From voice clones to digital avatars, AI offers new ways to digitally maintain loved ones – and raise concerns about data, consent and how this technique has an impact on how we make sure.
Diego Felix dos Santos never expected to hear his late father’s voice again – until AI made it possible. “The tone of the voice is pretty perfect,” he says. “It feels like he’s almost here.”
After the 39-year-old father died unexpectedly last year, Dos Santos traveled to his original Brazil to be with the family. It was only after returning to his home in Edinburgh, Scotland that he says he realized “I had nothing to actually remind [me of] My dad. “What he had was, however, a voting note that his father sent him from his hospital bed.
In July, Dos Santos took the ballot, and with the help of eleven laboratories-a artificial intelligence-driven voice generator platform founded in 2022 paid a $ 22 fee to upload the sound and create new messages in his father’s voice, and simulated conversations they never got.
“Hello son, how are you?” His father’s voice calls the app just as it would do on their usual weekly calls. “Kiss. I love you, Bossy,” the voice adds using the nickname his father gave him when he was a boy. Although Dos Santos’ religious family originally had reservations about him using AI to communicate with his father beyond the grave, he says they have since come to his choice. Now he and his wife, who was diagnosed with cancer in 2013, are also considering creating AI voice clones of themselves.
Dos Santos’ experience reflects a growing trend in which people use AI not only to create digital equality, but to simulate the dead. As these technologies become more personal and widespread, experts warn of the ethical and emotional risks – from questions of consent and data protection to the commercial incentives that drive their development.
The market for AI technologies designed to help people treat losses, known as “grief technology”, has grown exponentially in recent years. Ignited by American startups like StoryFiles (an AI-driven video tool that lets people record themselves for postum games) and in the following AI (a voice-based app that creates interactive avatars of deceased loved ones), this technique markets itself as a means of tackling and maybe even forthall, grief.
Robert Locascio founded Eternos, a Palo Alto-Based Start-up that helps people create an AI Digital Twin, in 2024 after losing his father. Since then, more than 400 people have used the platform to create interactive AI avatars, says Locascio, with subscriptions starting from $ 25 for an older account that allows someone’s history to remain available to loved ones after their death.
Michael Bommer, an engineer and former colleague of Locascios, was among the first to use Eteros to create a digital replica of himself after learning his terminal cancer diagnosis. Locascio says that bombs who died last year found closure by leaving a piece of itself to his family. His family has also found closure from it. “It catches his essence well,” his wife Anett Bommer, who lives in Berlin, Germany, told Reuters in an E email. “I feel closely in my life through AI because it was his last heartfelt project, and this has now become part of my life.”
The goal of this technology is not to create digital ghosts, says Alex Quinn, CEO of Authentic Interactions Inc, the Los Angeles-based parent company in StoryFile. Rather, it is to preserve people’s memories while still around to share them. “These stories will cease to exist without some form of interference,” says Quinn, noting that although the limitations of AI clones are obvious – the avatar will not know the weather outside or who the current president is – the results are still worth it. “I don’t think anyone will ever see anyone’s story and someone’s story and someone’s memory completely go.”
One of the biggest concerns about grief technology is consent: What does it mean to digitally recreate someone who ultimately has no control over how their equality is used after they die? While some companies like eleven laboratories allow people to create digital resemblance to their dear Postum, others are more restrictive. Locascio from Eternos, for example, says their policy limits them from creating avatars of people who are unable to give their consent and they manage checks to enforce it, including demanding that those who make accounts register their vote twice. “We don’t cross the line,” he says. “I think, ethically, this doesn’t work.”
Eleven laboratories did not respond to a request for comment.
By 2024, AI ethics at Cambridge University published a study calling for security protocols to tackle the social and psychological risks of the “digital afterlife industry.” Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, a researcher at Cambridge’s Liver Holding Center for The Future of Intelligence and co-author of the study, says commercial incentives often drives the development of these technologies-what transparency around data protection significantly.
“We have no idea how this (deceased person’s) data will be used in two or 10 years or how this technology will develop,” says Nowaczyk-Basińska. A solution, she suggests, is to treat consent as an ongoing process, revised when AI capabilities change.
But in addition to concerns about data protection and exploitation, some experts also worry about the emotional toll of this technology. Could it hamper the way people handle grief?
Cody Delistraty, author of “The Grief Cure,” warns against the idea that AI can offer a shortcut through grief. “Grief is individualized,” he says, noting that people can’t put it through the aim of a digital avatar or AI chatbot and expect to “get something really positive.”
Anett Bommer says she doesn’t trust her husband’s AI avatar in the early stages of her own grieving process, but she doesn’t think it would have negatively affected her if she had done so. “The relationship with loss has not changed anything,” she says, adding that Avatar “is just another tool I can use with photos, drawings, letters, notes,” to remember him.
Andy Langford, clinical director of the British -based Bereeavement Charity Cruse, says that while it is too early to make concrete conclusions about the effects of AI on grief, it is important that those who use this technology to overcome losses do not “sit stuck” in their grief. “We have to do some of both – grieving and vibrant,” he says.
For Dos Santos, it wasn’t about finding closure – it was about seeking connection to AI in his moment of grief. “There are some specific moments in life … which I would normally call him to get advice,” says Dos Santos. While he knows that AI cannot bring his father back, it offers a way to recreate the “magical moments” that he can no longer share.
