Digital resurrection?
The promise of these systems is a kind of resurrection – the reanimation of the dead through data. They offer to return voices, gestures and personalities, not as memories recalled but as presences simulated in real time. This kind of “algorithmic empathy” can be persuasive, even moving, yet it exists within the limits of code, and quietly alters the experience of remembering, smoothing away the ambiguity and contradiction.
These platforms demonstrate a tension between archival and generative forms of memory. All platforms, though, normalise certain ways of remembering, placing privilege on continuity, coherence and emotional responsiveness, while also producing new, data-driven forms of personhood.
As the media theorist Wendy Chun , digital technologies often conflate “storage” with “memory”, promising perfect recall while erasing the role of forgetting – the absence that makes both mourning and remembering possible.
In this sense, digital resurrection risks misunderstanding death itself: replacing the finality of loss with the endless availability of simulation, where the dead are always present, interactive and updated.
AI can help preserve stories and voices, but it cannot replicate the living complexity of a person or a relationship. The “synthetic afterlives” we encountered are compelling precisely because they fail. They remind us that memory is relational, contextual and not programmable.
Our study suggests that while you can talk to the dead with AI, what you hear back reveals more about the technologies and platforms that profit from memory – and about ourselves – than about the ghosts they claim we can talk to.
Eva Nieto McAvoy, King’s College London and Jenny Kidd, Cardiff University London
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
