AI, Grief and the Line We Shouldn’t Cross
Question: Elena Iacono, Founder, LegacyNex was recently asked for my perspective on a CBC article exploring the rise of A “grief bots” - technology that allows people to interact with digital recreations of loved ones who have died. Here are my thoughts.
Elena Iacono: Having lost my own dad, I would never judge what someone does to feel closer to someone they love. Grief is deeply personal, and there is no single right way to live with loss.
But this article raises an ethical question for me that I don't think we can ignore: did the person who died consent to being recreated?
If they didn't, I struggle with the idea that we have the right to use someone's voice, words, photographs and digital footprint to create new conversations on their behalf after they're gone.
Because those aren't actually their words anymore.
Technology can imitate someone's language, voice and mannerisms. But it cannot know what that person would have thought about something they never experienced. At some point, we move from preserving what someone gave us to generating something new in their name.
That distinction matters to me.
I was particularly struck by Rebecca Nolan saying that before creating the bot, she could imagine conversations with her father — and afterward, it felt as though those conversations had been outsourced to ChatGPT.
I understand that.
I lost my own father, and of course there are times I can imagine exactly what he would say. But that imagined conversation belongs to my relationship with him and my memory of him. I don't know that I would want technology answering back and telling me what he supposedly thinks.
Death is final. As painful as that is, I think there is something important about respecting that boundary.
It's also why I see a very clear distinction between this technology and the work I do through LegacyNex.
LegacyNex is about Human Inheritance™: giving people the opportunity, while they're here, to articulate their own wisdom, perspective, experiences and beliefs in their own voice and words.
The people who love them can return to those things later.
But they aren't "talking" to them.
Nothing new is being generated on their behalf. We're not asking technology to tell us what someone would say. We're returning to what they actually said.
I'm fascinated by what technology makes possible, and I think it can be an extraordinary tool. But possibility isn't the same thing as permission.
There is a moral line here.
For me, preserving someone's humanity is very different from attempting to recreate it.