Oct 14, 2026 · 40 min
Deadbots promise connection but complicate grief
Talking with the dead
As AI turns memories and messages into simulated relationships, the episode asks who controls those replicas and whether they help mourners or reshape mourning for profit.
- 1Deadbots can preserve a sense of connection while creating risks around consent, dignity, commercial exploitation, and a second loss.
- 2Speculative prototypes show how children, families, and platforms could struggle over whether digital replicas should persist or disappear.
- 3Human language, ritual, and memory may preserve the dead with more agency than automated conversations designed to keep interaction going.
Don't miss
Julie Sedivy explains how a deceased loved one’s words, gestures, and accent can become portable through language rather than an automated replica.
The brief
At a dinner where guests bring photographs of deceased loved ones, researchers examine how shared meals create room for grief, ritual, and questions about what makes people feel alive.
The episode turns to deadbots: AI simulations built from messages, recordings, and personal data, promising continued connection while placing grief inside a commercial market.
Tomasz Hollanek uses speculative prototypes to expose the stakes, from an advertising-filled grandmother to child-facing systems and family disputes over whether a digital clone should remain.
Julie Sedivy argues that language already carries the dead forward through accents, gestures, remembered phrases, and imagined conversations—work that requires time rather than automated replies.
The conclusion favors safeguards, professional supervision, and new rituals of farewell, while asking whether human memory preserves a loved one more safely than digital immortality.
Books & mentions
Some links are affiliate links — PodLume may earn a commission if you buy.
Other People's Words
A memoir about grief and how the voices of loved ones continue shaping the living.
Linguophile
A related book-length exploration of language, fitting the episode’s account of words as an afterlife.
Eternal You
A documentary examining technologies that preserve or simulate relationships with deceased people.