When Mourning Becomes A Marketplace: Can AI Imitate the Human Soul - Part II

By Kavisha Pillay

Loss has a way of reorganising our lives. One day, the familiar rhythms of life are intact - the warmth of a voice, the easy choreography of shared routines, the unspoken assurance that tomorrow will arrive much like today. But, whether we welcome it or resist it, loss is one of the few certainties of being human, and we will all eventually be confronted by its weight. 

Grief, in its rawest form, is not only about what is taken from us, but about what remains. To mourn is to stand at the edge of absence and realise how deeply we are shaped by presence. Loss sharpens us. It cracks the illusions of permanence, confronts us with the fragility of life, and forces us to reckon with who we are without what we loved. In this sense, grief is not merely a wound to endure, but a teacher. We emerge altered, stitched together with threads of longing and memory. The work of grief is slow, unchosen, and deeply human. 

I learned this at sixteen when my father died. One day he was vividly present - his laughter filling rooms, his dreams and desires an inch within reach. The next, he was gone. 

My young mind could not process how someone who was so audaciously alive could suddenly vanish into silence, leaving nothing behind but memories and unreturned messages. 

Like many who experience this type of loss, I longed for more - more time, more memories, and just one more conversation. Perhaps, it was inevitable that technology would try to answer this universal longing. Today, the “grief tech” industry is growing rapidly. From chatbots that imitate the texting style of the dead, to AI-generated voices and deepfake video calls, a myriad of companies now sell the possibility of digital resurrections. 

The offer is seductive. 

For a fee, one can upload archives of texts, voicemails, videos, and photos, letting algorithms reconstruct the likeness of the person they lost. 

For the bereaved, the possibility of “just one more” message is an almost unbearable temptation. A child can send messages to a parent who is no longer here. A widow can hear a birthday greeting years after their spouse passed away. Some of these encounters may be therapeutic in unfinished words finally spoken. It could help with providing comfort and closure. But technology never deals in absolutes. It trades in simulations. The more grief tech advances, the more the questions it raises outpace the  answers it seems to offer.

Who Owns our Afterlives?

Consent sits at the heart of this dilemma. 

Very few of us prepare for our digital afterlife. Most of us will leave behind a scattered trail of emails, WhatsApps, and social media posts that will long outlive us. After death, those fragments can be collected and repurposed by our loved ones, as well as by corporations. Rarely do the dead have a say. Should the decision to reanimate someone’s likeness belong to grieving relatives, or should the silence of the dead be respected as final? Additionally, who owns the digital remains of the dead?

But, perhaps the emerging danger here is not in what grief tech does to our dead, but in what it does to our living. Grief is an emotional process that inevitably bends us towards acceptance of loss. To outsource it to machines risks postponing what cannot ultimately be postponed. 

Questions emerge around what happens when grief itself is monetised. Some grief-tech companies charge subscriptions; the more you use their avatars, the more entangled you become. Is this support, or commodified longing? 

This business model thrives not on healing, but on prolonging attachment. Those unable to let go become the ideal customers. Grief, in this model, is not a sacred human process but a market to be tapped. 

Legal protections in this regard lag far behind. Rights to dignity and privacy after death are often patchy or non-existent. Companies effectively get to decide what is “respectful,” shaping digital mourning according to their terms, not ours. In this regulatory vacuum, the dead are left with fewer protections than the living, and the grieving with little recourse.

Dignity, Data, and the Digital Void

It is important to remember that AI cannot call back the dead. It simulates them, stitching together predictive patterns from data. Over time, these simulations can drift further from the person they once mirrored. They can begin to reflect the needs, fears, and wishes of the bereaved, or worse, the commercial interests of the platforms themselves. Memory is reshaped, not by truth, but by desire and profit. What we will be left with is not remembrance but reinvention - avatars that are moulded to soothe us.

This is where grief tech risks distorting not only our past but our present. If mourning becomes a process of remaking the dead in our image, are we really remembering them, or erasing them under the weight of our own longing?

Read Part I : When machines sing: Can AI imitate the human soul? 

I do not wish to demonise technology entirely. For some, these tools may offer genuine solace, a way to bridge the immense pain of loss. Yet we must tread carefully. There is a difference between being comforted by memory and being seduced by imitation. If grief teaches us anything, it is that love cannot be coded, and loss cannot be undone.

We stand, then, at a threshold. On one side lies the ancient work of mourning, messy, transformative, and uncontainable. On the other lies a new terrain, where grief is digitised, optimised, and perhaps prolonged. How we step forward will shape not only how we remember our dead, but how we understand ourselves as the living.

For in the end, grief is not simply about endings. It is about the way absence continues to shape presence, the way loss redefines love. To honour grief is to resist the urge to tidy it away with technology. To grieve is to remain unfinished, and in that unfinishedness, to remain human.