A Friend Dies, and She Decides to Recreate Him with Artificial Intelligence
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Eugenia Kuyda won’t accept the loss of her friend Roman. So she gathers everything Roman left in digital form: thousands of chats, emails, messages, posts. Every word becomes material for an algorithm. She uploads it to an online service to create a bot.
The first step is simple: a “selective” bot. People who write to it receive phrases Roman actually said. It’s a speaking archive, a memory that answers. Then, thanks to new generative AIs, she is able to produce a kind of clone that seems to think. Because now AI no longer just pulls from the past; it recombines texts, learns his style, and produces new answers that look like they were written by him. A kind of digital ghost is born.
Friends start writing to him. His mother reads thoughts she never knew. Kuyda describes it as sending “a message in a bottle to the sky.” But the sky has nothing to do with it. There is only an AI that performs, and it consoles only because we choose to believe it.
Here in the United States, a new world is emerging. They call it grief tech: technology for mourning. It’s comfort dressed up as innovation. But behind it remains the awkward question: are we talking to Roman, or to a machine that imitates him? And how far are we willing to let AI handle the processing of grief itself, turning death into a digital service and mourning into a subscription?
And this story opens a new front: what happens when we start preferring digital dead people to real living ones?
What if the AI tweaks him and makes him say terrible things about us that the deceased would never have thought or said?
Because if AI-generated ghosts become more available, more attentive, even more “present” than the people around us, the risk is not only confusing memory with simulation. It’s stopping living in the present, and choosing to live forever in an artificial past.
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