From vocal clones to digital avatars, AI offers new ways to digitally preserve loved ones – and raise concerns about data, consent and the way this technology should have an impact on how we cry.
Diego Felix Dos Santos did not expect to hear the voice of his late father again – until the AI make it possible. “The tone of the voice is quite perfect,” he says. “It looks like almost, he’s there.”
After the 39 -year -old father’s unexpected death, Dos Santos went to Natal Brazil to be with the family. It was only after being returned home to Edinburgh, in Scotland, that he said that he realized: “I had nothing to remember [me of] My father. “What he had, however, was a note of voice that his father sent him from his hospital bed.
In July, Dos Santos took this voice note and, with the help of Eleven Labs – a voice generator platform fed by artificial intelligence founded in 2022 – paid monthly costs of $ 22 to download the audio and create new messages in his father’s voice, simulating the conversations they never had.
“Hi son, how are you?” Her father’s voice comes out of the application, as she would on their usual weekly calls. “Kisses. I love you, authoritarian,” adds the voice, using the nickname his father gave him when he was a boy. Although the religious family of Dos Santos initially has reservations about it using AI to communicate with his father beyond the grave, he said that they have since come to his choice. Now, he and his wife, who was diagnosed with cancer in 2013, are also planning to create AI voice clones.
Dos Santos’s experience reflects an increasing trend where people use AI not only to create digital similarities, but to simulate the dead. As these technologies become more personal and widespread, experts warn against ethical and emotional risks – questions of consent and data protection to commercial incentives stimulating their development.
The AI technology market designed to help people treat loss, known as “mourning technology”, has increased exponentially in recent years. Intimed by American startups such as Storyfile (a video tool powered by AI which allows people to register for posthumous reading) and according to AI after (a vocal application that creates interactive avatars of deceased relatives), this technology occurs as a way to face, and perhaps even prevent mourning.
Robert Locascio founded Eternos, a startup based in Palo Alto who helps people create a digital twin from AI, in 2024 after losing his father. Since then, more than 400 people have used the platform to create AI interactive avatars, says Locascio, with subscriptions from $ 25 for an inherited account which allows the story of a person to stay accessible to loved ones after his death.
Michael Bommer, engineer and former colleague from Locascio, was among the first to use Eternos to create a digital replica of himself after learning his diagnosis of terminal cancer. Locascio says that Bommer, who died last year, found the closure leaving a piece of himself for his family. His family also found the closure. “It captures its essence well,” his wife Anett Bommer told Reuters, who lives in Berlin, Germany. “I feel it close to my life through AI because it was his last sincere project and it has now become a part of my life.”
The objective of this technology is not to create digital ghosts, explains Alex Quinn, CEO of Authentic Interactions Inc, the parent company based in Los Angeles de Storyfile. It is rather to preserve the memories of people while they are always there to share them. “These stories would cease to exist without a certain interference,” says Quinn, noting that if the limits of the clones of AI are obvious – the avatar will not know the weather outside or which is the current president – the results are still worth it. “I don’t think anyone who never wants to see someone’s story and someone’s story and someone’s memory.”
One of the greatest concerns about mourning technology is consent: what does someone who has no control over the way their resemblance is used to recreate digitally recreate after their death? While some companies such as eleven laboratories allow people to create digital similarities from their loved ones posthumously, others are more restrictive. Locascio d’Eternos, for example, says that their policy prevents them from creating avatars of people who are unable to give their consent and that they administer checks to apply it, including demanding those who make accounts to record their votes twice. “We will not cross the line,” he says. “I think that, ethically, it does not work.”
Eleven labs did not respond to a request for comments.
In 2024, AI ethicians at the University of Cambridge published a study calling for security protocols to combat the social and psychological risks posed by “the life industry after digital death”. Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, researcher in Cambridge’s Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence and co-author of the study, says that commercial incentives often stimulate the development of these technologies-making transparency around the confidentiality of essential data.
“We do not know how these data from these (deceased) will be used in two or 10 years, or how this technology will evolve,” explains Nowaczyk-Basińska. One solution, she suggests, is to treat consent as a process in progress, revisited as a change in AI capabilities.
But beyond concerns about confidentiality and data exploitation, some experts are also concerned about the emotional assessment of this technology. Could this inhibit the way people manage sorrow?
Cody Destraty, author of “The Grief Cure”, warns against the idea that AI can offer a shortcut through mourning. “Mourning is individualized,” he says, noting that people cannot put it through the sieve of a digital avatar or an IA chatbot and expect to “get something really positive”.
Anett BMMER says that she did not count on the Avatar of the AI of her husband during the first stages of her own process of mourning, but she does not think that it would have affected her negatively if she had done so. “The relationship with the loss has not changed anything,” she said, adding that the avatar “is just another tool that I can use alongside photos, drawings, letters, notes”, to remember him.
Andy Langford, the clinical director of the Crus-based Mourning Charitable Association, says that even if it is too early to draw concrete conclusions on the effects of AI on sorrow, it is important that those who use this technology to overcome the loss “do not remain stuck” in their sorrow. “We have to do a little of both – mourning and the living,” he says.
For Dos Santos, turning to AI in his sorrowful moment did not aim to find the closure – it was a question of looking for a link. “There are specific moments in life … that I would normally call it to get advice,” explains Dos Santos. Although he knows that AI cannot bring his father back, he offers a way to recreate the “magic moments” that he can no longer share.
