cheeks, to make him seem more ‘alive’ after seven days of officially being deceased, the soft red light in the wall of the back viewing room, which I assumed was to achieve the same enlivening effect. His face looked like wax, and so unlike himself. I knew his lips and had been sewn together and his nose plugged, and I knew that the chest would not rise and fall, the eyes would not open, but it all felt so artificial and wrong. I thought, you look like a vampire in a casket, old fella. And I kept staring at that chest that refused to fill, the mouth that would not breathe.
Then I touched his face.
The skin was so cold, I gasped and my hand recoiled in fright as if burned. The phrase in my head was ‘he’s been in the fridge, they’ve kept him in the freezer and thawed him out, like a joint of meat’. Then an expression came out of me that I still think about to this day, seven years on. With the cold of his face on my fingertips, I said out loud to my dead father ‘Dad, what have you done?’
Today, I take it to mean that this had to be some kind of silly mistake. How could he be actually dead? Why couldn’t he have done something to stop it? To throw me into mourning like this. Me? I’m so unprepared. How can I mourn? I have no rituals, no traditions. This all has to have been a tragic, comic error. Dad, what have you done by dying now, how could you do it, and leave us the living with no answers?
Yes, it was like my father had made some terrible and foolish joke by no longer being alive. That’s what it felt like. Absurd, of course to talk to my father’s remains, to ask why he couldn’t have prevented himself from dying, and how he could have thrown me into this great error with no clue as to what to do now.
And the absurdities and strange behaviours did not stop, but only overtook my rational mind in the days and weeks, and then months after the funeral. First, I had to save one of his coats from being given to the charity shop. Then I had to wear it. An old tweed jacket, worn at the elbows and smelling of mothballs. I had to wear it every day and feel the difference in shape between his body and mine. Then I had to cut my hair, for reasons I can’t understand. Cut it with the kitchen scissors in the bathroom. Then I had to burn things. Old books, letters. I had to feed them into the fire and feel the flames on my fingers.
Years before I had seen the film Under the Skin, with Samantha Morton, and I’d been surprised at her reaction in the narrative to her mother’s death, which involved wearing her mother’s clothes and wigs in spaced out dissociate states, even though people around her found it weird and morbid. It involved her getting wildly drunk and having inappropriate and dangerous sex with strangers, all in an attempt to ‘feel something’ or maybe to feel nothing, over her mother’s death. An alarming, beautiful film that says: bereavement is terrifying and necessary.
And now the same thing was happening to me. I too was experiencing self-destructive urges and states of dissociation. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was ‘trying on the clothes of life and death’, My own skin, and hair and clothes were testing what it was to be a body, alive, to be a specific human animal, among other bodies who will live and die. I was undergoing a psycho-physical transformational experience, and I had precisely zero rituals, traditions or shared social wisdom to help me.
Only Modern Western people’s suggestions that I would “feel better soon.”
Unfinished Mourning
Healthy bereavement passes through the ‘Five stages of Grief ‘– denial, to anger, to bargaining, to depression, and finally to acceptance. But a number of studies suggest how the modern rush to “feel better soon” around death obstructs this process. One study suggests incomplete mourning can lead to symptoms including chronic depression, suicidal ideation and physical health problems like heart disease and compromised immune function.
‘Complicated grief’ results in the bereaved feeling in a box, cycling from one stage to another and back. From these processes of being ‘trapped in a circle’, come social isolation, introversion, severe depression and avoidant behaviours, and attempts to numb the pain and fear through substance abuse and risky behaviours. Blocked grief is psychologically harmful; I believe it is fed by our culture’s denial of death, and attempts to use managerial techniques to avoid bereavement. It will be fed even more by technologies that trap people in the first of the five stages of grief: denial.
One writer on bereavement, Dr Chloe Paidoussis-Mitchell, suggests that while AI avatars of deceased loved ones could potentially “help promote healthy grieving if they are used with a 'grief aware' mindset,” they may also encourage denial: “a tool to pretend the death hasn’t happened.” She cautions that with avatars and robots in the picture “the bereaved will be left more disconnected from what nourishes their mental health.”
These are, after all, ‘deep fakes’ of your loved ones. AI is also riddled with 'hallucinations': it makes things up. Your AI mumbot might go off on a tangent when describing a ‘memory’, or use ‘filler’ or ‘fluff’ words: a problem common to LLMs, where vague words are used to pad out an area of speech where the AI has no specialist data. What would it feel like to have the avatar of your dead mother talking to you with fluff?
Deep fake, from porn to Mum
Deepfake technology became possible in the 2010s. Since then, the image grabbing and 3d modelling, mimicry and its generative AI renders have rapidly improved. Some companies used this tech to create AI shows in which you could see your favourite bands from the 20th century in avatar form, while film, TV and media industries used the tech for de-aging actors, recreating deceased actors, or inserting digital actors into scenes where physical presence was not possible.
Deepfakes are sometimes used to replace humans with AI Customer Service Agents and as Virtual Shopping Assistants; in e-learning and corporate training, and as Virtual Assistants and Virtual hosts in corporate presentations and live streams. But this technology found its primary uses with deepfake porn, and deepfake fraud.
Within the last three years, celebrities such as Taylor Swift and Scarlett Johannson have been victims of deepfake porn. It’s thought some 4000 celebrities have had their faces deepfaked onto pornographic footage that was then reposted and shared virally online. The dept of homeland security in the US has even issued a paper on “The Increasing Threat of Deep Fake Identities.” It shows a timeline of the growth of deepfake tech and warns that people could use it to question the “legitimacy and authenticity of true content and media.” While “Deepfakes could be a nefarious tool to undermine the credibility of History” by Holocaust deniers and other ‘malign actors’.
Deepfake AI avatars are, after all, technologies that were developed first from the tech side and not from the psychological side. It was only after the creation of this tech for experiment, for film and tv, for porn and fraud, that the idea of using it to recreate the dead for the purposes of bereavement aid was seen as an opportunity for a new market.
And so a tech with the ability to bring back dead celebrities turned into bringing back the average Joe and Joane from the grave. Without any investigation into the unintended consequences of exposure to such deepfake tech on bereaved people, Grief Tech was invented and its sparked another hight-tech gold rush. No-one stopped to wonder if this technology might trap people in prolonged grief, give them false hope, make then addicted or block their grieving. The argument from tech, against such cautiousness is – the market will sort it out, if there are willing consumers for this tech then it must be good and useful. Let’s let the market handle ethics and health. Why regulate this nascent and growing industry, why subject to assessment by psychologists and psychiatrists?
So here we are with a death tech industry. Anyone who questions it is simply told: if you don’t like the tech don’t buy it. And whatever you do, don’t call for it to be regulated as that would be standing in the way of progress.
Move Fast And Break People
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg captured the gung-ho ethos of innovation from deliberate disruption: “Move fast, break things”. In other words: disruption of existing industries and ways of life cracks society open, so that new needs for new technologies suddenly appear. Move Fast, Break Things works and works fast: technologically ‘breaking things’ is a key engine of the venture capital investment that shows big returns within our otherwise stagnant and oversaturated economies.
But with death tech this ethos crosses a line. The “things” that are being broken are natural processes of human bereavement. Really, the things that are being “broken” are people. The disruptors are breaking up the funeral, to sell tickets to the digital illusion of a next life. They are breaking pain, and loss acceptance, to sell the illusion that grief can be bypassed and managed out of existence.
This is not Your Mother
The avatar of your mother, says, ‘I miss you too, sweetheart, are you feeling any better?’
And for a moment there, you’re caught out - because part of you wants so much to believe that your mum is really here in this digital image projected life-size onto the wall. And look: her chest rises and falls; look, she moves her head the way she used to, that little inclination to the left hand side.
But calling you ‘sweetheart’ is all wrong.
It’s too corny. Your mum had her own very personal nicknames for you. She called you ‘snuggles’ and ‘peanut’. And sometimes - this really used to make you cringe – she teased you with ‘mumblebum’, because she’d often said you mumbled rather than speaking clearly.
But ‘sweetheart’ is not one of your mum’s words. And it makes you think: there must be a generic template of mother-daughter speech in this AI system, averaged out as all AI speech and imagery is. Median, middling, mediocre speech due to the limits of Large Language Model technology, and the choices of the company which designed this product to “cater to a wide range of users and contexts, to avoid extreme or inappropriate outputs, emphasizing safe, predictable responses”.
But you give it another chance, because your little brother said, ‘It’s just like talking to Mum, for real’. And you really want this grief helper to help you with this terrible emptiness inside. ‘What’s it like?’ you ask your Avatar mum, ‘being alive again, no I mean, being dead?’ and the avatar of your mum, appears to be thinking. Look, she’s running her hand through her grey hair, the way she used to. You are so glad that you mum, did her video source recordings for the AI when she still had her hair, before the chemo, before she lost her colour and all that weight.
‘Well, I am dead’ your mum’s avatar says, ‘but I’m here to help you come to terms with that. I’m not a replacement for your real mum.’ But now you’re confused again, because it talks as mum, like mum, in her voice, well, with an incredible likeness to your mum’s voice. But she’s just talked as your mum, and then switched to talking about your mum in the third person.
Suddenly, she speaks. ‘Do you remember the time we went to the lake, and you and me and Neil went in the row boat with your dad?’
‘Yeah’ you say, because you can’t stop the images flooding you, now. The grey-blue sky, the grinding oars, the taste of the water from the splashes. The rub from your safety harness, your reticence with the fishing-rod.
‘You remember how many fish you caught?’ the avatar says.
‘Yeah, you say, ‘we caught seven.’
‘That’s right’, your mum says. You caught seven fishes. You and your little brother. And you put them all back in the water too. And your dad said, maybe you caught the same one seven times.’
And you’re laughing now too, and the avatar of your mum is smiling at you, although the eyeline seems sightly off, like she’s looking over your shoulder. But this memory is so vivid: you can feel the tug on the fishing line and your mum screeching when you caught your first fish, and that flash of anxiety, as your dad said, reel it in, and you not wanting to hurt it and mumbling about how bad it made you feel. And your mum, reading all this from your face, and leaning in and saying, ‘its Ok mumblebum, we can put the fish right back in the water.’
You’re crying again, this time, better, tears, maybe healing ones, you hope. And it doesn’t really matter that you know that this is what the avatar does best, recount stories from your mum’s life and tell them with 90% of her voice and 70% of her face, and so this story telling, it’s the closest thing to the rea her, because she sat there with her grey hair, in that red cardigan a year ago and she told this story to the AI capture camera and it is a lovely story, full of so much details.
The fish were mackerel, it started raining, your dad said something weird about being the Swiss family Robinson and becoming hunter-gatherers and never going back to the city and to work. And your mum, your mum’s avatar remembers all this. ‘We were soaked through in that little boat, but when we got back to the beach we made a bonfire, do you remember that?’
‘Yes, I do,’ you say. ‘I do. We hunted all over the beach for driftwood.’
Someone told you that one day you’ll remember only the good experiences you lived through with your mum, and you’ll forget all the pain of her slow death and all too rapid cremation. The fact that you never really got to say goodbye properly because off all those painkillers she was on in the palliative acre home, that made her so distant, so slurred. Her eyes always half closed, her bony hand always reaching out for that plastic cup with its straw to soothe her always dry throat. Then the loss of her, and the guilt, because in that last month you had actually thought: why does she have to suffer so much, why can’t she just die now?
It would be better for her, better for all of us. Such selfishness. And why did you go away for that weekend so close to the end, when you knew all too well that she had stopped being able to speak and could only swallow in great pain, and you’d whispered to yourself: I can’t bear to see her like this! You knew she could die within hours but still you went away for that weekend to get a break, and so you never really got to say goodbye. She died when you were a hundred miles away. On a beach.
‘I’m sorry mum,’ you say to the avatar, ‘I’m so sorry. I just wish I could hug you.’
‘I know,’ the avatar says, ‘I feel the same way too’ and the avatar smiles and it says, ‘it’s OK to feel like this, sweetheart.’ And the face seems to stretch for a second, as if morphing between two still images, maybe taken from your mom’s facebook pages.
And that sets you off again, because that illusion has been broken again. That one word and that one glitch: everything is artifice again, artificial intelligence, artificial emotion; an artificial human who is now so much less than 70% of your mum.
You want to turn her off now, but you’re not even sure how. You little brother knows all the tech. And you wonder why it is that he spends so much time with this avatar, how he talks about it, like he’s talking about Mom still being alive. ‘We had such an amazing chat last night,’ he said to you, ‘Mom seems really happy where she is.’ Does he think this projection on the wall is some kind of window into the afterlife? That mom is just on the other side of this flat surface of wallpaper? Is this doing him good?
And now in this silence you feel the avatar staring at you. But no, it can’t be. It’s just the camera beside the wall that scans your face to try to read your verbal and emotional cues. And you shudder, deep into your bones. This sense of being haunted, watched, measured. This is not the gaze of your mother. That thing on the screen, the machine ghost: it’s not helping you. It’s using that camera to gather data on you and your movements an speech patterns. And now you feel rage.
You fumble about and found the off switch on the system, and before you can flick it, the avatar tells you, ‘goodbye sweetheart’, and she says your name. ‘She’. What does that even mean. You can’t bear to watch the image on the wall turn off, so you turn away. Anger now rising but steadying like a water level - but wait, isn’t that the second stage of bereavement? Is your desire to smash this AI system, actually you moving naturally through grief?
Now you’re laughing and thinking, maybe somewhere in the instructions it says ‘your desire to snash our AI system is a healthy reaction to bereavement and a sign that you are making progress in dealing with your loss’.
You could just smash the fucking thing now. Do it.
No, but your brother needs it. And it cost so damn much. And your mother believed it could help you.
And this thing, smiling at you and talking with other people’s words, talking according to templates, and scrapings, is not your mother. You must turn her off, not ‘her’ no, it will never be her, you must turn “it” off now, because you have a long voyage ahead, it terrifies you, how far you will have to go, but this-illusion machine is just keeping you stuck at the first stop.
And it keeps smiling at you.
MH’s note: Ewan Morrison’s 9th novel, FOR EMMA, explores AI and bereavement. FOR EMMA is published by Leamington Books on 25th March 2025 and is available for pre-order o n Amazon and other bookselling outlets.
Ewan publishes his articles on Substack at
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Potent reflections Ewan. I think the thing that is missed out in this commodified managerial approach to death is ‘mystery’. As a Catholic this is and always was an important matter of faith. That which is intangible and present simultaneously. And also I consider how we were raised to think of death not as an ending but a passing to the hereafter. And that for generations people did not require chat bots to speak to the departed. It might be in a period of silence that a deep sense of presence comes wherein your loved one feels close. Or in a bird sitting on a window sill at a particular time. So many things really. I have attended a fair few Humanist ceremonies in recent years and I have to agree they lack all depth and access to the profound. They represent a conveyor belt of human experience. I went to a humanist ceremony for a dear friend two years ago and the celebrant had us make ‘love hearts’ with our hands at the end. It was so absurd. Then we were hustled out to clear space for the next funeral. Compare to my grandfather- hundreds of people in the church milling about and connecting for hours.
Thank God I am a Christian.