You die. The group chat doesn’t.

Your playlists linger. Your Venmo keeps charging your nephew for Netflix. And now? Your ghost can text back.

Welcome to the uncanny afterlife—where AI doesn’t just help you live. It sticks around after you don’t.

From deepfaked grandma voices to holograms that speak at their own funerals, a growing field of grief tech is turning death into a user experience. Think ChatGPT with unfinished business.

💬 “Miss you.”

💬 💬 “I know.”

The bots aren’t just in your inbox anymore—they're in memorial services, grief support groups, end-of-life care.

As AI ethicist and former minister Dylan pointed out in a TED Talk, “What if AI and death are not an anomaly? What if AI is just the newest human tool we have of making sense of death in our lives?”

That unsettling question sums up where we are now: the intersection of grief and machine learning.

⚰️ Digital Resurrection IRL

The idea of AI in the afterlife isn’t exactly new—cruise the internet and you’ll find plenty of examples:

• StoryFile let a woman speak at her own funeral—even fielding questions live—via a pre-trained AI hologram built from video interviews. Her son is the CEO of the company.

• Amazon raised eyebrows when it previewed a future Alexa feature that could mimic any voice—including that of a deceased loved one—with just a few seconds of audio. A bedtime story read by grandma, even if she’s long gone.

• A German man with terminal cancer created an AI version of himself by recording 300 voice prompts and 150 personal stories, according to NPR.

But it’s no longer about if this tech will exist. It’s about who’s building it—and who profits from your ghost. They promise healing, closure and legacy preservation but grief tech startups are also raising millions.

Who owns your legacy bot? Who controls the data it’s built on? Who can alter it? Can it be used in court—or in an ad?

As AI creeps into our most sacred goodbyes, the line between comfort and uncanny keeps getting thinner.

🤖 💡 Final bot thought

Grief experts warn that while these bots can offer comfort, they might also blur the line between acceptance and avoidance.

Some studies suggest interacting with digital versions of the deceased might delay emotional processing or even complicate grief.

🤖 🗣️ Bot Talk: YouTube’s Not Hungry for AI Slop

Faceless content. Synthetic voiceovers. Algorithm-chasing junk. YouTube’s clearing its plate—and AI slop’s off the menu.

The platform’s cracking down on making money on lazy, low-effort machine-made videos. Think: hours of stitched-together stock footage, robo-voiceovers and titles like “Shocking Secrets Elon Musk Doesn’t Want You to Know.”

The new YouTube Partner Program policy update targets “inauthentic” content that adds no real value. Translation? If your video looks like ChatGPT met Canva and phoned it in? No ad money for you.

Even YouTube, land of chaos and commentary, is trying to clean up the bot mess.

🚀Coming up next week …

Don’t get bot hurt. Get bot even.