Digital technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly shaping our lives – but they are also increasingly influencing the way we deal with death, grief and remembrance. Such applications for digital afterlife, also known collectively as grief technology or the digital afterlife industry, encompass a whole range of services in which interaction with AI-controlled simulations of the deceased plays a particularly important role. Some services make it possible for people to actively remember friends and relatives after their death through text or voice messages. A technical enhancement, on the other hand, is the offer to enter into a reciprocal relationship with the deceased via chatbots or avatars. These applications, also known as deadbots or thanabots, act as a kind of digital chronicle of the life of the deceased[1]. On the one hand, recordings and data created or authorised by the person concerned are used to compile information about the deceased. On the other hand, there are also services that make use of the data available on the web and use it as the basis for the content that is communicated in the interaction with the avatar of the deceased. In other words, they create avatars, chatbots or digital twins that emulate the social behaviour of a person and also generate new communication based on previous data. In this context, artificial intelligence techniques are used that are also utilised for the creation of synthetic media in other contexts, known primarily as deepfakes, i.e. audio, video or image media whose content is artificially generated but appears deceptively real. AI language models are also used, which produce new content based on communication artefacts from the deceased as training data and by means of probability calculations. Due to the sensitivity of the subject area, the potential for misuse and data protection issues, digital survival is a relevant topic for ethical digitalisation research.
Comparability with analogue phenomena
For many bereaved people, it is important to feel close to the deceased and to evoke memories in certain places or by means of objects and, if necessary, to enter into an (imagined) communication relationship, e.g. by visiting the grave or looking at photos. Traditional gravesites, rituals of remembrance or religious symbolism – these and many other forms of dealing with death and mourning show the importance of remembrance for the bereaved. In an increasingly digital world, it is only natural that the bereaved wish to create a digital avatar and stay in contact with the deceased in this way. This change in the culture of mourning is made technically possible by the availability of large amounts of data about individual people, particularly through social media, but also through many other applications. As soon as the individual deadbots or avatars have been created on this basis using generative AI, they are available regardless of location and for the long term (permanence) and can therefore inspire the idea of living on indefinitely. In their image of humanity, the applications of the digital afterlife industry thus tie in with transhumanist ideas of overcoming the limitations of being human through technology.
Social relevance
Digital afterlife technologies represent many of the possibilities and concerns that are generally associated with AI, as if under a magnifying glass: Anthropomorphisation and the replacement of humans, manipulation of emotions, misinformation, poor training data quality, etc. The sensitive area of mourning culture and dealing with dying and death requires an extension of these problems for ethics and law to issues that are decisive for the safe and good handling of digital representations of the deceased. For example, after the death of the person represented, uncontrolled changes to the avatar can occur that no longer correspond to the wishes and ideas of the person or their relatives. Avatars can be used for advertising purposes, contradict ideas of piety or have a negative impact on the grieving process. In addition, the personal data of the people concerned is processed on a large scale, opening up opportunities for attack and abuse. It remains to be seen whether the AI-controlled avatars and chatbots of digital survival will integrate into the canon of our everyday media practices in the same way that other media such as photos, videos or audio recordings have already done. This includes the skills to recognise the selective and artificial character of such representations and to use them appropriately. Questions of representation may require a high degree of ethical reflection, both with regard to the vulnerability of mourners and the preservation of reverence as well as with regard to the interests of the represented persons in appropriate representation. Finally, it also remains crucial to recognise the possibilities of forgetting and being forgotten – also in the digital realm – as an anthropological necessity and to implement them in digital contexts[2].
Further links and literature
Recommended reading:
- Öhman, C. J./Watson, D. (2019). Are the Dead Taking over Facebook? A Big Data Approach to the Future of Death Online. In: Big Data & Society 6(1), 1-13.
- Sisto, D. (2020). Online Afterlives. Immortality, Memory, and Grief in Digital Culture, Cambridge (Massachusetts).
Sources
- Heesen, J./Hennig, M. (2024). Deadbots: Ethische Grenzen des digitalen Weiterlebens – eine medien- und technikethische Perspektive. In: Rathgeber, B./Maier, M. (Hg.). Grenzen Künstlicher Intelligenz. Kohlhammer.
- Ammicht Quinn, R. et al. (2024). Ethik, Recht und Sicherheit des digitalen Weiterlebens. Forschungsergebnisse und Gestaltungsvorschläge zum Umgang mit Avataren und Chatbots von Verstorbenen. Forschungsbericht, IZEW Universität Tübingen & SIT Darmstadt, Zenodo.