AI avatars bring comfort but can’t replace grieving

Diego Felix Dos Santos never expected to hear his late father’s voice again — until AI made it possible. “The tone of the voice is pretty perfect,” he says. “It feels like, almost, he's here.”

After the 39-year-old's father unexpectedly passed away last year, Dos Santos travelled to his native Brazil to be with family. It was only after returning to his home in Edinburgh, Scotland, that he says he realized “I had nothing to actually remind [me of] my dad." What he did have, though, was a voice note his father sent him from his hospital bed.

In July, Dos Santos took that voice note and, with the help of Eleven Labs — an artificial intelligence-powered voice generator platform founded in 2022 — paid a $22 monthly fee to upload the audio and create new messages in his father’s voice, simulating conversations they never got to have.

“Hi son, how are you?" his father’s voice rings out from the app, just as it would on their usual weekly calls. “Kisses. I love you, bossy,” the voice adds, using the nickname his father gave him when he was a boy.

Although Dos Santos’ religious family initially had reservations about him using AI to communicate with his father beyond the grave, he says they’ve since come around to his choice. Now, he and his wife, who was diagnosed with cancer in 2013, are considering creating AI voice clones of themselves too.

Dos Santos’ experience reflects a growing trend where people are using AI not just to create digital likenesses, but to simulate the dead. As these technologies become more personal and widespread, experts warn about the ethical and emotional risks — from questions of consent and data protection to the commercial incentives driving their development.

The market for AI technologies designed to help people process loss, known as “grief tech,” has grown exponentially in recent years. Ignited by US startups such as StoryFile (an AI-powered video tool that lets people record themselves for posthumous playback) and HereAfter AI (a voice-based app that creates interactive avatars of deceased loved ones), this tech markets itself as a means to cope with, and perhaps even forestall, grief.

Robert LoCascio founded Eternos, a Palo Alto-based startup that helps people create an AI digital twin, in 2024 after losing his father. Since then, more than 400 people have used the platform to create interactive AI avatars, LoCascio says, with subscriptions starting from $25 for a legacy account that allows a person's story to remain accessible to loved ones after their death.

Michael Bommer, an engineer and former colleague of LoCascio’s, was among the first to use Eternos to create a digital replica of himself after learning of his terminal cancer diagnosis. LoCascio says Bommer, who died last year, found closure in leaving a piece of himself behind for his family. His family has found closure from it too.

“It captures his essence well,” his wife Anett Bommer, who lives in Berlin, Germany, told Reuters in an email. “I feel him close in my life through the AI because it was his last heartfelt project and this has now become part of my life.”

The goal of this technology isn’t to create digital ghosts, says Alex Quinn, the CEO of Authentic Interactions Inc, the Los Angeles-based parent company of StoryFile. Rather, it's to preserve people’s memories while they’re still around to share them.

“These stories would cease to exist without some type of interference,” Quinn says, noting that while the limitations of AI clones are obvious — the avatar will not know the weather outside or who the current president is — the results are still worthwhile. “I don’t think anyone ever wants to see someone’s history and someone’s story and someone’s memory completely go.”

One of the biggest concerns surrounding grief tech is consent: What does it mean to digitally recreate someone who ultimately has no control over how their likeness is used after they die? While some firms such as Eleven Labs allow people to create digital likenesses of their loved ones posthumously, others are more restrictive.

LoCascio from Eternos, for example, says their policy restricts them from creating avatars of people who are unable to give their consent and they administer checks to enforce it, including requiring those making accounts to record their voice twice. “We won't cross the line,” he says. “I think, ethically, this doesn't work.”

Eleven Labs did not respond to a request for comment.

In 2024, AI ethicists at Cambridge University published a study calling for safety protocols to address the social and psychological risks posed by the “digital afterlife industry” Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, a researcher at Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and co-author of the study, says commercial incentives often drive the development of these technologies — making transparency around data privacy essential.

“We have no idea how this (deceased person’s) data will be used in two or 10 years, or how this technology will evolve,” Nowaczyk-Basińska says. One solution, she suggests, is to treat consent as an ongoing process, revisited as AI capabilities change.

But beyond concerns around data privacy and exploitation, some experts also worry about the emotional toll of this technology. Could it inhibit the way people deal with grief?

Cody Delistraty, author of “The Grief Cure”, cautions against the idea that AI can offer a shortcut through mourning. “Grief is individualized,” he says, noting that people can't put it through the sieve of a digital avatar or AI chatbot and expect to "get something really positive."

Anett Bommer says she didn’t rely on her husband’s AI avatar during the early stages of her own grieving process, but she doesn’t think it would have affected her negatively if she had. “The relationship to loss hasn't changed anything,” she says, adding that the avatar “is just another tool I can use alongside photos, drawings, letters, notes," to remember him by.

Andy Langford, the clinical director of the UK-based bereavement charity Cruse, says that while it’s too soon to make concrete conclusions about the effects of AI on grief, it’s important that those using this technology to overcome loss don’t “get stuck” in their grief. “We need to do a bit of both — the grieving and the living,” he says.

For Dos Santos, turning to AI in his moment of grief wasn't about finding closure — it was about seeking connection. “There’s some specific moments in life ... that I would normally call him for advice,” Dos Santos says. While he knows AI can’t bring his father back, it offers a way to recreate the “magical moments” he can no longer share.