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Creed

Death & life

Digital

17 March 2025

6 min read

AI deadbots are no way to cope with grief

The data we leave in the cloud will haunt and deceive those we leave behind.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A tarnished humaniod robot rests its head to the side, its LED eyes look to the camera.

Nicholas Fuentes on Unsplash.

What happens to all your data when you die? Over the years, like most people, I've produced a huge number of documents, letters, photos, social media posts, recordings of my voice, all of which exist somewhere out there in the cloud (the digital, not the heavenly one). When I die, what will happen to it all? I can't imagine anyone taking the time to climb into my Dropbox folder or Instagram account and delete it all? Does all this stuff remain out there cluttering up cyberspace like defunct satellites orbiting the earth?

The other day I came across one way it might have a future - the idea of ‘deadbots’. Apparently, AI has now developed to such an extent that it can simulate the personality, speech patterns and thoughts of a deceased person. In centuries past, most people did not leave behind much record of their existence. Maybe a small number of possessions, memories in the minds of those who knew them, perhaps a few letters. Now we leave behind a whole swathe of data about us. AI is now capable of taking all this data and creating a kind of animated avatar, representing the deceased person, known as a ‘deadbot’ or even more weirdly, a ‘griefbot’.

You can feel the attraction. An organisation called ‘Project December’ promises to ‘simulate the dead’, offering a ghostly video centred around the words ‘it’s been so long: I miss you.’ For someone stricken with grief, wondering whether there's any future in life now that their loved one has gone, feeling the aching space in the double bed, breakfast alone, the silence where conversation once filled the air, the temptation to be able to continue to interact and talk with a version of the deceased might be irresistible.

There is already a developing ripple of concern about this ‘digital afterlife industry’. A recent article in Aeon explored the ethical dilemmas. Researchers in Cambridge University have already called for the need for safety protocols against the social and psychological damage that such technology might cause. They focus on the potential for unscrupulous marketers to spam surviving family or friends with the message that they really need XXX because ‘it's what Jim would have wanted’. You can imagine the bereaved ending up being effectively haunted by the ‘deadbot’, and unable to deal with grief healthily. It can be hard to resist for those whose grief is all-consuming and persistent.

Yet it's not just the financial dangers, the possibility of abuse that troubles me. It's the deception involved which seems to me to operate in at a number of ways. And it's theology that helps identify the problems.

The offer of a disembodied, AI-generated replication of the person is a thin paltry offering, as dissatisfying as a Zoom call in place of a person-to-person encounter.

An AI-generated representation of a deceased partner might provide an opportunity for conversation, but it can never replicate the person. One of the great heresies of our age (one we got from René Descartes back in the seventeenth century) is the utter dualism between body and soul. It is the idea that we have some kind of inner self, a disembodied soul or mind which exists quite separately from the body. We sometimes talk about bodies as things that we have rather than things that we are. The anthropology taught within the pages of the Bible, however, suggests we are not disembodied souls but embodied persons, so much so that after death, we don't dissipate like ethereal ‘software’ liberated from the ‘hardware’ of the body, but we are to be clothed with new resurrection bodies continuous with, but different from the ones that we possess right now.

We learned about the importance of our bodies during the COVID pandemic. When we were reduced to communicating via endless Zoom calls, we realised that while they were better than nothing, they could not replicate the reality of face-to-face bodily communication. A Zoom call couldn't pick up the subtle messages of body language. We missed the importance of touch and even the occasional embrace. Our bodies are part of who we are. We are not souls that happen to temporarily inhabit a body, inner selves that are the really important bit of us, with the body an ancillary, malleable thing that we don't ultimately need. The offer of a disembodied, AI-generated replication of the person is a thin paltry offering, as dissatisfying as a virtual meeting in place of a person-to-person encounter.

Another problem I have with deadbots, is that they fix a person in time, like a fossilised version of the person who once lived. AI can only work with what that person has left behind - the recordings, the documents, the data which they produced while they were alive. And yet a crucial part of being human is the capacity to develop and change. As life continues, we grow, we shift, our priorities change. Hopefully we learn greater wisdom. That is part of the point of conversation, that we learn things, it changes us in interaction with others. There is the possibility of spiritual development of maturity, of redemption. A deadbot cannot do that. It cannot be redeemed, it cannot be transformed, because it is, to quote U2, stuck in a moment, and you can’t get out of it.

This is all of a piece with a general trajectory in our culture which is to deny the reality of death. For Christians, death is an intruder. Death - or at least the form in which we know it, that of loss, dereliction, sadness - was not part of the original plan. It doesn't belong here, and we long for the day when one day it will be banished for good. You don’t have to be a Christian to feel the pain of grief, but paradoxically it's only when you have a firm sense of hope that death is a defeated enemy, that you can take it seriously as a real enemy. Without that hope, all you can do is minimise it, pretend it doesn't really matter, hold funerals that try to be relentlessly cheerful, denying the inevitable sense of tragedy and loss that they were always meant to express.

Deadbots are a feeble attempt to try to ignore the deep gulf that lies between us and the dead. In one of his parables, Jesus once depicted a conversation between the living and the dead:

“between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.”

Deadbots, like ‘direct cremations’, where the body is disposed without any funeral, denying the bereaved the chance to grieve, like the language around assisted dying that death is ‘nothing at all’ and therefore can be deliberately hastened, are an attempt to bridge that great chasm, which, this side of the resurrection, we cannot do.

Deadbots in one sense are a testimony to our remarkable powers of invention. Yet they cannot ultimately get around our embodied nature, offer the possibility of redemption, or deal with the grim reality of death. They offer a pale imitation of the source of true hope - the resurrection of the body, the prospect of meeting our loved ones again, yet transformed and fulfilled in the presence of God, even if it means painful yet hopeful patience and waiting until that day.

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The Wild God we can't coerce

Weird and increasingly encountered beyond the wilderness.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A pianist raises his arms while sitting at a grand piano amid recording equipment.

Nick Cave recording Wild God.

nickcave.com

Christianity is a wild thing.

I say this, even while only half-understanding what I’m saying. It’s something that I’m learning. Or perhaps it’s more appropriate to say that it’s something that I’m unlearning. Because, admittedly, I’m far more familiar with a somewhat domesticated view of my own faith tradition. The kind that allows me to fashion fences out of my expectations; to put parameters around God’s presence and boundaries upon his behaviour. Both of which are a farce, of course - but a comforting farce, none the less.

You see, there is nothing ‘comfortable’ about a God who cannot be wholly predicted or comprehended, let alone controlled or contained. A wild God is always going to be a challenge to a culture that has enthroned comfort. We’re too easily spooked and too unused to the sensation of being cosmically baffled.

But, affronting as it may be, I am trying my best to sit in the knowledge that the God I believe in is a wild God. And I’m finding this wildness increasingly hard to ignore. Perhaps it’s all the Rowan Williams I’ve been reading, or my newfound interest in the Romantics (as in, the eighteenth and nineteenth century poets, not the 1970’s American rock band). Or maybe it has more to do with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ new album, which I have been listening to relentlessly over the last week.

In this musical offering, Nick Cave introduces us to his ‘Wild God’, who I think is my God too. It’s just that ‘wild’ has never been the first adjective I reach for when describing him.

Until now, I suppose.

Let me clarify what I mean by wild, because what I’m not saying is that God is inherently chaotic, unruly, reckless or irrational. Wild Gods, as we know them from the myths and legends, act on tempestuous whims, and are more than a little havoc prone. They are perilous, largely because one can never truly know where they stand with them. That couldn’t be further from what I mean. The entire Old Testament - as complex, nuanced and masterful as it is - can be understood as a collection of ways in which the God at its centre is saying – this is who I am, this is what I desire, this is what I’m going to do, this is where you stand with me. If you were to read the Bible, it would become pretty clear pretty quickly: God is insistent that those who seek to know him will never have to second guess him. God’s wildness does not mean that we cannot know the essence of who he is or how he feels towards us. I like to think that we can endeavour to know him accurately, but never exhaustively.

Rather, what I’m trying to get my head and heart around is the knowledge that God, and therefore Christianity, cannot be wholly domesticated. Despite my best efforts, it cannot be made into an entirely comfortable and cozy thing. To make it so, one would have to dilute it, shrink it, bleed any truth out of it. In his poem - Sometimes a Wild God -Tom Hirons writes,

Oh, limitless space.
Oh, eternal mystery.
Oh, endless cycles of death and birth.
Oh, miracle of life.
Oh, the wondrous dance of it all’.

There’s an innate weirdness to the Christian worldview, a pure wildness at the heart of it. It’s brimming with mystery and mysticism. As Hirons hints, it’s bigger and more consequential than our comfort-zones would like it to be. And, what’s more, much of it is communicated through the natural world. Biblical narratives and poetry are endlessly pointing us toward the places and spaces that are outside human cultivation – the stars, the mountains, the oceans – the things that pre-date and will outlive us.

Christianity is wild in that there’s an alluring organic-ness about it. Its truth sits beyond human manipulation and coercion.

For millennia, whole lives have been given over to this truly wild and, I believe, wildly true story. Can I give you just two recent examples? Two people who have (utterly unexpectedly) adventured their way into this wild and wonderful way of seeing the world? Two people I’ve had the joy of learning from over the past year?

First up is Paul Kingsnorth.

Paul is an award-winning poet and a best-selling author of both fiction (including the Buckmaster Trilogy: Wake, Beast and Alexandria) and non-fiction (including Real England, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and his ongoing Sub-Stack series: Abbey of Misrule). He is, and always has been, an advocate for treating the natural world as if it were far more than a machine to be used or a resource to be obtained. Such behaviour is, according to Paul, nothing short of sacrilegious. As well as an enchantment with what he can see and sense in the natural world, he also has a long-standing fascination with all things mystical.

Buddhism, Witchcraft – you name it, he’s tried it.

He told Justin Brierley and I the story of how he his adventures have led him to arrive at the wildest possible destination: Christianity.  

And then there’s the renowned mythologist, Dr Martin Shaw, who decided to do a 101-day wild vigil in Dartmoor. Despite not being a Christian, on the very last night, he prayed. While praying, he looked up and saw something utterly unexplainable, something ‘properly Old Testament’. And that was it – after a night of dancing, several other ‘odd’ experiences, and eighteen months of deep pondering – he was able to say, ‘I went into the forest expected to be wedded to the wild and I came out wedded to Christ’.

Thinking about it, it’s probably no accident that ‘Christianity’ began on the margins, and from there, worked its way into the cities. There was a time where the prediction of Jesus’ arrival was being yelled out into the countryside, so loudly that people were emptying the surrounding towns to come and hear more. A time when rumours of redemption were being whispered in the rural hills. A time when its chief messenger was an inexplicably weird man named John the Baptist; who shunned his prestigious priestly heritage to live in the wilds, to dress in camel skins, to eat honey and insects and insist upon the imminent coming of the long-awaited Messiah. This Messiah, by the way, who would be born where animals are kept, sleep on mountains, retreat into deserts, walk on water, speak to storms, and break people (including himself) out of stone graves.

You see what I mean, Christianity is a wild story to believe and live in accordance with.

It’s the story that drove the ‘Desert Mothers and Fathers’ of the Third Century AD to reject civilisation and all its comforts, in order to seek God in the silence and solitude of the desert. It’s the story that is still inspiring people to live in caves on Mount Athos, secluded islands just off the coast of Wales and forests in the heart of Ireland. An uncontainable message has, since its inception, been lived out in uncontainable places.

Honestly, you want weird? Christianity can darn-well give you weird.

Don’t be fooled by over-familiarity or be swayed by that pesky left-side of your brain, the part that wants to convince you that you know all that there is to know. Christianity is a story that I, myself, had forgotten was quite this wild.