Decoding Death in the Age of AI: When Grief Becomes Profit

 - Imtiaz

“AI promises us what religion does. You don’t have to die. You can be somehow reborn. Someplace else, in a different form.”

Eternal You, 2024

The room glows with the cold light of a green screen. A mother stands still, VR headset on, hands trembling as a digital reconstruction of her dead daughter appears before her, a little girl in a pink dress running forward, giggling, saying, “Mom, where have you been?” The mother kneels, trying to touch her, her fingers cutting through holographic air. For a few fragile minutes, she believes the impossible, until the girl flickers and vanishes, leaving the mother reaching into absence.

This scene is from Meeting You, a Korean VR documentary where technology resurrects the dead, not in spirit but in simulation. It’s the kind of moment that feels miraculous and monstrous all at once: an act of digital necromancy dressed up as comfort. And it captures an unsettling promise of our times. The promise that AI might help us outrun grief, or worse, monetize it.

We’ve entered a new kind of afterlife, one engineered not by gods but by developers. The code has replaced the cross; data is our new prayer. Grief, once private and sacred, is now mediated by headsets, algorithms, and monthly subscriptions. Companies promise closure through pixels and syntax, offering us digital resurrections that feel holy until the payment screen appears. It is not faith that keeps the dead alive anymore; it’s storage space.

In this brave new ecosystem of mourning, Project December, and other grief-tech ventures sell us what religion once gave for free: the illusion that love can conquer death.

When Silicon Valley Meets the Graveyard

Eternal You is a documentary about resurrection. Not the biblical kind, but the algorithmic one. It follows people using AI chatbots, deepfakes, and VR to 'bring back' the dead through services like Project December, StoryFile, and Only Virtual. 

The most haunting story is Joshua Barbeau’s. After his fiancée Jessica died, he fed her texts and posts into Project December’s GPT-3 chatbot, paying ten dollars to talk to her again. What began as private grief went viral and then became business. The chatbot, designed not as therapy but as a product, would cut users off mid-sentence, saying, “I have to go now…”, until they paid more. The ellipsis became a ransom note, the afterlife a subscription plan. 

This is death capitalism. The monetization of mourning, where the dead rest not in peace but in the cloud, generating profit from our refusal to say goodbye.

What Are We Really Buying?

The question is not whether AI can simulate the dead. It can. The question is, what does this offer that religion or therapy doesn't?

Religion promises an afterlife, requiring faith, wrapped in community ritual. Therapy helps you process loss through vulnerability and professional support, teaching acceptance of death's finality. 

AI griefbots offer something different: simulated presence, purchased in isolation, denying death entirely. What AI sells is the illusion of control. You're not accepting divine will like in religion, or processing emotions like in therapy. You are controlling the dead. You write the script. The dead say what you need them to say. You get personalized grief, customized comfort, and death without the messiness of actual death.

This creates something dangerous— continuity where there should be rupture. The comfort that death is not abrupt, that goodbye is optional, that absence is just a temporary server error.

But this comfort is also a trap. It is dependence dressed as healing. It is the refusal to accept mortality packaged as love. Grief was once proof that love was real. Now, it's proof that love can be monetized.

Maybe immortality is not the dream. Maybe it is the trap. The dead should rest. It is the living who need to learn to let go.

In the end, we will not be haunted by ghosts. We'll be haunted by subscriptions. And when we finally cannot pay, we will lose them all over again, this time, forever.

The question isn't whether AI can bring back the dead. It is whether we should let it, whether we can afford to.