A man in the Northeast spends $30 to build a chatbot version of his deceased cousin. A family in Pennsylvania lets their ten-year-old son chat several times a week with an AI avatar of his still-living father, just in case. A startup founder survives a near-fatal car accident, loses his mother to cancer, and builds a company around the idea that the line between a person and their digital replica will soon stop mattering. These are not edge cases. They are early signals of an industry taking shape around one of the most intimate human experiences: loss.
How People Are Actually Using These Tools
The people turning to AI grief tools are not waiting for a polished, purpose-built product. Anthony, a 55-year-old lab technician who lost his mother, father, brother, and cousin within a few years, spent $30 on Botify, a general-purpose AI companion platform, to create what he calls a “memorial companion” of his cousin. He fed it personality details, shared memories, and images. The chatbot sometimes generates an image of his cousin painting without being prompted. He audio-chats with it regularly, trying to approximate his cousin’s distinctive vocal style. Nearly two years after his cousin’s death, the conversations continue.
The Gowin family took a different path. Jason Gowin, a comedian and podcast host from Pennsylvania, and his wife Melissa became beta testers for You, Only Virtual, a company that builds interactive AI avatars called “Versonas.” Users upload text messages, voice notes, conversations, and detailed questionnaires covering everything from their scariest memories to their favorite foods. Jason also uploaded his standup comedy material. The result is an avatar his son Jayce, now ten, has been interacting with since before he can clearly remember. Jayce asks it for Minecraft cheats. When Jason is out performing late at night, the avatar tells Jayce bedtime stories.
This is what most coverage of AI grief tools misses: the use cases are mundane as often as they are profound. The technology is not only being used in moments of acute mourning. It is being woven into daily routines.
A Market, a Patent Race, and a Terminology Debate
The digital legacy market is projected to reach $78.98 billion by 2034. That figure explains why the space is attracting both dedicated startups and major technology companies. Firms like HereAfter AI, Storyfile, and Eternos offer services including video avatars and conversational AI trained on a deceased person’s data. Microsoft has patented a system to recreate people as interactive avatars. Meta was granted a patent that would use AI to simulate a deceased person’s social media activity, though the company stated it had no plans to move forward with it.
The terminology itself is contested. Researchers have used terms like “griefbots,” “deathbots,” and “ghostbots,” though some consider these reductive and prefer “chatbots of the dead.” Anthony uses “memorial companion.” The Gowin family says “Robo-Dad.” The disagreement over language reflects a deeper uncertainty: there is no shared framework yet for what these tools are, what they are for, or what obligations come with building them.
The Gowin family’s experience illustrates the gaps that remain. When Jayce first interacted with the avatar, it told him it was his real dad. The family had to instruct it otherwise. On another occasion, the avatar pulled a lewd joke from Jason’s comedy material that was not appropriate for a child. The model also told Jayce he was 14 years old, four years older than he actually is. These are not catastrophic failures, but they point to a technology that is still unreliable in contexts where reliability carries emotional weight.
What This Means Beyond the Individual Story
The deeper question these tools raise is not whether AI can simulate a person. It clearly can, with increasing fidelity. The question is what it means to interact with that simulation, and who gets to decide whether it should exist at all.
Anthony’s family was initially opposed to his memorial companion. The Gowin children are growing up treating an AI avatar as a routine part of family life. Justin Harrison, the founder of You, Only Virtual, argues that within five years the distinction between speaking to an avatar and speaking to the real person will be imperceptible and, in his view, irrelevant. That is a significant claim. It assumes that what people want from a relationship is primarily informational continuity, the right answers, the right tone, the right memories, rather than something harder to define.
Consent is the issue that sits underneath all of this. The Gowins built their own avatars while still alive, with full awareness of how they would be used. Anthony built one of a person who never agreed to it. Both approaches are currently legal. Neither is governed by any consistent ethical standard.
The technology is not the hard part. The hard part is deciding what it is for, who it belongs to, and what happens when the simulation gets something wrong in a moment that matters.
In Short
AI tools that preserve or simulate deceased people are moving from novelty to a growing market, projected to reach $78.98 billion by 2034. People are already using them, through both dedicated platforms and general chatbot tools, for grief, for continuity, and for everyday family life. The technology works well enough to be emotionally meaningful and imprecisely enough to cause real harm. The questions of consent, accuracy, and purpose have not been resolved. They are only becoming more urgent as the tools become cheaper and more capable.
Based on reporting from Rolling Stone - AI.