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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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Review

Culture

Film & TV

7 August 2024

9 min read

Deadpool and Wolverine admit there’s only one story worth telling

Here's why a knowing take on post-modernity's void strikes a chord.

James Lawrence

James is Canon Missioner at Blackburn Cathedral. He researches technology and theology at Oxford University.

Two superheroes, deadpool and Wolverine, stand and crouch respectively, in a desert like place.

'A desert of criticism and a wasteland of cynicism.'

Disney.

Can Marvel Jesus save a dying cinematic universe? That's the key question for the latest film from Marvel Studios and, it would seem at least from the box office, that the answer is: yes!

Deadpool & Wolverine, the snarky buddy comedy odd-ball team-up between Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, made over $590 million in its first week. That’s the sixth biggest opening of all time.

What follows is not a traditional review, you can find plenty of those online already. Instead, I want us to consider Deadpool & Wolverine as a cultural artefact that displays some of the key themes of our society. The stories that we tell, including the films that Hollywood produces, can act as a mirror to our culture, giving us an opportunity to see trends that we might have otherwise missed. 

As a mirror to this cultural moment, I want to suggest that Deadpool & Wolverine presents us with a cynical and nihilistic take on the end of an era in which all the protagonists can do is barrage the audience with an endless stream of jokes and quips.

The third instalment of the Deadpool trilogy is the first to be set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) since Disney acquired the rights to 20th Century Fox for $71.3 billion. Until now all the X-men movies, the Wolverine movies, the prequels and the Deadpool movies have been produced by 20th Century Fox. But it’s the start of a new chapter for the X-men franchise.

The Disney executives hope for a new lease of life for the MCU, which has been struggling to find its way ever since the epic conclusion to Avengers: End Game. Of course, ordinarily, this sort of corporate back and forth would be irrelevant when thinking about the themes of a movie, but, in this case, the business backdrop is effectively a major plot-point of the film.

A significant portion of the dialogue is spent discussing the acquisition of the X-men franchise by Disney. Deadpool talks about what Kevin Feige (president of Marvel Studios) will and won’t allow in his films. A major action set-piece takes place next to a ruin of the 20th Century Fox logo. Deadpool jokes with Wolverine that he is joined the MCU when they are in a bit of a slump, and, when Deadpool is asked to save the universe, he takes this to mean that he should save the entire MCU franchise describing himself as ‘Marvel Jesus’. The movie knows that this film is the product of a business deal, and it wants its audience to know that too.

So, this film takes place at the end of an era and to highlight this throughout the film, a series of high-profile cameos are made by actors and characters from the last 24 years (no spoilers here). They are brought into the movie so that they might be given a final send off. A heroic on camera action hero death, one last valiant fight before the curtain falls. In a sense, Deadpool & Wolverine is a eulogy to the comic film industry, an era has passed away, we live only in the ruins of a once great edifice and all we can do is joke around and reminisce about the good old days

Deadpool’s is a dark humour, laughing death in the face, traipsing around the trash heap at the end of time incessantly spouting one-liners.

The scepticism Deadpool and Wolverine exhibits about the movie industry, correlates neatly with a post-modern disposition to be suspicious about the role of power. Deadpool knows, and points out to his audience, that it is only the vested interests of corporate power that allow this film to take place, and he revels with delight when these corporations seem to be failing. He is under no illusions that the studios are benign entities who merely hope to make worthwhile art - Deadpool is a cynic, the jester, who takes great satisfaction in declaring that the emperor has no clothes.

Coupled with this is the constant breaking of the fourth wall. This is one of Deadpool’s foundational characteristics, he has been breaking the fourth wall since his earliest appearance in the comics and the previous two films. Deadpool uses this ability to deconstruct and point out some of the quirks of the superhero genre. For example, in the first film when a villain jumps into the scene from a great height, Deadpool says to the audience: “Superhero landing. She's gonna do a superhero landing… You know, that's really hard on your knees.” (This joke is repeated in Deadpool & Wolverine).

The deconstructionist tone contrasts sharply with Marvel’s previous movies, particularly the grand narrative which spanned 22 films and culminated in Avengers: Endgame- an unashamed mythic narrative about the defeat of evil and the triumph of good over bad. Yes, there were jokes and subversive elements in the MCU before Deadpool, but in the main the characters like Captain America are sincere and the movie takes them and their motivations seriously. Deadpool in contrast delights in deconstructing the narrative: Marvel’s grand narrative is over, Fox’s cinematic universe is over, and it is unclear if they will be able to successfully tell another epic mythic story.

All of this, I imagine, sounds quite dystopian and that is not just how the film feels but also serves as the set piece for the middle section of the story. The misadventure of Deadpool & Wolverine lands both characters in “the void at the end of time” a place described as a Mad Max set, a barren desert where only the strongest survive by dominating the weak. In this hellish environment, Deadpool is completely unphased, he continues to make joke after joke, despite multiple characters in the movie telling him to ‘shut up’, and he displays zero remorse when his joking around results in other characters being killed. The humour of this film is the final element which makes it feel very post-modern and nihilistic. Deadpool and Wolverine are left in a hellscape and all they can do is fight with one another and make non-stop sarcastic quips. Deadpool’s is a dark humour, laughing death in the face, traipsing around the trash heap at the end of time incessantly spouting one-liners.

Paul Ricoeur, the French Christian and philosopher describes in his work two instincts in modernity: a ‘willingness to listen’ and a ‘willingness to suspect.’ The willingness to suspect is best exemplified by the three ‘masters of suspicion’, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. Following these masters of suspicion, modernity has learnt to be critical and to criticise texts, narratives, motives and power. Ricoeur thinks that we need both instincts, we need to be able to listen and we should be able to suspect, but, he cautions post-modern society that it is possible to find yourself in a desert of criticism in which there is nothing symbolic, nothing sacred, nothing but power and will. I have never seen a better depiction of the ‘desert of criticism’ put to film than Deadpool’s void at the end of time.

Perhaps the film is doing this because this is, in fact, the only story worth telling.

All of this was bubbling around in the back of my head when the film came to its final climax. It is my experience of the finale that made me want to write this review of the film. After almost two hours of post-modern nihilism, in the denouement, our two protagonists are faced with the classic superhero choice to sacrifice themselves so that they can save their universe from imminent destruction. And, of course, like good superheroes, they go willingly into danger and give up their lives for the sake of their friends.

I had such a strange set of emotions as I watched this part of the story unfold.

Firstly, I thought “Oh, right, this is the moment when the hero sacrifices himself- that is obviously what comes next.” I have been conditioned by decades of superhero films to expect this sequence of events at the end of the movie. But secondly, I found myself thinking. “This is so out of place with the rest of the film, this is pure sentimental heroics, we’ve just had two hours of cynicism and fourth wall breaking and the climax of the whole thing is a traditional superhero ending?!” And then, lastly, I found myself wonderful, ‘Perhaps the film is doing this because this is, in fact, the only story worth telling- that everything up to this point has only been playing at cynicism because, at a fundamental level, the filmmakers realise that cynicism and scepticism aren’t enough to make a compelling story.”

Western society feels as if it has lost its narrative. It is as if, just like the MCU, our best story is behind us, and we are flailing to find a new story.

Deadpool & Wolverine is a strikingly resonant film, it has struck a chord with contemporary culture. The film offers us a mirror to the contemporary society in which we live and I think we must look deeply into the mirror if we are going to accurately diagnose the ills of our current cultural moment.

Many people today feel like they are living in a desert at the end of time, devoid of meaningful symbolism and sustenance for the soul. The hollowing out of meaning in post-modern Western culture has resulted in a tinderbox which is ready to combust at a moment's notice. “Over the last month we have seen riots breakout across England caused by an incident in Southport that sent sparks flying.”. Relatedly, contemporary Western society feels as if it has lost its narrative. It is as if, just like the MCU, our best story is behind us, and we are flailing to find a new story. Look at the average Netflix viewing figures to discover that many of us only enjoy watching re-runs of our favourite TV shows from 10 years ago.

The cynicism and scepticism of Deadpool & Wolverine resonates with many people in the contemporary West, and the film offers two ways of reacting to the pain of our cultural moment.

For most of the film Deadpool saunters through this nihilistic hellscape spouting a barrage of gags, sex-jokes and sarcastic quips- that is the first option, to laugh in the face of meaninglessness. But for the climax of the movie, it’s as if the writers knew that they couldn’t maintain the ruse. When the characters of Deadpool and Wolverine make the choice to sacrifice themselves for the sake of others they choose to live for something bigger than themselves. They admit in their actions that they aren’t the nihilists they were pretending to be, and the film acknowledges that in the final analysis there is nothing ultimately satisfying, nothing ultimately sustaining, in that way of being in the world.

Or, to put it another way, the only way that Deadpool could become ‘Marvel Jesus’ is by following in the footsteps of actual Jesus: by sacrificing his life for those whom he loved and by discovering that true life, resurrection life, is always and only ever found on the far side of death.

Paul Ricoeur writes that ‘beyond the desert of criticism, we wish to be called again’, called to a second, or post-critical naïveté. Naivete is a deliberately provocative term to use, no one wants to be considered naïve (even postcritically naïve!), so perhaps you might prefer to think of it as synonymous with restored or as experiencing a recollection of meaning. I think many people in the West today are waking up to the challenge of living in a desert of criticism and a wasteland of cynicism. The capacity to criticise is an important skill, but it has run rampant and left out society with a void of meaning in which nothing is sacred, nothing is enchanted.

Deadpool & Wolverine speaks of a culture desperately in need of a new story, a narrative within which meaning can be found. The film paints in vivid imagery the result of a society that has lost its narrative. And, in the end, Deadpool and Wolverine seems to admit that there is only one story worth telling: self-sacrificial death and resurrection.