Connect with us

Tech

Can you really talk to the dead using AI? We tried out ‘deathbots’ so you don’t have to

Published

on

Can you really talk to the dead using AI? We tried out ‘deathbots’ so you don’t have to


Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being used to preserve the voices and stories of the dead. From text-based chatbots that mimic loved ones to voice avatars that let you “speak” with the deceased, a growing digital afterlife industry promises to make memory interactive, and, in some cases, eternal.

In our research, recently published in Memory, Mind & Media, we explored what happens when remembering the dead is left to an algorithm. We even tried talking to of ourselves to find out.

“Deathbots” are AI systems designed to simulate the voices, speech patterns and personalities of the deceased. They draw on a person’s digital traces—, text messages, emails and —to create interactive avatars that appear to “speak” from beyond the grave.

As the media theorist Simone Natale has said, these “technologies of illusion” have deep roots in spiritualist traditions. But AI makes them far more convincing, and commercially viable.

Our work is part of a project called Synthetic Pasts, which explores the impact technology has on the preservation of personal and . For our study, we looked at services that claim to preserve or recreate a person’s voice, memories or digital presence using AI. To understand how they work, we became our own test subjects. We uploaded our own videos, messages and voice notes, creating “digital doubles” of ourselves.

In some cases, we played the role of users preparing our own synthetic afterlives. In others, we acted as the bereaved trying to talk to a digital version of someone who has passed away.

What we found was both fascinating and unsettling. Some systems focus on preserving memory. They help users record and store personal stories, organized by theme, such as childhood, family or advice for loved ones. AI then indexes the content and guides people through it, like a searchable archive.

Others use generative AI to create ongoing conversations. You upload data about a deceased person—messages, posts, even voice samples—and the system builds a chatbot that can respond in their tone and style. It uses a subset of AI called machine learning (which improves through practice) to make its avatars evolve over time.

Some present themselves as playful (“host a séance with AI”), but the experience can feel eerily intimate. All the platforms claim to offer an “authentic” emotional connection. Yet the more personalization we attempted, the more artificial it felt.

When prompted by these systems we provided more information about ourselves, only to have the bot repeat the exact phrasing we had used in stiff, scripted replies. At times, the tone was incongruous, such as when cheerful emojis or upbeat phrasing appeared even when discussing death—a clear reminder that algorithms are poor at handling the emotional weight of loss:

“Oh hun… 😔 it (the death) is not something I’d wish for anyone to dwell on. It’s all a bit foggy now, to be honest. 🌫️ Let’s chat about something a bit cheerier, yeah?”

The more archival-based tools we tested offered a calmer experience but also imposed rigid categories and limited nuance. As digital media scholar Andrew Hoskins has observed, memory in the age of AI becomes “conversational”—shaped by interactions between human and machine. But in our experiments, those conversations often felt flat, exposing the limits of synthetic intimacy:

Human: You were always so encouraging and supportive. I miss you.

Deathbot: I’m right here for you, always ready to offer encouragement and support whenever you need it. And I miss you too… Let’s take on today together, with positivity and strength.

Behind these experiences lies a business model. These are not memorial charities, they are tech start-ups. Subscription fees, “freemium” tiers and partnerships with insurers or care providers reveal how remembrance is being turned into a product.

As the philosophers Carl Öhman and Luciano Floridi have argued, the digital afterlife industry operates within a “political economy of death,” where data continues to generate value long after a person’s life ends.

Platforms encourage users to “capture their story forever,” but they also harvest emotional and biometric data to keep engagement high. Memory becomes a service—an interaction to be designed, measured and monetized. This, as the professor of technology and society Andrew McStay has shown, is part of a wider “emotional AI” economy.

Digital resurrection?

The promise of these systems is a kind of resurrection—the reanimation of the dead through data. They offer to return voices, gestures and personalities, not as memories recalled but as presences simulated in real time. This kind of “algorithmic empathy” can be persuasive, even moving, yet it exists within the limits of code, and quietly alters the experience of remembering, smoothing away the ambiguity and contradiction.

These platforms demonstrate a tension between archival and generative forms of memory. All platforms, though, normalize certain ways of remembering, placing privilege on continuity, coherence and emotional responsiveness, while also producing new, data-driven forms of personhood.

As the media theorist Wendy Chun has observed, often conflate “storage” with “memory,” promising perfect recall while erasing the role of forgetting—the absence that makes both mourning and remembering possible.

In this sense, digital resurrection risks misunderstanding death itself: replacing the finality of loss with the endless availability of simulation, where the dead are always present, interactive and updated.

AI can help preserve stories and voices, but it cannot replicate the living complexity of a person or a relationship. The “synthetic afterlives” we encountered are compelling precisely because they fail. They remind us that memory is relational, contextual and not programmable.

Our study suggests that while you can talk to the dead with AI, what you hear back reveals more about the technologies and platforms that profit from memory—and about ourselves—than about the ghosts they claim we can talk to.

Provided by
The Conversation


This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.The Conversation

Citation:
Can you really talk to the dead using AI? We tried out ‘deathbots’ so you don’t have to (2025, November 9)
retrieved 9 November 2025
from https://techxplore.com/news/2025-11-dead-ai-deathbots-dont.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.





Source link

Tech

6 Great After-Christmas Deals to Spend Your Gift Cards On

Published

on

6 Great After-Christmas Deals to Spend Your Gift Cards On


After-Christmas deals are an excellent way to redeem any gift cards or cash you got for Christmas. You can purchase something you actually want, and you can do it for less money than usual. I’ve scoured the Internet for truly good after-Christmas deals on the gear that we’ve hand-tested on the WIRED Reviews team. Many of these sales will end this weekend, so keep that in mind while you’re shopping. Find all the highlights below.

For more inspiration, check out some of our recently updated buying guides, including the Best Office Chairs, the Best Cheap Phones, and the Best Space Heaters.

WIRED Featured Deals:

Anker Laptop Power Bank for $88 ($47 off)

We love this beefy power bank. Its 25,000-mAh capacity is more than enough for fully charging your iPhone between 4 and 6 times, and it can deliver up to 165 watts to two devices meaning that you can charge your laptop, gaming console, or anything else you fancy. The built-in USB-C cable doubles as a carrying loop. There’s also a nifty display that’ll give you at-a-glance information on remaining battery, temperature, charging speeds, and more. It has pass-through charging support and only takes about two hours to fully recharge. This deal price matches what we saw on Black Friday.

Google Pixel 10 for $599 ($200 off)

  • Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

  • Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

  • Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Google

Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro, and Pixel 10 Pro XL

There was an on-page coupon (PIXEL10) that had the best price we’ve tracked for any of the phones in the Google Pixel 10 lineup. That coupon is not available as of Saturday morning, but it may be back—clip it if you see it. This is still a good deal on the smartest Android phones you can buy, with fantastic cameras, snappy processors, gorgeous displays, and more AI integration than the average person needs. Check out our dedicated buying guide to figure out which Google Pixel 10 is right for you. If you’re in the market for an upgrade, now is a good time to buy considering that we’ve never seen any phone in this flagship lineup sell for less.

Bruvi BV-01 Brewer Bundle for $228 ($120 off)—Clip the Coupon

Image may contain: Cup, Box, Beverage, Coffee, and Coffee Cup

Photograph: Louryn Strampe

I’ve tested a lot of pod coffee makers, and the Bruvi BV-01 is my favorite. This deal price is the best we see outside of special events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The brewer is cute and looks great on a counter, with a large reservoir, an intuitive touchscreen display, and a built-in wastebin that collects used pods for you. The best part are the proprietary B-Pods, which are designed to biodegrade in a landfill. The bundle gets you the machine plus an assortment of bestselling coffee and espresso pods to get you started.

Fitbit Charge 6 for $100 ($60 off)

Fitbit Charge 6

The Fitbit Charge 6 has been at the top of our fitness tracker buying guide since we first tested it. It’s attractive, affordable, accessible, and on sale for a match of the best deal we’ve seen. It’ll play well with iOS and Android, and it has a solid suite of features that’ll cover almost anyone’s needs—including skin temperature, heart rate readings, ECGs, activity and workout tracking, and more. The battery lasts for at least a week on a single charge. This deal comes with a six-month subscription to Fitbit Premium, which normally costs $10 per month.

Hydro Flask Standard Mouth Water Bottle for $30 ($10 off)

Hydroflask Bottle

Photograph: Dick’s Sporting Goods 

Hydro Flask

Standard Mouth Water Bottle

This budget-friendly deal gets you a steal on the best reusable water bottle. Hydro Flask bottles are durable, portable, and easy to cover in all the stickers you’ve been hoarding. The handle is flexible, the bottle is leakproof, and every component is dishwasher safe (though you may want to opt for hand-washing if you do end up plastering it in stickers). A few different colors are on sale at this price.

Beats Powerbeats Pro 2 for $200 ($50 off)

Left: Selfie of a person with short hair wearing Beats Powerbeats Pro 2 earbuds in orange. Right: curved, around-the-ear earbuds and an oval-shaped case.

If hitting the gym is one of your New Year’s resolutions for 2026, the Beats Powerbeats Pro 2 are worth considering. They’re the best workout headphones we’ve tested thanks to their comfortable and ergonomic fit, noise cancelation, spatial audio, a heart rate monitor, and the fact that they play well with both iOS and Android phones. The sound is solid, the battery life is good, and they’re water-resistant. This deal price comes within $20 of the best we’ve seen. Every color—orange, lavender, grey, and black—is on sale.


Power up with unlimited access to WIRED. Get best-in-class reporting and exclusive subscriber content that’s too important to ignore. Subscribe Today.



Source link

Continue Reading

Tech

Hyperkin’s Competitor Upgrades the Xbox Controller by Copying Sony’s Design

Published

on

Hyperkin’s Competitor Upgrades the Xbox Controller by Copying Sony’s Design


The most immediately striking difference is that Hyperkin’s product swaps the typical Xbox approach of asymmetric thumbsticks for the PlayStation’s horizontal layout. It also separates the D-pad (it’s one piece inside the pad, but splits its cardinal directions so each appears to be its own button), while the ABXY face buttons are spaced slightly further apart. Where the DualSense’s touchpad would sit, we have the Xbox home, menu, view, and share buttons, all blended in rather smartly. An LED ring around the home button just about echoes the lights running the periphery of the DualSense’s touchpad, although it’s really more of an inversion of the regular Xbox controller, where the home button itself lights up.

The Competitor’s thumbsticks come equipped with thumbcaps that mirror the PS5’s, an outer ring with a convex central point, but a pair of Xbox-standard concave caps are included. These easily pop on and off, and can be mixed and matched, if you were so (strangely) inclined.

There are two areas where this departs from both the standard Xbox and PlayStation controllers in terms of inputs. The first is the presence of two programmable rear buttons, M1 and M2. By default, these duplicate the input of the A and B buttons, but holding down the Mode button between them lets you remap them. There are also physical button locks to prevent their use entirely. The other is that while the Competitor boasts a 3.5-mm headphone jack like Microsoft’s official pad, it adds a built-in audio mute button, hidden in the black between the thumbsticks—a nice little upgrade.

Oddly Familiar

In use, the Competitor feels … well, a lot like a PS5 pad. The slightly wider grip fits in the hand comfortably, all inputs are accessible, and those symmetrical thumbsticks sit nicely in reach for all but the smallest hands. A microtextured underside provides a solid grip that, when coupled with its 232-gram weight, makes the Competitor feel particularly suited to longer play periods. It’s all very familiar if you’re already a multiformat gamer, to the extent that it sometimes slightly threw my muscle memory off, reaching a thumb out to do a PlayStation touchpad function and finding only the Xbox system buttons.

Photograph: Matt Kamen



Source link

Continue Reading

Tech

In Cryptoland, Memecoin Fever Gives Way to a Stablecoin Boom

Published

on

In Cryptoland, Memecoin Fever Gives Way to a Stablecoin Boom


When US president Donald Trump launched his own meme cryptocurrency on January 17, days before his return to the White House, I was halfway up a Swiss alp, attending a crypto conference in the town of St. Moritz.

Memecoins, which typically have no purpose beyond financial speculation, were having a moment. The previous year, millions of new memecoins had flooded the market; a few, like Fartcoin, had rocketed to billion-dollar valuations. Pump.Fun, a platform for launching and trading memecoins, had become one of the fastest-growing crypto launchpad businesses ever. Now, the soon-to-be president was getting in on the act.

Over lunch on the second day of the conference, beneath the ornate stucco ceiling and golden chandeliers of the venue’s dining hall, I located a table designated for a conversation about memecoins. Whereas other tables were half full, the memecoin workshop was oversubscribed; latecomers pulled up chairs to create two full rows.

The discussion was led by Nagendra Bharatula, founder of investment firm G-20 Group. Bharatula had recently coauthored a paper arguing that memecoins, despite their juvenile spirit, had a place in professional investors’ portfolios. In the six months prior, a basket of 25 “bluechip memecoins”—an oxymoron if ever there was one—had outperformed bitcoin by 150 percent, he pointed out. Some of the attendees murmured their approval.

Since then, the shine has come off the memecoin market. The paper value of Trump’s coin, which climbed to a peak of $14 billion two days after its launch, has cratered to roughly $1 billion. Hundreds of thousands of small investors lost their shirts. Pump.Fun’s daily revenue, a proxy for the overall appetite for memecoin trading, is barely more than a tenth of what it was in January. The memecoin gold rush has spawned a raft of litigation.

Next up: the stablecoin. If memecoins are symbolic of reckless abandon and unflinching profiteering in cryptoland, stablecoins are a symbol of the industry’s search for purpose and respectability. Designed to hold a steady $1 valuation, stablecoins are pitched by proponents as a faster and cheaper way to make everyday payments and international money transfers.

In a year in which the US has declared itself open for crypto business, where previously crypto firms feared regulatory backlash under the Biden administration, stablecoins have supplanted memecoins as the coin à la mode—and punctured the mainstream.

Though stablecoins have been around since 2014, they have predominantly been used by crypto traders as a safe harbor during bouts of market volatility, not by regular people. The concept has also faced resistance from regulators skeptical of a new form of money; Diem, a stablecoin venture incubated at Meta, famously shuttered in 2022 in the face of broad-based opposition.



Source link

Continue Reading

Trending