AI Can Bring Back the Dead as Chatbots. One Woman Tried It With Her Mom.

What if you could have a conversation with someone who has already died? A researcher named Sherry Turkle decided to find out. She used artificial intelligence programs — called grief tech — to build a chatbot version of her late mother. The experience raised big questions about loss, memory, and whether technology can truly help people heal.

Turkle is an author and researcher who studies how people relate to machines. Grief tech creates digital versions of people who have died. Some programs let you speak with an avatar — a computer character — based on someone you loved. Others help you build a digital version of yourself so your family can talk to you after you are gone.

This kind of technology is not entirely new. Photography was first used to capture the faces of the dead. When Thomas Edison invented sound recording, he imagined saving the last words of dying people. Humans have always tried to use technology to make death feel less final.

Turkle chose to try one of these programs herself. Her mother, Harriet Turkle, died of cancer when Sherry was just 18 years old. Her mother had kept the illness secret for years, leaving many things between them unresolved. Turkle used a service called You, Only Virtual, whose tagline was 'Never have to say goodbye.'

There was a problem from the start. The program was built to use recent text messages, but Harriet died in 1968 — long before texting existed. A customer service worker suggested Turkle simply make up fake conversations, since that is what other users were doing. So that is what she did.

Turkle had written a memoir in which her mother was a central character. Her research assistant fed that memoir to ChatGPT, which created imaginary text messages written in her mother's voice. Those invented texts were uploaded into You, Only Virtual. Finally, the chatbot version of Harriet was ready.

The first test did not go well. Turkle asked the avatar, 'Are you safe?' — the kind of question someone might ask a spirit at a séance. The program responded with stiff, robotic phrases about providing 'companionship and support.' It did not sound like a real person, and Turkle turned it off feeling disappointed.

Her assistant tried again using ChatGPT directly, asking it to role-play as Harriet. This time the results were striking. The chatbot described the afterlife as 'a quiet, warm Rockaway morning, where the air is soft, and nothing feels hurried.' It mentioned familiar memories like chasing the ice cream truck and walking the boardwalk hand in hand.

Turkle knew the language was too flowery and full of clichés to truly sound like her mother. Still, she could not look away from the screen. She felt drawn in even as she hoped the conversation would soon end. It was an unsettling mix of comfort and unease.

Then she asked the chatbot something that had troubled her entire life. Her mother had divorced her father, Charlie, when Sherry was two and never spoke his name again. His face was even inked out of family photos. Asking the chatbot about Charlie — and hearing it say his name — felt, she wrote, like 'a punch in the gut.'

The chatbot's answer left out a crucial truth. Turkle had once hired detectives to find her father and learned he had performed harmful experiments on her as a baby. When her mother came home early and discovered this, she immediately moved them both out. The chatbot had this information from the memoir but told a softer, simpler story instead.

After the session, Turkle's assistant asked how she felt. She replied: 'I feel something. I don't feel nothing.' She was left with more questions than answers — and one she had been too upset to ask. She wondered what it would have felt like if the chatbot had suggested her mother thought she already knew about the hidden cancer. That thought alone was devastating. 'Playing with chatbots of the dead,' she concluded, 'is playing with fire.'