Three years ago, Christi Angel was desperate to talk to her close friend—and first love—Cameroun. When he had last texted her, she was overcome by the busyness of life and didn’t respond. Then Cameroun died suddenly from liver cirrhosis, leaving behind his wife and many devastated family members and friends, including Christi.
In her grief, Christi experienced what so many of us have felt after losing a loved one: She wished she could speak to her friend just one more time. As a Christian, she knew real-life séances were out of the question. But were artificial intelligence–powered imitations? Maybe it will be okay, she thought. Let’s just try and see.
The question then: how exactly should Christians respond to the griefbot industry? AI researcher Jason Thacker, a professor at Boyce College, told me it must be an “all-hands-on-deck approach.”
In her dim New York City apartment one evening, she opened her laptop and set up a chatbot profile through Project December, an AI platform with the tagline “Simulate the dead.”
She shared some information about Cameroun through an online form that asked for his age, details about their relationship, and his personality traits. The platform then spit out a custom chatbot of her friend, which relied on AI models to generate messages that sounded eerily similar to Cameroun before he died in late 2020.
“I can’t believe I am trying this. How are you?” Christi wrote to the chatbot in early 2023.
“I’m alright. I’m working. I’m living. I’m … scared,” the Cameroun character replied.
“Why are you scared?” Christi asked. “I’m not used to being dead,” it said. “What makes you happy over there?” she typed. “Having someone to care enough to ask,” it replied, later adding, “being with you.”
The whole thing was strange: It sounded too much like Cameroun, Christi told me. The vernacular; the shortened words; what it knew about his job in Chattanooga, Tennessee; the Fred Hammond songs and other music the two had loved since they first met in high school. At some point, the AI bot wrote that Cameroun—also a Christian—hadn’t really crossed over to the other side. Where he was, it wrote, was “dark and lonely.”
“What kind of people have you met?” Christi asked.
“Mostly addicts.”
“In heaven?”
“Nope, in hell.”
She backed away from her computer.
Project December warns its application may help or hurt users, who pay $10 for fictionalized séances and should, according to the company, use it at their own risk. The startup is one of many on the global market employing generative AI to mimic the dead. These platforms blur the line between the reality of death and the mirage of life through computer programs known as griefbots and deadbots.
Pastors should be cognizant that some congregants might be drawn to griefbots, and should be prepared to steer them away from these technologies. But Thacker notes conversations about these tools need to happen before a devastating loss; these decisions can become much more difficult in the midst of pain.
The burgeoning world of grief tech mostly runs on large language models trained on troves of data, including technology developed by dominant industry players like OpenAI. One company, Seance AI, asks users to input the personality traits and writing styles of loved ones and let them “speak to your heart once again” from beyond the veil. Others, such as HereAfter AI and Eternos, allow users who pay a fee to interact with “digital twins” of people who preserved their memories and personal views before they died.
Some users have bypassed bespoke griefbots and created their own connections on OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other apps.
