After My Dad Died, I Tried To Bring Him Back To Life Using AI. Here's What It Did To My Grief.

Artificial intelligence is widely believed to be the next frontier — an uncharted future, primed for exploration and new life — but since learning about ChatGPT, I can only think about the after-life. Will the way we view death transform with technology? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself for over 10 years.

My recognition of a new type of graveyard began when I was a teenager and I understood a young person’s death meant they left behind more than just family or belongings — it also meant Facebook pages with entire personalities frozen in time.

A profile of a deceased classmate would hold 300+ photos of a night buying slurpees at 7-Eleven, a badge proclaiming they “liked” baby sloths, and comments from friends saying they’d see them tomorrow. We were part of generation “me,” which made the sudden absence of “them” feel even more haunting in the digital realm.

At that time, Facebook was also not prepared for the fact that its “friends” would die and their profiles would remain. After users started to get notifications to “add” their dead loved ones, the company made updates to its profile settings and created a process by which users could be allowed to control a deceased connection’s “digital legacy.” An explainer video on Facebook reads: “We live in a digital world, what happens when we leave it behind?”

When my dad left his behind in 2019, I couldn’t bear to visit his Facebook page, but knowing it existed made it hard to avoid. There were too many comments left from people I didn’t know, all of whom proclaimed to love my Dad. It felt like a virtual tombstone that my family did not create. I didn’t know what was worse — the heartfelt messages from strangers or knowing that he’d never respond.

I investigated how to