The Dead Are Texting Back: Inside the Grief Bot Industry

In 2021, a freelance writer named Joshua Barbeau typed a sentence into a chatbot and his fiancée answered. She had been dead for eight years.

He had fed a language model her old texts and a short description, using a service called Project December. The conversations that followed, reported at length by the San Francisco Chronicle, read the way ghost stories have for centuries: intimate, uncanny, comforting, wrong, right. He knew it wasn’t her. He kept typing anyway.

Five years later, that experiment is an industry. This is the tour: who’s selling what, what psychology says, what researchers are warning, and the one thing you should decide on purpose, in writing, while you’re alive.

The offerings sort into two very different species, and the difference is consent.

The first species records the living. HereAfter AI interviews you, over hours, about your life, then packages the answers into an interactive “legacy avatar” your descendants can question. StoryFile did the same with video, its technology famously letting Ed Asner field questions at his own memorial service. You participate. You curate. You know.

The second species reconstructs the dead. Feed a model the texts, voicemails, emails, and posts a person left behind, and it generates them: their phrasing, their jokes, their typos. Project December sits here. So did the origin story of Replika, which began when its founder rebuilt her closest friend, Roman Mazurenko, from his messages after he was killed in an accident. In China, a full commercial sector now sells “digital resurrection,” grieving parents commissioning video avatars of dead children for modest fees, and it is already common.

The dead person, notably, signed off on none of species two.

Grief science has a concept called continuing bonds: the finding, mainstream since the 1990s, that healthy grieving usually isn’t about letting go. People keep talking to their dead, at gravesides, in journals, in their heads, for decades, and mostly it helps. Seen through that lens, a grief bot is just a more responsive version of the same thing, and some users describe exactly that: a place to say the unsaid things, a bridge through the worst months.

But continuing bonds research came from bonds that couldn’t answer. A bot answers. It’s available at 3 a.m., it never tires of you, and it’s engineered, like all engagement products, to keep the conversation going. Clinicians’ concern has a name: prolonged grief disorder, added to psychiatry’s diagnostic manual in 2022, the roughly one-in-ten cases where mourning locks up instead of moving. Does a responsive simulation of the dead help the stuck get unstuck, or does it keep them stuck? Here’s the honest answer: nobody knows. The long-term studies don’t exist yet. Every user is the experiment.

The most cited academic work on this so far came out of Cambridge in 2024: two researchers at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence published an analysis of the “digital afterlife industry” in the journal Philosophy & Technology, and their scenarios are worth reading before you upload anything.

They warn about consent, in both directions: the dead who never agreed to be simulated, and the living, including children, who may have a dead parent’s avatar pressed on them by a well-meaning relative. They warn about what they call unwanted hauntings, mourners who want to stop and find the service, or the family member paying for it, won’t let the dead lie. They flag the obvious commercial nightmare: an avatar of your mother that starts recommending products, because engagement is the business model and grief is a very sticky user state. And they call for guardrails the industry mostly lacks: age restrictions, transparency, and dignified retirement protocols, ways for a bot to be laid to rest.

One of their scenarios has already run in the wild, unplanned: StoryFile, the company that animated Ed Asner, filed for bankruptcy in 2024. Which surfaced the question every one of these products carries in its terms of service: your dead person’s avatar is not an heirloom. It’s a hosted service. When the company dies, so, again, does the person, and the family grieves the loss again, this time because a company shut down.

Here’s where this lands in MORTL territory: the raw material of a grief bot is your data, your texts and voice and face, and right now, in most places, the decision to animate it after your death belongs to whoever holds the archive. Which means it’s an estate planning question that almost no estate plan answers.

So answer it. In your digital legacy documents, alongside the account list and the legacy contact settings, write the sentence. Yes: I consent to my data being used for a memorial AI, and here’s who controls it. Or no: I do not want to be simulated, period. Estate attorneys have begun drafting exactly these clauses. The legal enforceability is still soft in most states. The moral clarity for your family is absolute, and in practice, the family usually honors the sentence they can point to.

And if you’re the griever considering the other side of the screen: no verdict here. Some people find real comfort. Some get stuck in it. The researchers’ practical advice amounts to this: go in knowing it’s a simulation trained to please you, notice whether it’s helping you carry the loss or helping you avoid it, and know where the off switch is before you start. Grief was never linear anyway. Just make sure the loop you’re in is one you chose.

The technology to make the dead text back exists, it’s for sale, and the research on what it does to the living is years behind the product. Two decisions are yours to make now: whether your own data can ever be used this way, in writing, and whether a simulation belongs anywhere in your grief. Both deserve to be choices. Right now, for almost everyone, they’re defaults.

Sources: San Francisco Chronicle, “The Jessica Simulation” (2021); Hollanek & Nowaczyk-Basińska, “Griefbots, Deadbots, Postmortem Avatars,” Philosophy & Technology (2024); DSM-5-TR, prolonged grief disorder (2022); Klass, Silverman & Nickman, Continuing Bonds (1996); reporting on StoryFile’s Chapter 11 filing (2024) and China’s digital resurrection industry (2023-2024). See our Sources & Methodology.

This article is education. If grief has you somewhere dark, a grief counselor is a human who can actually hear you. Find support.