Are we ready for ‘grief-tech’?

This story was produced by our colleagues at the BBC.

Lottie Hayton lost both her parents within two months of each other. As a young journalist she wanted to write about it, and in particular to investigate a new tech genre known as “grief tech,” or “ghostbots”.

An industry is emerging that uses artificial intelligence to build chatbots of people who’ve died with the aim of offering solace to those who’ve lost loved ones.

Hayton made a chatbot version of her dad and a visual talking avatar of her mom.

“My drive to try it was, I guess, in order to provide other people who might be using it with information,” said Hayton.

“The bot sort of blinks and moves slightly like she did, that was quite alarming. The face moves in a juddery way but it very much looked like her and that threw me off,” she added. “It had an air of her, but it was definitely robotic. I was inherently aware that this was a piece of technology.”

Within the last five years, the idea of digital resurrections have gone from science fiction to reality. Anyone can sign up to create a digital chat version of loved ones for as little as $10. Lifetime subscriptions, however, can cost several hundred dollars.

Justin Harrison set up his ghostbot business, You Only Virtual, after his own mother became ill.

“For anybody tech-savvy, it’s a pretty easy process, extracting text messages and emails and online messages,” Harrison said. “Our technology is nowhere near as good as it’s going to be in six months, in a year. Generally speaking it’s going to be mind-blowing in three years.”

This industry is still very new and still pretty niche. Businesses operating in this field only have a few thousand users and there’s not a huge amount of investor interest. But some experts believe that ghostbots could go mainstream.

Carl Orman is a Swedish researcher and author who has spent the past 10 years studying the ethics of the digital afterlife.

“Five years ago I would have said that most people would still find it kind of creepy. But then ChatGPT hit,” said Orman. “It’s not implausible that over the next decade or so, interacting with chatbots impersonating real humans becomes just as common as having a video call and that’s going to open up a new market for those chatbots. “

Experts are now calling for studies to find out if these tools can really help us with our grief, and if they do, figure out how companies might offer that ethically, consensually, and safely.