In an Arizona courtroom last May, a 37-year-old Army veteran named Christopher Pelkey forgave the man who killed him. He did it on video. He had been dead for three and a half years.
Pelkey’s sister, working with her husband, had built an AI avatar of her brother’s face, voice, and mannerisms to deliver his own victim impact statement at the sentencing of the man convicted of his manslaughter. The judge praised the video from the bench and handed down 10.5 years for manslaughter, a year more than the state had asked for. It is believed to be the first time an AI recreation of a deceased victim has been used in a U.S. courtroom. It will not be the last.
That courtroom moment was one of a half-dozen examples that came up at “Generative Ghosts: AI Afterlives & the Future of Memory,” a SXSW panel this year that drew a packed room at the Hilton in downtown Austin.
Dylan Thomas Doyle, executive director of the nonprofit AI for All Tomorrows and a research fellow at Northwestern University, led the conversation. Before he was a researcher, Doyle was a minister and a hospital chaplain. The question he got most often, he told the room, was, “Where do we go when we die?”
He says he never had a good answer. But increasingly, an AI-powered answer is available.
The panel included Meredith Ringel Morris, director and principal scientist for human-AI interaction at Google DeepMind; Jed R. Brubaker, associate professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and the lead researcher on the “compassion team” at Facebook that built memorialized profiles; and Iason Gabriel, a philosopher and senior staff research scientist at Google DeepMind—has been working in this space longer than there’s been a name for it. Morris and Brubaker co-authored an early paper laying out the interaction design, legal, and ethical questions of “generative ghosts”—AI agents trained on a person’s data that evoke or imitate them, dead or alive.
The examples Morris walked through are not science fiction. The Beatles released “Now and Then” in November 2023, using AI to extract John Lennon’s vocals from a late-1970s demo—the first new Beatles song in 27 years. The estate of George Carlin sued the Dudesy podcast in January 2024 over an AI-generated comedy special that ran in the comedian’s voice and cadence; the case settled three months later, with the defendants permanently enjoined from using Carlin’s image, voice, or likeness on any platform. Robin Williams’s daughter Zelda has spent the past two years asking strangers on Instagram to stop sending her AI videos of her father—calling them, most recently, “horrible TikTok slop”.
The market is already here. “The global digital legacy market was valued at $13 billion in 2024, according to Precedence Research, and is projected to grow to nearly $56 billion by 2034.”
In China, the company Super Brain has told the South China Morning Post that since launching in mid-2023, it has helped “thousands” of people digitally revive deceased loved ones from as little as 30 seconds of audio or video, for as little as 20 yuan—about $3. At the high end, Eternos. Life sells AI digital twins for roughly $5,000. It’s AI enables people to record their own “Life Story Avatars” while still alive. Meta has patented the technology to make memorialized Facebook pages interactive after the user is gone.
The Triadic Relationship
The reframe came from Gabriel. The experience of talking to a generative ghost feels dyadic—you and the entity. It is not. There is always a third party in the room: the developer who built the model, the company that hosts it, and the contract that governs what happens when you stop paying.
This is not an abstract concern. A 2024 paper by researchers at the University of Cambridge’s Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence outlined the practical risks: deadbots used to surreptitiously advertise products to grieving users in the voice of a lost parent. Morris ran through her own list of ugly possibilities. Service interruption used as leverage—what she described as a hypothetical in which a platform learns you’re emotionally dependent on the avatar of your grandfather, then jacks the subscription to “five thousand dollars a month, or else we’re gonna delete Grandpa.”
Puppeteering attacks, in which a bad actor takes over the agent and uses emotional trust to push the survivor into bad financial decisions. Social engineering, in which a hacker queries grandfather-bot for the family details that unlock your accounts.
Gabriel called the worst version of this a “second death”—when the company shutters, raises rates, or changes the terms, and the entity that mattered to you disappears a second time. The Cambridge researchers proposed something similar: methods and even rituals for retiring deadbots in a dignified way, which they called a “digital funeral”. None of the current platforms offer one.
The economic problem runs deeper. Gabriel pointed to what philanthropy calls the dead hand problem—wealthy donors locking the intent of trusts decades after their own deaths, with the living legally obligated to honor it. Now apply that logic to an agentic AI. A generative ghost with a will, a brokerage account, and an instruction set is not a memory. It is an economic actor. The balance of power between the living and the deceased is beginning to shift in ways the legal system lacks a framework for.
A Failure of Imagination
When Doyle asked how we avoid the dystopian version, Brubaker answered first. “We’re being burdened by a lack of imagination,” he said.
He is tired of Black Mirror. Every time someone learns what he does for a living, they cite Season 2, Episode 1, “Be Right Back,” in which a grieving widow orders a synthetic husband. The 2025 Black Mirror season produced “Common People,” in which a woman’s life depends on a subscription her husband can’t afford to keep paying for. The metaphor is no longer subtle.
Brubaker’s larger point landed harder. We are running multi-billion-dollar experiments using exactly one piece of fiction as our reference text. Holocaust museums, he noted, are now actively asking whether they can build generative ghosts of the last living survivors before time runs out. That is not the same conversation as chatting with Grandma. But the technology, the platforms, and the corporate incentives are all the same. Without better stories, we will default to whichever one makes money first.
For the optimizing class, the pitch is obvious. Capture your voice while you’re healthy. Train an agent on your writing, your photos, your texts. Leave behind a version of yourself that can advise your children, give the toast at your daughter’s wedding, and—as Morris put it on stage —perhaps even continue to earn an income for your descendants by working as a computer science professor in the cloud.
Just read the terms of service very carefully.
