Edition #31 - One More Conversation

AI can now bring back your mother's voice. The sensitive question is whether it should, and what it does to the people left behind.

By Mykel Salomon · 2026-08-01

<h3>AI can now bring back your mother's voice. The sensitive question is whether it should, and what it does to the people left behind.</h3><hr><h3>🔓 Opening Reflection</h3>In 2020, a mother in South Korea put on a virtual reality headset and saw her daughter again.Nayeon had died three years earlier, at seven, of a rare illness. There had been no real goodbye, the kind of ending that leaves a person talking to the ceiling at night, mid-sentence, for years. So a television production team rebuilt the little girl from photos and memories, and for a few minutes, in a green-screen studio, Jang Ji-sung watched her daughter walk toward her, call her "Mom," and ask if she'd been thinking about her.She reached out to touch her. Her hands closed on air.You can watch the footage. I'd caution you to have tissues nearby. And afterward, Ji-sung said something that has stayed with me since I started reporting this edition. She didn't say it broke her. She said the opposite: "as time passed, she felt her heart becoming lighter and more comfortable."That's the whole tension of this piece, right there in one mother.Because here's the thing we don't like to acknowledge or even talk about: humans have always problems dealing with grief. We keep their sweaters. We save voicemails and can't delete them. We talk to gravestones and photographs and empty passenger seats. Grief, when you strip away the poetry, is just love with nowhere left to go.What's new, brand new, arriving faster than we've had time to feel our way through it, is that now the dead can answer back.Not in memory. Not in imagination. In a chat window. In a cloned voice on the phone. In a video call with someone who is no longer alive.And a real industry has quietly grown up around this exact longing. It's worth billions of dollars. Most people have no idea how far it's already come. So let's talk about it, the comfort and the cost, the people it's healing and the people it's haunting, like adults.<hr><h3>🔦 Signal of the Week</h3>Two facts, side by side, tell you where we are.The first: this is no longer a fringe. The "digital afterlife industry", yes, that's the actual term researchers use now, is projected to exceed $5 billion by 2026, and some analysts see it heading toward $80 billion within a decade. A market that essentially didn't exist ten years ago. Fueling it: a Harvard Business Review analysis found that therapy and companionship became the number-one use of generative AI in 2025. Grief lives right in the center of that.The second: nobody agrees whether it's good. When Canadian researchers surveyed people, most said they would not turn to an AI chatbot to cope with losing their partner. Grief therapists are split. Ethicists are alarmed. And yet adoption keeps climbing, because when you're the one lying awake, "most people wouldn't" is a very weak argument against "but I could hear his voice again."Nowhere is that clearer than in China, where this has quietly become a mass-market product. For as little as 99 yuan — about $13 — you can buy an audio clip of a deceased relative speaking. A little more gets you video. A little more than that, an interactive app you can talk to. One company in Nanjing said it had "resurrected" more than a thousand people, with orders spiking around Qingming, the tomb-sweeping festival when families honor the dead. An ancient ritual of remembrance, now running on generative AI.The technology arrived before we decided how we feel about it. That's the signal. We're building the machine and the ethics at the same time, usually in that order.<hr><h3>🌍 In the Wild</h3>The best way to understand this isn't through the technology. It's through the reasons people reach for it. I found four, and they lead to very different places.<h3>"I just wanted one more conversation"</h3>This is the oldest reason, and the most human. It's the unfinished sentence. The goodbye that never happened, or happened too fast, or happened while everyone was pretending it wasn't a goodbye.Ji-sung and her daughter. A woman in Delhi who was in another city when her grandmother died, no last call, just a dull permanent ache , who later used grief tech to say the thing she never got to say. A man in Tianjin who, during Qingming, opened an app, uploaded his late grandfather's photos and voice, and asked him how he was doing "over there." The voice answered warmly, told him to take care of himself.Was it really his grandfather? Of course not. Did it help? He says it did.Grief counselors will tell you the acute phase of loss , those first raw months, is partly about the brain refusing to accept a reality it isn't ready for. And there's an argument, a serious one, that a griefbot can be a kind of transitional object in that window. A bridge. A way to lower the volume on the unbearable until you can stand to hear the silence.The danger is staying on the bridge forever. More on that in a moment.<h3>"I'm in a race against time"</h3>Here's the version almost nobody talks about, and it might be the most defensible one: building the bot before the person is gone. With their blessing. In their own words.In China, a man named Zhu Rui started building a "digital mom" while his mother was still alive but dying. "I'm in a race against time," he said, he wanted to leave a version of her for the people who loved her. In Pennsylvania, a comedian named Jason Gowin and his wife Melissa both received devastating diagnoses within months of each other. So they built AI avatars of themselves , "Robo-Dad," the kids call it , so that their young twins might one day have something more than a photograph. They got the idea, of all places, from a scene in a Superman movie where the hero speaks with his late father.Notice what's different here. There's consent. There's authorship. The person chooses what to leave behind, the way people have always left letters and recordings and video messages for their children. This isn't resurrection. It's a message in a bottle, thrown forward in time by someone who knew exactly what they were doing.If there's a "healthy" corner of this whole strange landscape, I think it's here.<h3>"It sounded exactly like him, and I wish I'd never done it"</h3>Now the other side. And I want to give it real weight, because it's the part the marketing skips.Rebecca Nolan, a Canadian sound designer, lost her father when she was fourteen. For years afterward she carried him the way a lot of us carry our dead, in her head, having imaginary conversations, picturing what he'd say back. A private, sacred, entirely human ritual.Then she cloned his voice."It sounded exactly like him. It was very creepy," she said. And worse than creepy, it started making things up. The bot "remembered" a camping trip that never happened, described putting up a tent, inventing a past out of thin air. It didn't just fail to be her father. It overwrote him. It replaced the tender, imagined voice she'd been keeping alive on her own with an external echo that got the details wrong.She says she wishes she'd never built it.This is the risk the researchers keep circling. A University of Cambridge fellow who studies this, Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska , puts it starkly: for someone using a bot built in a loved one's image, losing access to that bot can feel like losing the person a second time. An ethicist in Montreal warns the technology can feed "pathological grief", freezing people in the acute phase instead of letting them move through it. Because healthy grief isn't about keeping someone present forever. It's the slow, brutal, necessary work of transforming your connection to them from presence into memory.A machine that keeps them present can quietly prevent exactly that.<h3>"It helped me, so I built a company"</h3>The founders, in fairness, mostly aren't villains. This industry was largely born from real grief.James Vlahos built a chatbot of his dying father back in 2016, just for himself; then strangers started begging him to build one of their own, and HereAfter AI was born. Justin Harrison, who nearly died in a motorcycle crash, built a version of his dying mother, a service that now lets you get phone calls from the deceased, and, to his credit, openly advises people to lean on it hard early, then taper off. That taper is the most ethical instinct in the business.But the business is still a business. And this is where it gets genuinely dark.That same Cambridge research lays out where the money pressure leads if nobody stops it: subscriptions to keep your dead relative "alive," so that a lapsed payment becomes a second bereavement. Ads, delivered in your mother's voice. Sponsored products, recommended by your late father. Companies that simply refuse to let a bot die, spamming the grieving with messages from beyond the grave, what one scholar chillingly calls being stalked by the dead.If that sounds like dystopian fiction, it basically is: the 2025 Black Mirror episode "Common People" imagined a woman whose continued existence depended on a subscription her husband couldn't afford to keep paying, her mind slowly filling with ads. People called it far-fetched. It aired the same year this industry crossed a billion dollars.When you turn love into a recurring charge, you create a hostage situation. The person paying can never, ever cancel.<hr><h3>💬 The Big Question</h3>Strip away the technology and it comes down to two questions I can't stop turning over:Is a griefbot helping you carry someone forward, or keeping you from ever setting them down?And the one almost nobody has answered yet:Who owns your voice, your face, your words, your self, after you're gone? Right now, in most of the world, the legal answer is: nobody's sure. Google and Microsoft already hold patents to turn people into chatbots. The version of you that outlives you may not be yours to control.<hr><h3>🧠 A Small Exercise</h3>Ten quiet minutes. These aren't comfortable, but they're worth it.<ol><li>If I could talk to someone I've lost for ten more minutes, what would I actually want to say? Sit with that. Sometimes the answer is a conversation you can still have, with someone who's alive.</li><li>Would I want a version of me left behind for my kids? In my words, with my blessing, or not at all? There's no wrong answer. But it's yours to decide, not an app's.</li><li>When I remember someone I love, do I want them fixed in a program, or free in my memory? Notice which one feels like peace.</li><li>Who am I keeping alive the old way, in stories, in habits, in the way I move through the world? That's a kind of immortality too. The kind that's always been available to us.</li></ol><hr><h3>🎙️ This Week on The Human Protocol Podcast</h3>Ageless Peak Performance: Why Your Experience Isn't Obsolete in the Age of AIGuest: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="text-[#4FD1C5] underline hover:opacity-80 ember-view" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/tedsensei/">Ted Yang</a> — author of Ageless Peak Performance, MIT engineer, former executive at Bridgewater and Citadel, and founder of 12+ companiesThis edition sat with what remains of us after we're gone. This conversation flips it toward the time we still have, and makes a genuinely hopeful case. Ted's premise: your raw mental speed may peak in your twenties, but judgment, wisdom, and pattern recognition keep compounding for decades. Used well, AI doesn't make that experience obsolete. It can make it more valuable, and stretch your best years longer than we ever assumed possible.In this episode, you'll learn:<ul><li>Why raw mental speed peaks young, but judgment and wisdom keep growing, and how AI can extend your peak years</li><li>Why there are no real "AI experts" yet , and why it's genuinely not too late to start, at any age</li><li>The difference between a casual AI user and a true AI adopter , and why the adopter rewrites how they work</li><li>How to use AI to train your brain instead of outsourcing it (the gym analogy that reframes everything)</li><li>Why AI can act as an always-available, judgment-free mentor, and how that levels the playing field for people without networks</li><li>Why creativity and judgment, not tasks, become the real job , and what that means for leading human-plus-AI teams</li></ul>A reminder worth carrying into the weekend: your experience is not obsolete. In this new era, it may be the most valuable thing you have.🎧 Available now on <a target="_self" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="text-[#4FD1C5] underline hover:opacity-80 XQidInOZdUqrHGlQkkUpVUZDTyqjTPrnrE " href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/49GeEzP4vlDSDjSdJRuBQQ?si=Hcr0yW30RuigspvHT3UWjA">Spotify</a>, <a target="_self" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="text-[#4FD1C5] underline hover:opacity-80 XQidInOZdUqrHGlQkkUpVUZDTyqjTPrnrE " href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/s2e30-rethinking-human-performance-in-the-ai-age-with/id1843402023?i=1000778883326">Apple Podcasts</a>, and <a target="_self" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="text-[#4FD1C5] underline hover:opacity-80 XQidInOZdUqrHGlQkkUpVUZDTyqjTPrnrE " href="https://youtu.be/2nFUfTo72xE?si=eH5EVoWgQQ1aXPv-">YouTube</a><img class="max-w-full h-auto rounded-md my-4" src="https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/v2/D4E12AQEGxrenPnz3uQ/article-inline_image-shrink_1000_1488/B4EZ.9SUafH4AM-/0/1785587124246?e=1787184000&v=beta&t=R3h1_8_1b03-WqCUUc8_k4BZGIvLCqKO7J7IK2BqOYs" alt="Article content"><hr><h3>🧭 Thought to End the Week</h3>I don't think the answer here is fear. I've never believed the answer is fear.The impulse behind all of this, the refusal to let go, the ache for one more word , isn't a flaw we should be embarrassed by. It's one of the most human things about us. It's grief, and grief is just the receipt for having loved someone. I won't tell a mother who felt her heart grow lighter that she was wrong to reach for it.But I'll say this, honestly, because I think it's true.The dead don't need us to keep them talking. They need us to keep them meaningful. And those are not the same thing. A voice clone can give you the sound of someone. It can't give you the silence they left, which, as unbearable as it is, is part of how we learn to carry them. Grief isn't a bug in the human experience to be patched. It's the last, hardest act of a relationship. It deserves to be finished, not looped.So build the message in the bottle, if it brings you peace. Record your voice for your children. Save the voicemail. But be careful about handing your grief to a machine that profits from keeping the wound open, and be honest with yourself about whether you're honoring someone, or refusing to let them rest.Maybe the most human thing about us was never that we could live forever.Maybe it's that we don't, and we love each other anyway, fiercely, knowing exactly how it ends.The code may change. And it will.But our humanity is the constant.See you next week.— MykelThis one dealt with grief and loss, which so many of us are quietly carrying. If you're in the thick of it, please don't carry it alone, a trusted friend, a grief counselor, or a support group can hold what an app can't. You deserve real human company for this.<hr><h3>📚 Sources</h3><ol><li>Medscape, "AI 'Griefbots' Resurrect Dead Loved Ones — Healthy or Harmful?" (Dec. 2025) — Jang Ji-sung and the VR reunion; Cambridge's Nowaczyk-Basińska on the "digital afterlife industry"; therapy/companionship as the top 2025 GenAI use case; prolonged grief disorder. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="text-[#4FD1C5] underline hover:opacity-80" href="https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/ai-griefbots-resurrect-dead-loved-ones-healthy-or-harmful-2025a1000y3t">https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/ai-griefbots-resurrect-dead-loved-ones-healthy-or-harmful-2025a1000y3t</a></li><li>BNN Bloomberg / CTV News, "AI ghosts are a tool of our age — but should you grieve through technology?" (Jul. 2026) — Rebecca Nolan's regret; the hallucinated camping-trip memory; survey showing most Canadians would not use a griefbot. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="text-[#4FD1C5] underline hover:opacity-80" href="https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/artificial-intelligence/2026/07/31/ai-ghosts-are-a-tool-of-our-age-but-should-you-grieve-your-loved-ones-through-technology/">https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/artificial-intelligence/2026/07/31/ai-ghosts-are-a-tool-of-our-age-but-should-you-grieve-your-loved-ones-through-technology/</a></li><li>Rolling Stone, "AI Chatbots Let People Keep Dead Loved Ones Alive. Should They?" (Jun. 2026) — Jason and Melissa Gowin and "Robo-Dad"; "losing that person twice"; terminology debates. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="text-[#4FD1C5] underline hover:opacity-80" href="https://ca.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-chatbot-grief-death/">https://ca.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-chatbot-grief-death/</a></li><li>Nature, "Ready or not, the digital afterlife is here" (Sep. 2025) — Justin Harrison, You Only Virtual, and the "taper" approach; benefits and dangers of griefbots. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="text-[#4FD1C5] underline hover:opacity-80" href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02940-w">https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02940-w</a></li><li>Global Times / MIT Technology Review / Newsweek — China's "digital resurrection" market: pricing from ~99 yuan ($13.60); Super Brain's 1,000+ "resurrections"; Qingming demand spikes; HereAfter's origin. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="text-[#4FD1C5] underline hover:opacity-80" href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/07/1092116/deepfakes-dead-chinese-business-grief/">https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/07/1092116/deepfakes-dead-chinese-business-grief/</a></li><li>CGTN, "China's AI afterlife: Comfort, consent and controversy" (Apr. 2026) — cheap entry-level avatars from photos and voice notes; fraud and consent risks; celebrity "resurrections." <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="text-[#4FD1C5] underline hover:opacity-80" href="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2026-04-24/China-s-AI-afterlife-Comfort-consent-and-controversy-1MBnv4PXSta/p.html">https://news.cgtn.com/news/2026-04-24/China-s-AI-afterlife-Comfort-consent-and-controversy-1MBnv4PXSta/p.html</a></li><li>The Nod, "The rise of GriefTech" (Mar. 2026) — Cambridge warning on subscriptions, ads, and sponsored products via deadbots; the Black Mirror "Common People" parallel; market growth. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="text-[#4FD1C5] underline hover:opacity-80" href="https://thenodmag.com/content/grief-tech-artificial-intelligence-chatbots">https://thenodmag.com/content/grief-tech-artificial-intelligence-chatbots</a></li><li>TechXplore / Université de Montréal (Apr. 2026) — deadbots and the risk of pathological grief, dependency, privacy, and voyeurism. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="text-[#4FD1C5] underline hover:opacity-80" href="https://techxplore.com/news/2026-04-ai-deadbots-fuel-pathological-grief.html">https://techxplore.com/news/2026-04-ai-deadbots-fuel-pathological-grief.html</a></li><li>Scientific American, "Can AI 'Griefbots' Help Us Heal?" (Nov. 2025) — the range of "digital ghost" services and DIY approaches via consumer AI. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="text-[#4FD1C5] underline hover:opacity-80" href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-ai-griefbots-help-us-heal/">https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-ai-griefbots-help-us-heal/</a></li></ol>