A new study out of the University of Colorado Boulder looked at “generative ghosts” — AI chatbots trained on dead relatives.
Jack Manuel Manning, an information science doctoral candidate, presented this work in June at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Designing Interactive Systems Conference. The team ran a qualitative test with sixteen people, ranging from 22 to 50 years old.
They interacted with two versions of a loved one who passed away.
One spoke as the person — the “reincarnation” mode, first person.
The other described them like a narrator — the “representation” mode, third person.
Guess which one won?
The first-person version. It felt more alive. More vivid. More comforting, really. Even though some folks were spooked by how attached they felt.
“In the [reincarnation],it just feels like I’m getting closure I needed so bad,” one participant, labeled P4, said.
It hits that raw spot. But others hesitated.
P11 worried about dependency. She noted it looks a lot like falling for an AI character, only the stakes feel higher.
Here’s the thing: factual accuracy didn’t matter as much as emotional tone. Did it sound right? That’s what counted.
If the AI spoke in the third person (“your father liked hiking”), participants often ignored the distinction anyway. They still talked to the bot using “you.” P12 put it simply, admitting they were just conflating questions meant for the deceased with questions for the machine. The brain doesn’t always follow the rules researchers set up.
The sample size? Small. Just sixteen people. The authors admitted that limitation clearly. This didn’t cover every culture or religion. Mourning varies wildly. A funeral in Tokyo is different from a wake in Chicago, and the tech response probably should be too.
Plus, these were one-off sessions. No long-term testing. We don’t know if attachment builds over a month. Or if it fades after a week.
Who knows?
The paper argues future systems must weigh the comfort against the danger of unhealthy dependency. Consent matters. Family dynamics matter.
We are standing on the edge of talking to the dead via servers. The question isn’t if we will do it. It’s whether we can do it without breaking our minds a little more. 🖤
