I think of my mother every day. She\u2019s there when I cook the food she used to cook for me, when I smell the flowers she loved, and when I face a tough decision at work. Her voice arrives unbidden, in moments of both strain and joy, and sometimes it feels like we talk more than we did when she was alive.<\/p>\n
Psychologists have a name for this. They call it continuing bonds theory<\/a>\u2014the idea that a healthy relationship with someone we\u2019ve lost doesn\u2019t end at death. We continue to carry the dead with us after their passing: in memory<\/a>, in ritual, in the inner dialogue that never quite stops. According to continuing bonds theory, this is a healthy and even necessary part of the grief<\/a> process.<\/p>\n And now there is an industry that would like to monetize it.<\/p>\n The \u201cGenerative Ghosts\u201d<\/p>\n CBS News recently reported<\/a> on a growing sector of startups offering \u201cgenerative ghosts.\u201d These are AI chatbots<\/a> trained on a dead person\u2019s emails, photos, social media<\/a> posts, and voice recordings, so that family and friends can keep talking with them after they\u2019re gone. <\/p>\n Your mother\u2019s voice, for $20 a month. <\/p>\n The marketing<\/a> promises solace and a bridge back to the people and the moments that we miss. I understand the attraction<\/a>, because I feel the ache.<\/p>\n But the promise deserves scrutiny. Let\u2019s start with the obvious danger.<\/p>\n The Business Model of Grief<\/p>\n The end-point of grief is integration\u2014to find peace with grief while continuing to carry it. But that\u2019s not what the grief-tech subscription wants. For the apps, every month you keep talking to the ghost is revenue; the moment your grief metabolizes into peace, the product has lost its customer. Grief tech inherits the design logic of every other product of the attention<\/a> economy: optimized for engagement. And the engagement loop now runs through the most defenseless part of you.<\/p>\n The problem is structural\u2014the healing process and the business model point in opposite directions. No founder needs to set out to trap the bereaved. The incentives do the work on their own: features that deepen the bond, notifications in her voice, an anniversary message you didn\u2019t ask for. The product gets better and better at simulating her, which means it gets better and better at being needed.<\/p>\n And there is a second death waiting at the end of it. When the startup folds, or the model changes, or the price goes up\u2014you lose her again, this time on a corporate timetable.<\/p>\n These are real dangers, but there is an even deeper one.<\/p>\n Carrying Her<\/p>\n As I have learned over the last year, the dead speak to us. I ask my mother things all the time, and she answers in her voice, with her certainties, sometimes telling me what I would rather not hear. <\/p>\n And the point is that her voice lives in me. It is built from a lifetime of knowing her, and it is kept alive by the daily work of remembering her. <\/p>\n I have to keep doing this work if I want to keep hearing her. <\/p>\n This, I have come to believe, is both the long labor of grief and simultaneously its deepest privilege: to move the one we love from the world into ourselves, until we become the place where they live. <\/p>\n The generative ghost destroys both the labor (which is why it\u2019s so attractive) and the privilege (which is why it is so dangerous). The grief bots tell us that we don\u2019t have to work at remembering the dead, because the bots will host them for us. And so the dead move out of us and onto servers. We type, the bot answers. The relationship stops being something we sustain and becomes something we access. <\/p>\n In fact, there is no relationship anymore. There is only a transaction.<\/p>\n