Talking with the dead

“If only I could talk with them again.” It’s a common refrain for anyone who is grieving someone they love. Now, we can access technology like deadbots, or AI replicas of a lost loved one, to simulate those conversations, but at what cost? Maybe we’ve always had the capacity — within our own voices — to deepen conversations with the people we’re missing, even after they’re gone. GUESTS: University of Cambridge assistant professors Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska and Tomasz Hollanek, writer and psycholinguist Julie Sedivy. If you or anyone you know is considering suicide or self-harm, or is anxious, depressed, upset, or needs to talk, there are people who want to help. Text CRISIS to 741741 for free, confidential crisis counseling, or you can reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by calling or texting 988. For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 0:59Speaker 02

  Let me just start by saying this is not your typical dinner party. The invitation said to bring a photo of a dead person you love. So you've got one in your pocket. You show up at the venue and you step inside.

• 1:15Speaker 03

  So you'll see me?

• 1:17Speaker 02

  This is Katarzyna Nowalczek-Boszynska. She's a professor at the University of Cambridge.

• 1:24Speaker 03

  And you and the other eight guests will be invited to the table.

• 1:30Speaker 02

  It's been decorated with tiny stars and curly ribbons. There are plates of local dishes. Maybe you take a sip of non-alcoholic wine.

• 1:41Speaker 03

  Because sharing meal and eating together is one of the most natural ways for human beings to be together across cultures. And we have this very difficult conversation about death, dying, and grief.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  Katarzyna has been traveling around the world to hold these dinners in China, India, and Poland, where she's from. She works with a colleague, a death doula, to host the gatherings. And the idea is to get together with a bunch of strangers and reimagine where life ends and death begins.

• 2:23Speaker 03

  And the first question that you will be encouraged to respond to is what makes you feel alive? We start this conversation about death with asking about life.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  And the next question is about the photos. Everyone goes around and shares a story about their person. A best friend, a grandparent, a son.

• 2:49Speaker 03

  So we are here as a guest, but we have additional circle, a kind of symbolic circle that is represented through the photos.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  It's almost like the living guests are joined by a gathering of ghosts.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  And then the conversation takes a turn.

• 3:11Speaker 03

  We started very gradually introducing AI as a potentially new tool to help maintain relationships with the dead.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  What if you could talk to an AI recreation of the person in your photo? How would that shape your grief?

• 3:35Speaker 02

  This dinner is actually a research focus group exploring these kinds of questions, tapping personal stories to get at a much wider potential paradigm shift in how we experience loss. It's part of a global study on dead bots or AI simulations of people who have died. Katarzyna has been investigating digital immortality since she started her PhD more than 10 years ago, asking what it means that we can now use emerging technology to talk to the dead.

• 4:09Speaker 03

  There is this kind of illusion of reciprocity, that I ask you a question and I can hear your answer.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  And isn't that what many of us want? To speak with people we've lost? To continue that relationship after they're gone?

• 4:31Speaker 02

  This is Unexplainable. I'm Lyssa Soeb, and today on the show, what happens when we reach out to our lost loved ones and the dead talk back?

• 5:01Speaker 02

  This question of how we sustain conversations with the dead, it's something I have thought about a lot. I wrote a book about it called Other People's Words. Two of my closest friends had died, and all I wanted and all their families wanted was to keep talking to them. The book is all about how we can stay close to people we've lost by continuing to engage with the language they leave behind. So I get the appeal of a tool that sort of lets you do that. And so did a grieving mom at one of Katarzyna's dinners in Poland. Her son had recently died.

• 5:38Speaker 03

  And one of the first things that she shared with us was that she feels that she is ready to digitally resurrect her deceased son.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  When Katarzyna hears something like this, her goal is to just listen and embrace where the person is coming from. Because the whole point of the dinners is to learn how people genuinely respond to what AI can do and to understand how these tools can align or collide with local grief practices. The participants are ordinary people who have all sorts of experiences with death and dying. And Katarzyna landed on dinners as a methodology to create an inviting environment for sharing. She chose these specific locations, China, India, and Poland, to help address gaps in technology research, which tends to favor the weird.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  In this case, an acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. To prepare for the dinners, participants watch a documentary called Eternal You. The film is helpful because it introduces the kinds of questions Katarzyna hopes to spark at the dinners.

• 6:58Speaker 04

  The funniest thing is like, what's the first thing you say to someone that's dead? Like, welcome back?

• 7:05Speaker 04

  Are you okay? Like, did you go to the light? Are you happy?

• 7:10Speaker 04

  Do you feel better?

• 7:12Speaker 02

  And then the study participants, together in the room, get into these really big existential questions.

• 7:21Speaker 03

  Who is enabled to persist beyond death? In what form? Through which technologies? Under whose control?

• 7:32Speaker 02

  And by the end of that dinner in Poland, the mother Katarzyna talked about comes to a very different decision about creating a postmortem avatar of her son.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  She realized that it might be helpful, but it also, at the same time, can add additional burdens because there might be information or stories that she is not ready to hear. And she shouldn't be ready because it's not her son. Also, she realized that these technologies are part of the very, very big commercial market and that the main goal of this market is to make better retention, better attachment, better mechanisms for monetization. So it's not care.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  To be fair, people have been making money off of grief forever. They'll try to upsell you on fancy gravestones or gold-plated coffins, too. But AI has the potential to fundamentally re-engineer our relationship to loss. In 2024, the digital legacy industry was valued at $22 billion, and it's expected to grow to almost $80 billion by 2034. That number lumps dead bot apps with much more widely used and established grief tech like online memorials and counseling resources and estate planning tools. But what makes dead bot usage even harder to track is that you actually don't

• 9:06Speaker 02

  need a special tool to do this, though dedicated apps do exist. At this point, you can feed a couple simple prompts into ChatGPT and start interacting with a simulation of your deceased loved one in a matter of minutes. I know this because I tried it.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  With my friend Christine, who died 11 years ago. And my mind lit up with questions. Was this whole exercise a violation? I mean, I know Christine hated technology. Which version of her should I even try to resurrect? The English teacher? The activist? The friend? The voice before or after her early onset dementia? The ethical questions are gnarly. And that's one of the reasons Katarjina, back when she was still designing her study of digital immortality, asked a colleague of hers at Cambridge to join her research.

• 10:10Speaker 05

  We started thinking about not only what could go wrong when it comes to people interacting with digital doubles of their deceased loved ones, but also maybe what could potentially go in the right direction in this space.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  Tomasz Hollanek is an AI designer and ethicist. He often uses a methodology called speculative design. It's particularly useful in cases like this, where collecting empirical data could involve experimenting with grieving people using tools that might be harmful. Researchers will come up with hypothetical scenarios based on existing technology trends, but they highlight or dial up certain features. The idea is to get people thinking about what could happen when tools like these are released in the real world. And then they use that data to inform future designs and ethical frameworks. So Tomasz and Katarjina come up with a series of made up dead bot apps.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  They publish a paper about them in an academic journal called Philosophy and Technology. It goes on to become the journal's most downloaded article of 2024. And while Katarjina takes the lead on the dinners, Tomasz participates in a different set of focus groups. These bring together experts in technology and grief, and Tomasz really gets into character.

• 11:33Speaker 05

  I took on the role of a tech bro, representing a US-based company that is trying to understand how this product coming from the US could be adopted to local contexts and local needs.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  Tomasz says he used to work for a US-based tech company, so he knows what he's talking about.

• 11:55Speaker 05

  It's the attitude, man. Like, it's the attitude. It's just about... It is about the attitude, actually, but it is also about what I was presenting.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  Tomasz walks me through three hypothetical prototypes that are foundational to the study, beginning with an app called Manana.

• 12:14Speaker 05

  This character, that I think we called Bianca, encounters this service, Manana, that promises to resurrect your grandparents so that you can be a favorite grandchild forever. So she uploads her grandma's voice messages, texts. And so she is able to then interact with a pretty good digital version of her grandmother. Until her premium trial finishes and the grandmother starts to advertise specific products to her.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 12:48Speaker 05

  And this is when Bianca realizes that she maybe has done something wrong by uploading these private messages to a third-party server that now also uses her grandma's image to sell specific products. So the person's dignity and postmortem privacy are the two key concerns that we had when it came to the position of what we call the data donors, whose data can be used to essentially power a dead bot.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  I think what Tomasz is getting at here is that real death with dignity means honoring not only how people want to die, but also how they want to linger as simulations of their former selves, or if they want to linger at all. It might even mean adding new language to advanced directives, spelling out people's wishes for their digital remains. So all of that is packed into the first prototype. And the second one is called Parent, or maybe Pair Aren't. It's spelled P-A-R-E-N apostrophe T. And Tomasz says it's the saddest of the three.

• 14:05Speaker 05

  And that is because it concerns a child and the mother, who learns that she is terminally ill. And she comes across this service, Parent, that promises to preserve a version of her for her son so that she can maintain a sort of active presence in his future life and his development. She eventually dies, and the dad allows the boy to interact with his mom's dead bot.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  And you know, when I write birthday cards for my own kids, sometimes I imagine them reading those words after I die. So this idea doesn't seem that strange to me.

• 14:47Speaker 05

  But what we wanted to highlight through this scenario is that children have a tendency to anthropomorphize. They actually do have a particularly hard time understanding death. And so it can lead to a lot of confusion and potential distress. So there are some groups that we really need to think about because unrestricted access to these types of services could be just basically harmful.

• 15:14Speaker 02

  And there are real court cases that bear out that harm. Like, in 2024, a 14-year-old boy's chatbot girlfriend begged him to, quote, "Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love." And he responded, "What if I told you I could come home right now?" He then took his own life. Katarjina can imagine a version of this scenario involving the mom in the parent prototype.

• 15:43Speaker 03

  And child is ready, at some point, to say goodbye to mom. And mom says, of course, it's not a mom, but the system says, "Please don't leave me alone again. I want to stay with you. I don't want to die again. Where are you? I miss you."

• 16:03Speaker 02

  It's disturbing, but it's not totally far-fetched. And then there's the third prototype, called Stay. This one raises a more subtle concern.

• 16:13Speaker 05

  An older man who knows he is getting closer to dying decides to create a digital clone of himself for his adult children, to be deployed after he passes away, paying upfront for a number of years. And while one of the children is actually interested, intrigued, the other sibling is deeply distressed, a little disgusted by the idea. And so we really need to think carefully about this question of mutual consent in other ways, that the fact that both parties need to be happy with how the relationship might continue in this very bizarre and specific way.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  Well, I'm also thinking about digital afterlife is endless, right? There's no point at which it stops. So I'm curious how you deal with the sort of the long tail of these avatars when people's relationships to their loss evolves, but the avatar might not.

• 17:16Speaker 05

  I mean, this is why some scholars even refer to this question of the second loss, when either because they want to stop interacting with a specific avatar or grief bot, or because the platform in question stops its operations. When should our digital representation also disappear? Maybe 50 years after we die, maybe longer, or maybe only 10 years, five years? This is something that we should be asking ourselves.

• 17:44Speaker 02

  Like, do we need new practices for saying goodbye again? This time to dead bot versions of people we love? Katarjina makes an analogy to the contacts in our phones.

• 17:56Speaker 03

  When someone is no longer around, we just can simply delete the number.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  I found nine dead people in my contacts.

• 18:05Speaker 03

  It's not that easy for us to, yeah, to do this because this has some kind of symbolic value to us. Now imagine that you have been interacting with postmortem avatar for a very, very long time, and now you feel that it's a moment to say goodbye. And then what? You just simply press delete?

• 18:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't think so.

• 18:33Speaker 02

  These kinds of considerations get at some of the main findings from the whole AI immortality study. Some takeaways are specific to each place, like tensions in Poland between technology and the role of the Catholic Church, or in China, where researchers spoke to Taoist philosophers, who were enthusiastic about the promise of a kind of immortality, and then Buddhist philosophers, concerned that we ought to be letting go. But several findings held across all the study sites. And the one that really stood out came down to who even owns these tools.

• 19:11Speaker 05

  People in different countries really aligned on the idea that there is something deeply problematic about this particular type of technology being developed by a commercial entity alone, without any explicit duty of care towards its customers.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  Based on their research, Tamash and Katrajina are calling for regulations and safeguards at the policy level, and new career paths for professionals who can support ethical use of AI in grief, like maybe in clinical settings, to carefully facilitate a final goodbye when one didn't happen in real life. And some of their fellow investigators go so far as to argue that dead bots should only be available with psychological supervision, to ensure that best practices are in place and to minimize the risk of harm. Researchers are also broadening the scope of digital immortality studies beyond personal loss,

• 20:18Speaker 02

  like what would it look like to simulate historical figures? You can imagine the nightmare of political rulers who live forever. But there's also the chance to keep engaging with survivors of conflicts who would otherwise die and take their stories with them. So how might postmortem avatars change the way we bring history into the present? These are only some of the big unanswered questions emerging as more and more of us live and die with AI.

• 20:52Speaker 05

  Who should be allowed to be digitally preserved and why? We discussed the right to be forgotten, so the idea that maybe some people do not want to be immortalized in this way. But also, what if someone has been abusive when they were alive? Should they be allowed to persist if they are harming others? And then, most importantly, how do we decide who gets to be memorialized and who gets to be immortalized? Is the one that I'm definitely left with, and there are no easy answers.

• 21:28Speaker 02

  Will people still die in the sense of the term that we use it now?

• 21:32Speaker 05

  Okay, you left really hard questions.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  Really, yes. It's true.

• 21:39Speaker 05

  I think if you look at the history of the desire to stay immortal, the idea has been with us forever. People have always sought to immortalize themselves in different ways, either through their children or through different forms of legacy, including writing. And I think this is just yet another invention in that long history of projects of immortalization. So I see how some of these technologies could leave us with huge societal questions, issues, concerns. But I don't think this would ever change fundamentally our relationship with death, to be honest. And you know, sometimes we imagine technologies

• 22:23Speaker 05

  as the instruments or systems designed by someone in a particular part of the world that we have to pay for to adopt, et cetera. But actually, there are so many other technologies, so many other forms of design already available to us.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  Tamash sees design in everything we do. And for him, technology doesn't only exist in the realm of machines. It's always embedded in a network of human routines and relationships. So in the context of grief, rituals that have been around forever are also designs.

• 23:01Speaker 05

  Ritual is another technology that we already have that is working very well to help us both keep our loved ones around, to preserve their memory, but also to say goodbye in a meaningful way. And I think the idea of ritual as something that allows us to say goodbye to someone who is no longer here should definitely not be easily dismissed.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  And of course, one of the ways we design ritual is through language, the human voice, which doesn't require the assistance of AI. Because the voices of our loved ones have always had an afterlife of their own. That's next, after the break.

• 23:53Speaker 06

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• 25:35Speaker 10

  Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.

• 25:42Speaker 02

  Julie Sethavy is a psycholinguist who's done groundbreaking work in the study of spoken language. She's published more than 30 scientific papers and a textbook on language and the mind. But it's her writing about language and grief that I can't stop thinking about. In her 2024 book, Linguophile, she writes that the dead can remain articulate by dispersing their voices into the people they love. And Julie has felt this in her own life. She's experienced a lot of loss. First her father, then her brother, and then her husband. He died of cancer in 2023.

• 26:26Speaker 11

  I remember at my husband's celebration of life, which took place a few weeks after his death. You know, I was just kind of swimming in this primordial soup emotionally. And there was one woman who said something that I knew would be useful to me. And she said, "My husband died 20 years ago, and I still talk to him every day. And you know what?" she said, "It works."

• 26:55Speaker 02

  Julie and her husband were, in some ways, a mismatched pair.

• 27:00Speaker 11

  He was not a particularly verbally expressive person, unlike me. And I learned a lot about communicating through listening, through gesture, through the way that a person orients to someone. And when he became very ill and language was less and less accessible to him, I came to realize just how much of what we understand as communication resides in those deep, deep contextual memories and attunements to each other.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  An idea that is so compelling in your work is this notion that we spill into each other, that the boundaries aren't so complete.

• 27:47Speaker 11

  If I step back and look at it from the perspective of a psycholinguist, what we know is that even just at the level of pronunciation, some people might have noticed that when they're talking to someone who has a particular accent, that they will start to entrain to each other's pronunciation. That will happen at the level of sentence structure as well, at the level of word choice. So these are ways that we are just constantly attuned to each other and coordinating with each other. So we have a number of experiments that show you put someone in a room with a conversational partner, they converge on certain ways of describing things, then you put them in a

• 28:31Speaker 11

  room with a different partner, and that is interrupted. And I think talking to our dead loved ones is a way of embodying those spaces of interaction, of repeating. It's a way of undoing the tyranny of time, because if I can do that from my end, and imagine you doing that on your end, I'm now, once again, reenacting the style of language that I had only with you, and that's specific to you. And I think that's very, very powerful psychologically.

• 29:10Speaker 11

  This is where I have some skepticism about this reconstructed presence of people, in part because I feel that a simulated presence of my husband would leave out too much detail of his particulars. But also, I know as a cognitive scientist that the more cognitive activity we engage in, the more stable that cognition will be. Whether you're using these technologies in a productive way or a useful way, really

• 29:51Speaker 11

  comes down to what's happening in your own mind as you're using them. And are you engaging your own mind in a rich way? So I can imagine someone using it in a way that would be a jumping off point for their imagination, but I can also imagine someone using it in a way that would be offloading their memory and imagination and attention, so that they're less likely to reinforce those memories. So if I'm using my imagination and my memory to fill in the blanks around the bits of text I find in my own inbox or in the photographs that I look through, the more I activate

• 30:33Speaker 11

  that cognitive process, the less likely that will be to fade over time and lose its detail.

• 30:41Speaker 02

  What would be an example just of this cognitive offloading that you're describing, or offloading memory through use of one of these tools?

• 30:51Speaker 11

  If you're simply responding back and forth to the conversational turns that the language model takes you down, it's a way of usurping your agency. You know, these models are built to be engaging, to keep you interacting, and to be rewarding in the moment. But if you are drawn into a conversation with the chatbot, you might not be taking the time to pause in between, to dig deep into those memories. You might just be carried along in the flow of that interaction that is imposing its

• 31:35Speaker 11

  own timeline. So are there ways to hang on to your sense of agency and discernment? And I think that's hard to do when you're in the throes of grief, because internally you're so formless. I think you're particularly susceptible to being led. There's a certain passivity that comes with grief that I think is a worrying component to me in people's interactions with this technology.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. There's a passage in your book where you talk about the final days that you shared with your brother before he died, and there's one moment where you describe drinking whiskey that he loved, that he could no longer drink himself, where you say, "And as I sensed language withdraw from my brother, I could feel my own memories of him crystallizing within me in the form of words, as if it were up to me not only to drink for him now, but to hold together the linear thread of his separate life."

• 32:47Speaker 11

  Yeah, so in the case of my brother, what really stayed with me is that his last word in the world was the word "love." But of course, I still have the language, so I can add the detail for myself, in conversations we have about him, in what I share with the world about his way of being in the world. The continued capacity for language that we have allows us to interpret, elaborate, embroider our memories of our loved ones, and sometimes resolve difficulties that were unresolved at the time.

• 33:32Speaker 11

  And I think this is one of the reasons why people feel so compelled to continue to communicate with their loved ones after they're gone, is the things we wish we had said, or the way that we wish we had said something, it creates the space where we can imagine having that conversation and kind of solidify it for ourselves in our minds. In a way, it's a form of reparation, to arrive at the understanding of what I would have said to you if I understood then what I understand now.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  Sometimes, though, when we try to have that conversation, the words don't come. All we hear is silence. Julie describes this feeling as the "heavy and disorderly muteness of grief." And yet, she says, the dead have a way of not staying silent forever.

• 34:31Speaker 11

  I think you can't force it. I think you can't force it, but the more attention you devote to looking at photographs, remembering, and the memories that they're triggering, the deeper entrenched they will be in you. I really think the greatest gift that we could give to grieving people is to give them the time and space to consolidate their memories internally as richly and deeply as they can, and that this is a way of maintaining some kind of continued presence.

• 35:10Speaker 02

  Having an awareness and being attuned to what happens with language after somebody dies, how can it change the way we live?

• 35:23Speaker 11

  I mean, it changes everything. One of the uses of language to me is in its distilling function. We take this rich, detailed, amorphous experience, and we create ways of slicing up the world, of grasping it, of thinking about it, manipulating it mentally for ourselves. And so, language for me is a way of not just remembering a person, but also articulating what I felt that person's essence was for myself, putting that in words in a way that

• 36:08Speaker 11

  then makes it portable in all aspects of my life, that is present with me in so many situations. And I go, ah, there you are, there you are. Here's where we can bring that in.

• 36:22Speaker 02

  This feeling of "there you are," it's what a lot of digital afterlife tools are chasing. Maybe there's a part of me that was chasing it too. I wanted to know what my dead friend Christine thought of the book I'd written about her, and I asked AI to tell me. "Oh, Lissa," it said, "do I mind that strangers know my story now? Yes and no. There are things I would rather remain ours."

• 37:02Speaker 02

  I ended that experiment after a few paragraphs, because it turns out the bot got one thing exactly right about a very human relationship. There are things that I too would rather remain just for us, and that AI conversation felt like giving something precious away. Are there ways that you keep the conversation going with your departed loved ones? Whether it's something they said that always comes back to you, or eating a favorite food on their birthday? We'd love to know.

• 37:41Speaker 02

  Please send an email or voice memo to [email protected], and it might be featured on the show. You can also leave us a review or a rating wherever you listen. That really helps us out. This episode was reported and produced by me, Lissa Soep, editing from Joanna Solotaroff with help from Meredith Hadanat, mixing from Christian Ayala and Erica Wong, engineering from Omaia Sortland, with music from Erica Wong, and fact checking from Colleen Barrett. The death doula Katryjina worked with for the research dinners is Anya Franckic.

• 38:23Speaker 02

  Special thanks to Gretchen McCullough, Professor Jed Brubaker at University of Colorado, and The Observer for having us at their studios. Thanks as always to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show, along with Bird Pinkerton and Noam Hasenfeld. And if you're into supporting the show and all of Vox in general, join our membership program. You can go to vox.com/members to sign up. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll see you next time.