There is certainly no one who can fill the vacuum left by the death of a loved one.

But with AI you can create a digital avatar of the dearly departed and, perhaps, share many more years of togetherness, even if it’s only of the virtual kind.

You can make a digital avatar of yourself; the avatar will live forever.

The idea of a digital presence is not new. A company called eterni.me has been offering such services for a decade now. But these are mostly interactive bots. Things have speeded up greatly with generative AI. Digital immortalisation has become sharper, easier, more believable, more interactive.

Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basiska, a research fellow at the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge, told Scientific American recently that to create your postmortem avatar, you need tomes of personal data and AI — you need to grant access to your personal data to the commercial company; it means that you share your video and audio recordings and your messages, so that AI can make sense of it.

So, is it all good or bad?

If the digital avatar ‘learns’, it would become an entirely different person. A digital avatar could interfere with the process of ‘closure’ of the dead, keeping memories alive and painful. What if the avatar is manipulated by a third party for fraud?

Think about all these potential scenarios carefully before you seek a “rebirth”.

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Published on May 4, 2025