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Out the windows of our midtown Manhattan conference room, the people on the sidewalk below looked small, delicate. I watched them as I waited for our meeting to begin, engaging in a train of thought I’d often followed since my brother died: Who among them is grieving? Who’s lost someone in a serious way? Who down there, waiting in the out-the-door Sweetgreen line or descending into the subway, has glimpsed the void in the way I have?
After losing Matt to a heroin overdose, I started working for a nonprofit that organized to support people affected by addiction and change harsh policies, like the criminalization of drug use and the medical system’s hostility toward science-based treatment. This was the 2010s, and the opioid epidemic was big news. Impressive agencies of many stripes noticed: advertising, branding, public affairs, strategic comms. They offered us pro-bono services that were often genuinely helpful—but they’d also pitch splashy campaigns meant to grab attention, no matter what.
When this latest batch of agency people began their pitch, it started out strong. They ran through some research and nuanced table-setting to show they were aligned with our mission of reducing stigma. I felt small buds of excitement bloom. It was invigorating to think of the impact we could have by putting a new narrative out there, helping people feel less alone and find the support they need. But then, the agency people unveiled their big idea: to create a campaign centered around reanimated digital avatars of our dead loved ones.
Today, the innovations in digital necromancy are relentless. Meta has patented technology that can keep you posting forever, even if you die. Grammarly has created digital mimics of dead writers and thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Carl Sagan to give personalized feedback on emails and term papers. The “digital afterlife industry” is valued in the billions, providing customers around the globe with tools to resurrect their dead loved ones at scale. You can upload texts, videos, voicemails, any digital ephemera that remains after a loss, and these A.I.-powered tools will stitch it into a screen-bound facsimile of your loved one, ready to offer you that last conversation you never got to have. But loss isn’t a technical challenge to be remediated—it’s deeply, entirely, and wretchedly human, and the only way out is through. That’s where the healing happens. That’s where the beauty is buried. So what do we lose, then, when we try to innovate our way around it?
As the agency people dug into their slides, describing the frightening technology that would make this kind of thing possible plus the social strategy they recommended, their tone-deaf enthusiasm echoed off the glass and hardwood of the conference room, chatter and chuckles becoming sinister as they bounced about in tinny surround sound.
The fact that this was even pitched once would be weird enough. But it was something we fielded multiple times. These revive-the-dead ideas would rarely have much meat to them beyond the novelty of the tech itself. Sometimes, they’d suggest creating a video or podcast series revolving around the living family member “talking” to the copy. One time, around the World Series, an agency pitched the idea of filling a baseball stadium with digital renderings of people who’d died from overdoses. Listening to these ideas unfold, it felt like we were on opposite sides of a seesaw: As the agency people’s excitement rose over the course of the pitch, I’d feel the hot anger in my stomach pulling me into the floor.
Whenever I or a colleague would press for details on what exactly the point of this would be, the agency people seemed puzzled, repeating the vague details back to us like we simply hadn’t heard it the first time. It was, they said, a powerful message of awareness. Driving awareness of the message. We’d go in a few buzzword-laden circles before we’d say thank you very much and then ignore their follow-up emails.
The perplexed faces of the agency people in those conference rooms feel familiar to me today. With a deluge of A.I. tools ranging from “inscrutably useless” to “affront to God” bombarding us daily, a vocal portion of the public is reacting with disgust while the people who’ve created the tools look around sheepishly, shrugging their shoulders and batting their eyelashes, no idea in the faintest what anyone could possibly be so upset about.
Ten years ago, these reanimation stunts were nutty and obscure enough to shoot down with ease. But today, as A.I. widgets ooze through every crack of our digital lives, our reflexive outrage at the overreach is starting to wear down. It’s just one drop inside the daily deluge of ambient ghoulishness. We’ve either run out of steam or brains, or maybe both, because now it’s increasingly like, sure, why not feature a hologram of Tupac at a Salesforce conference. It’s ironic that many A.I. overlords are so obsessed with taste lately, lurking at Prada shows and Vanity Fair parties. They don’t seem to grasp that taste goes beyond crewnecks and playlists. That some things are tasteless not because they’re uncool, per se, but because they are, as Hayao Miyazaki once said, “an insult to life itself.”
Here’s what I know about life. My brother died in the apartment we shared. He was fine in the morning and in the evening he was gone. I was the one who found him. I saw his pale skin turned purple, his sly mouth gone flat. After that, there were no illusions about it. My mind didn’t trick me. I knew, molecularly, that he was dead. While that was traumatizing at the time, the finality helped my grieving. It wasn’t like the high school ex-boyfriend who died in a car crash, or the grandparent who went into an ICU and didn’t come out. There was no mystery. There was no magical thinking.
The body is only half of what we know of each other. Maybe even less. The bigger half is that ineffable star-stuff: the essence, the soul. It’s impossible to truly re-create. Facsimiles that match vocal tone, speech patterns, even height and smile can never nail the soul.
Every person is a pilgrim on their own grief journey. The mountain is the same, but the paths are different. Whatever your path, grief is a time to get gritty, nasty, and as low as you dare go. Grieving often prompts frantic spelunking missions—rereading old letters or texts, scouring your camera roll and random social media accounts for any scrap of a memory of your loved one. Maybe you’ll find a new video of his laugh, his hair in the wind, his shoulders moving while he dances. You’re desperate for these novel artifacts. Grieving is also time to get angry and justified in your own insane behavior. You’re allowed to do whatever you want when you grieve. I believe that.
So from this perspective, I can see how someone reeling from a major loss might wish to feed scraps of data into a large language model and have it spit out a loved-one-shaped bot. I understand every grubby, rotten impulse of the bereaved. I consider myself lucky that I did not meet those agency people until more than a year after my loss. If they’d glided toward me in those early months, vampiric and assured, with those put-upon pity eyes that say “Let us create something unholy so that you can see your dead brother one more time,” I can’t be sure what I would have said. Would I have made the Faustian bargain from a place of raw desperation? Maybe.
But would the holographic pixels of an A.I.-generated facsimile capture the tiny crevices between my brother’s crooked teeth? Would they get the shadows of his wiry grin just right? Would they accurately present his honking laugh, his quiet scoff, his John Waters sense of humor? Would they show me the star-stuff, really?
My memories of my brother—the real feeling of them, not the content, not the digital assets—live only in me. Not in a data center. Not even in a photo album or yearbook. If they are not within me, they are not alive. And memories, famously, need to live on.
