Griefbots. A New Way of Communicating With The Dead?

Abstract

There is a growing number of new digital technologies mediating the experiences of grief and the continuing bonds between the bereaved and their loved ones following death. One of the most recent technological developments is the “griefbot”. Based on the digital footprint of the deceased, griefbots allow two-way communication between mourners and the digital version of the dead through a conversational interface or chat. This paper explores the mediational role that griefbots might have in the grieving process vis-à-vis that of other digital technologies, such as social media services or digital memorials on the Internet. After briefly reviewing the new possibilities offered by the Internet in the way people relate with the dead, we delve into the particularities of griefbots, focusing on the two-way communication afforded by this technology and the sense of simulation derived from the virtual interaction between the living and the dead. Discussion leads us to emphasize that, while both the Internet and griefbots bring about a significant spatial and temporal expansion to the grief experience –affording a more direct way to communicate with the dead anywhere and at any time– they differ in that, unlike the socially shared virtual space between mourners and loved ones in most digital memorials, griefbots imply a private conversational space between the mourner and the deceased person. The paper concludes by pointing to some ethical issues that griefbots, as a profit-oriented afterlife industry, might raise for both mourners and the dead in our increasingly digital societies.

Full text

REGULAR ARTICLE
1 3
Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-022-09679-3
Abstract
There is a growing number of new digital technologies mediating the experiences of
grief and the continuing bonds between the bereaved and their loved ones following
death. One of the most recent technological developments is the “griefbot”. Based
on the digital footprint of the deceased, griefbots allow two-way communication
between mourners and the digital version of the dead through a conversational in-
terface or chat. This paper explores the mediational role that griefbots might have
in the grieving process vis-à-vis that of other digital technologies, such as social
media services or digital memorials on the Internet. After briey reviewing the
new possibilities oered by the Internet in the way people relate with the dead, we
delve into the particularities of griefbots, focusing on the two-way communication
aorded by this technology and the sense of simulation derived from the virtual
interaction between the living and the dead. Discussion leads us to emphasize that,
while both the Internet and griefbots bring about a signicant spatial and temporal
expansion to the grief experience –aording a more direct way to communicate
with the dead anywhere and at any time– they dier in that, unlike the socially
shared virtual space between mourners and loved ones in most digital memori-
als, griefbots imply a private conversational space between the mourner and the
deceased person. The paper concludes by pointing to some ethical issues that grief-
bots, as a prot-oriented afterlife industry, might raise for both mourners and the
dead in our increasingly digital societies.
Keywords Griefbots · Grief · Mourning · Continuing bonds · Mediation · Death ·
Digital footprint · Digital immortality · Chatbots · Cultural psychology
Accepted: 13 February 2022
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature
2022
Griefbots. A New Way of Communicating With The Dead?
BelénJiménez-Alonso1· IgnacioBrescó de Luna2
The original version of this article was revised. The corresponding author name has been updated and the
ORCID number 0000-0001-8044-7643 should be for the corresponding author, Ignacio Brescó de Luna.
The correct ORCID number of Belén Jiménez-Alonso is 0000-0003-1849-7740.
Extended author information available on the last page of the article

Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science
1 3
The sudden death of Roman Mazurenko in a car accident in 2015 left Eugenia Kuyda
with the need to speak to her friend one last time. Rereading Roman’s old text mes-
sages, she thought that they might be used as the basis for a chatbot—one capable of
simulating her friend’s conversational style—thus enabling her to communicate with
him once again (Newton, 2016). Using over 8,000 lines of text messages from her
friend’s conversations with dierent people, and a neural network developed at her
articial intelligence start-up, Kuyda built a chatbot which those who had been close
to Roman reportedly found eerily convincing (Elder, 2020). Chatbots are “computer
application[s] with articial intelligence (AI) capable of generating a two-way con-
versation between a human being and a machine (robot) through a conversational
interface or chat” (Ávila-Tomás et al., 2020, p. 33). Since the creation of the rst-ever
chatbot ELIZA—a program impersonating a psychotherapist, devised in 1966 by
Joseph Weizenbaum—, advances in articial intelligence have changed the way we
interact with machines such as the increasingly popular voice-based assistants. Fol-
lowing this trend, programs powered by AI engines are also likely to change the way
we interact with the dead in a not-too-distant future. Similarly to Kuyda’s case, dier-
ent projects are currently being devoted to these so-called griefbots—chatbots based
on the digital footprint left behind by the deceased through social media, emails,
texting and messaging systems—with the aim of providing the bereaved with the
chance to speak to their loved ones after their death. The data scientist Muhammad
Ahmad is working on a messenger program that imitates his father’s speech pattern
so that his grandchildren can bond with him (Godfrey, 2019). In 2014, the entrepre-
neur Marius Ursache envisaged Eterni.me, a service whereby you could develop your
own digital avatar with which your descendants could interact after your death. In
turn, Microsoft has recently abandoned a project to develop a conversational chatbot
of a specic person based on her/his social data, despite having patented the system
to do so (Abramson & Johnson, 2020). Microsoft’s General Manager of AI programs,
Tim O’Brien (2021), recently referred to the project as disturbing.1
The prospect of a future in which we can communicate with our dead via their
digital footprint generates a mix of curiosity and concern. There is concern about
the impact griefbots might have on the bereaved. In line with Black Mirror’s ‘Be
Right Back’, (Brooker & Harris, 2013), some of Mazurenko’s friends expressed con-
cern that Kuyda’s device might leave people “mired in grief but drawn back into the
pseudo-relationship, unable to move on but unfullled by the facsimile of a loved
one” (Elder, 2020, p. 74). If, as is commonly understood, the grieving process ends
once we overcome the loss and say goodbye to our loved ones by letting go of the
ties that bind us to them,2 then it seems reasonable for alarm bells to ring in the face
of an artefact that perpetuates the continuation of these bonds. Conversely, a grow-
ing trend in grief studies questions the need to break the aective bonds with the
departed. According to the continuing bonds model (Silverman, Klass & Nickman,
1996), rather than sever the attachments with the deceased and move on, the grieving
1 This is not the case with Google and its—apparently less “disturbing”—assistant Loretta. The Loretta ad
(Google, 2020), aired during the 2020 Super Bowl, features a widower using a voice assistant as an aid to
remember little things about his late wife Loretta (Leaver, 2021).
2 This popular assumption is strongly inuenced by the Freudian letting-go approach.

Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science
1 3
process implies moving with an ongoing connection to those no longer living. This
sense of connection, with positive eects on coping with loss, may appear in the
form of dreams, invoking the example of the deceased as a standard of self-judgment
or, more generally, through an inner dialogue by imagining their responses to one’s
actions and beliefs (Stroebe et al., 1996). According to Norlock (2017), imaginal
relationships with the dead “are meaningful even when they are no longer recipro-
cal” (p. 342). However, while having an internal conversation with the deceased by
the graveside is quite common, the prospect of holding an external and reciprocal
conversation with a griefbot might transform our sense of connection to the departed
and thereby our grieving process in general. In addition to the impact of griefbots on
the bereaved, there is also concern about their impact on both the dead and the very
idea of death (Savin-Baden and Burden, 2019), as these devices promise to recreate,
and in so doing perpetuate, the identity of those no longer living.
In sum, the possible use of griefbots as new technological artefacts to cope with
loss opens up a series of questions regarding our digital human existence (Lagerkvist,
2017). Mourners’ unique response to loss, including the way of maintaining their
bonds with the deceased, is not an exclusively intrapsychic phenomenon (Neimeyer,
Klass & Dennis, 2014), but one elaborated together with other people in specic socio-
cultural contexts—with social norms on how people should grieve—and mediated by
those technological artefacts available in any given historical moment. According to
cultural psychology (Brescó, Roncancio, Branco & Mattos, 2019; Vygotsky, 1978;
Wertsch, 1998), human action is characterized by an irreducible tension between
agents and cultural tools which simultaneously constrain and enable experience, such
as when mourning and remembering the dead through a picture (Jiménez-Alonso &
Brescó, 2021a; 2021b) or a memorial site (Brescó & Wagoner, 2019). In a similar
vein, Walter (2015) posits that technologies—ranging from sculptures, writing and
music to today’s Internet—not only mediate how we communicate with the living,
but also the way we communicate with the dead, thus making them socially present.
From this perspective, griefbots are just another technological artefact—endowed
with their own peculiarities—to be added to the wide range of “old” and “new” tech-
nologies mediating our experience of grief in our societies.
Drawing from this framework, what follows is a reection on the mediational role
of thanatechnology (Sofka, 1997) or new digital technologies, such as the Internet
and griefbots, in the grieving process, and more particularly, on the continuing bonds
with our loved ones after their departure. We will rst focus on the possibilities intro-
duced by the Internet, including the new ways in which we communicate with the
dead on social network services (SNSs) and the digital permanence of the latter in
cyberspace. From there we will move on to discuss the particularities of griefbots,
focusing on the two-way communication aorded by this technology and the sense of
simulation derived from the virtual interaction between the living and the dead. After
contrasting, in the discussion section, the main aordances of the Internet and grief-
bots and their respective implications on grief, death and our imaginal relationship
with those no longer with us, we will conclude by briey agging up some ethical
issues raised by the use of griefbots, aecting both the living and the dead.

Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science
1 3
Exploring the Mediational Role of Digital Technologies in the
Grieving Process
If we look at history, we can see various ways of mediating communication between
the living and the dead, including ways of impersonating the latter in line with the
griefbot rationale. As Elder (2020) notes, “the emerging technologies we encoun-
ter today have roots in very old tendencies” (p. 84). Drawing on the funeral rituals
discussed by the 3rd -century-BCE Confucian scholar, Xunzi, Elder (2020) exam-
ines the “impersonator of the dead”, a designated representative playing the part of
the deceased person, thus oering those present the opportunity to interact with the
departed as a means of facilitating mourning. Another example can be found in spiri-
tualistic séances, where the dead manifest at the bereaved’s questions. While these
practices, unlike the previous example of the impersonator, may be prompted by a
greater quest for realism, they focus more heavily on the departed than on the survi-
vors (Beischel, Mosher & Boccuzzi, 2015). The telephone constitutes a more recent
artefact which, according to Walter (2015), permitted tele-presence—a non-physical
co-presence—between interlocutors, comparable to that between the living and the
dead. As a socially validated technology, the phone can be used to leave text and
voice messages for the deceased or to hold one-way conversations with them, as in
the case of the wind phone in Japan; a phone box built by Itaru Sasaki to cope with his
cousin’s death, but which was eventually opened to the public following the 2011 tsu-
nami.3 Lastly, the current digital world has expanded the possibilities of communica-
tion and mourning (Dilmaç, 2018) from online memorials—where the bereaved can
honour the dead—to platforms entrusted to manage the digital legacy of the latter and
deliver personal messages to the living. In this sprawling digital domain, we can also
nd “digital zombies” (Bassett, 2015) re-animated through interactive tombstones
with barcodes, unintended encounters with “Internet ghosts” re-appearing from the
cloud (Cann, 2014), as well as attempts to create digital avatars (Fussell, 2016) and
griefbots.
The continuing bonds model, based on the imaginal relationship between the liv-
ing and the dead, is a framework that is particularly suited to exploring how dierent
technologies mediate these relationships, whether by enabling one-way communi-
cation, as in the case of the phone, or a two-way interaction through spiritualistic
séances or the “impersonator of the dead”. This exploration is particularly relevant
within the context of new technologies, for they bestow a certain digital immortal-
ity on the dead, with whom one can interact in dierent ways. Along these lines,
Savin-Baden, Burden & Taylor (2017) dierentiate between one-way and two-way
immortality. In the former—typied by online memorials—the posthumous digital
presence of the deceased “is purely ‘read-only’. It is possible to view it, read it, even
get messages from it, but not to engage in a dialogue with it” (p. 21). In turn, two-way
immortality implies “the potential for the digital identity to interact with the living
world […] from two-way text or even voice and video conversations to analysis of
stock market activities” (p. 21). Drawing on the distinction made by Savin-Baden et
3 There are works exploring inverse cases, namely of bereaved who claim to have received phone calls
from the dead—see classic work by Rogo and Bayless (1979).

Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science
1 3
al. (2017), the following sections address the mediational role of new digital tech-
nologies in communication between the living and the dead, focusing on the Internet,
on the one hand, and griefbots, on the other.
Grief and the Internet: Expanding Death-related Experiences
Communication with the dead, according to Lagerkvist (2013), “reects the gist of
social media practices of our time: selves in constant connectivity even with the
ultimate others—the dead” (p. 104). This constant connection aorded by the Inter-
net among the living is also mediating the continuing bonds between the living and
the dead. Yet how is the Internet, including social networks and online memorials,
mediating mourning and the way we conceive of and relate to the dead in our digital
era? What possibilities does this relatively new technology oer compared to previ-
ous technologies? Brubaker, Hayes and Dourish (2013) address these questions by
highlighting the temporal, spatial and social expansions of death-related experiences
resulting from the use of SNSs. In their own words:
Temporally, we see pliability in this asynchronous medium (particularly around
notication of death) and an interweaving of death into everyday SNS experi-
ences (rather than in just funerals and memorials). At the same time, the use
of online memorials leads to a spatial expansion in which physical barriers to
participation are dissolved. Finally, social expansion results from the broad dis-
semination of information and grief practices throughout these SNSs and the
resulting forms of context collapse in online self-presentation (Brubaker et al.,
2013, p. 159).
These three dimensions of digital grief seem to allow for a more personalized way
of expressing and sharing, at our own pace, our mourning experience in connec-
tion with other mourners in need of the same social support (Gamba, 2018). This
results in an open and communal space—less constrained by the norms and physical
limitations of traditional oine rituals—where both mourners and the mourned can
be constantly connected from dierent global locations (Lingel, 2013). The digital
practices enabled by SNSs are also contributing to blurring the traditional boundaries
between public and private mourning (Myles, Cherba & Millerand, 2019) in that they
oer new spaces for articulating collective grief (Wagoner & Brescó, 2021), sharing
our innermost feelings and emotions among strangers, and bringing more visibility
to marginalized groups and forms of disenfranchised grief (Doka, 1989). As a result,
mourning has become an everyday practice in the online world, and is thus no longer
secluded from the rest of society or sequestered within the private sphere (Walter,
Hourizi, Moncur & Pitsillides, 2012).
In essence, the temporal, spatial and social expansion resulting from the use of
SNSs is inevitably changing the experience of grief in our societies. On the one hand,
these aspects are mediating new ways in which the bereaved express and cope with
loss, while managing the continuing bonds with their loved ones and commemorating
their memory. On the other hand, these technologies also bring about new concep-
tions of the dead stimulated by new ways of existing posthumously in the digital

Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science
1 3
world. For instance, the deceased’s virtual identity is often still accessible. Users can
visit their prole pages, read the deceased’s previous posts and even post messages
on Facebook memorial pages (Moyer & Enck, 2020). In this regard, a new aspect of
digital technologies is that they enable a sense of permanent presence of the dead or,
as Walter et al. (2012) put it, “a plausible geography of the dead residing in cyber-
space” (p. 293). This digital permanence, combined with the presence of a social
community sharing the same virtual space from dierent locations, contributes in
turn to legitimating the practice of interacting with the dead. In Kasket (2012a), we
nd some users reporting the feeling that the dead are there listening online behind
the screen and receiving the message. Despite not expecting a two-way communica-
tion, many users claim that replies from their loved ones come forth via dreams and
signs in the real world. In certain cases, the strong bond with the digital presence of
the deceased leads some users to say that the eventual deletion of their prole would
amount to losing the last bit of their loved ones (Kasket, 2012a).
In reecting on the dead’s digital being, Kasket (2012b) highlights the ‘thing-
ness’ of Facebook proles in the form of durability which, in turn, has an impact on
the ongoing connection between the mourner and the deceased. However, this digi-
tal immortality in cyberspace—whether in the form of Facebook memorials, digital
zombies or Internet ghosts—might have a negative side. According to Dilmaç (2018),
this continuous presence of the dead is at odds with the necessary role that the “rites
of passage” play in the grieving process. Although this digital presence is conducive
to maintaining an aective link with the dead, the personal and social ceremonies
that mark the passage of a person from one state to another might be hampered on
the Internet. In Dilmaç’s own words: “due to the Internet, the dead no longer travels
from one world to the next: she or he disappears physically but is all the more pres-
ent on the Web” (p. 289). Whether these online mourning practices involve a radical
shift from the traditional oine rites or just a spatial temporal and social expansion of
the latter—e.g., the dead are physically present in cemeteries, though their access is
limited in time and space—, the digital immortality aorded by the new technologies
raises a series of considerations on the way we mourn. However, these considerations
take on another level of complexity when moving from one-way immortality—in the
form of passive digital memories such as Facebook proles—to a two-way immortal-
ity aorded by griefbots.
Grief and Griefbots: A Two-way Dialogue with the Dead?
Besides online memorials and other kinds of passive digital memories, digital immor-
talization can take the form of AI-powered computer applications capable of a two-
way conversation by means of an interface or chatbot. Designed from the deceased’s
digital footprint —such as Mazurenko’s text messages used by Kuyda— griefbots
can potentially comprise all digital traces left behind after death, including “inten-
tional digital traces—emails, texts, blog posts, Facebook and photographs—and
unintentional digital traces—records of website searches, logs of movements and
phone calls” (Savin-Baden & Burden, 2019, p. 92). Some authors talk about digi-
tal memories related to these posthumous digital selves, while others use the term
“narbs” (Mitra, 2010) or crumbs to refer to these “digital souls” (Paul-Choudhury,

Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science
1 3
2011). Savin-Baden et al. (2017) reduce digital immortality to code and data kept
alive by a hosting company. However this digital immortalization may be under-
stood, the main feature that this technology brings into mourning practices is the pos-
sibility of a two-way conversation between the living and the dead by simulating the
latter’s conversational style and speech patterns. Crucially, unlike online memorials,
this bi-directionality enabled by the griefbot also implies a certain agentiality on the
part of the deceased person. Thus, a fundamental dierence between chatting with
the bot of your loved one and posting messages on her Facebook prole—or holding
an imaginal dialogue by her graveside—is that, in the rst case, the conversation does
not just depend on the survivor’s initiative for it to take place. Thus, on the one hand,
the griefbot’s responses go beyond the bereaved’s agency, although they do depend
indirectly on a “third party”: the griefbot programmer or designer. On the other hand,
it might well happen that the griefbot initiates a conversation autonomously, thus
requesting an answer from the bereaved. Lastly, the fact that the conversation is made
tangible in the form of written or oral messages adds certain materiality—a ‘thing-
ness’, to use Kasket’s (2012b) expression—to the intimate dialogue between the
bereaved and the deceased, and with it, a certain illusion of reality.
However, ethical and even legal considerations aside—briey touched upon in
the conclusion section—, digital identities created through our digital traces are not
without problems. In the opinion of Elder (2020), “such bots make poor substitutes
for living friends and family” (p. 85). According to this author, these bots are blind
to the multiple public selves we present in our conversations with dierent people
and contexts. In mixing them up and disproportionately drawing on data taken from
certain conversations over others—typically those held online—these applications
might fail to respect the integrity of the deceased’s memory. Furthermore, “the fact
that the bot draws on past experiences to predict future responses might mean that
it is incapable of adapting, growing, and changing with the other person” (Elder,
2020, p. 75). Along these lines, Ahmad (2016) highlights that “interactions which
are deeper are much harder to emulate, require more data and relatively sophisticated
methods” (p. 401). In any case, for this author, beyond griefbots’ ability to simulate
the deceased’s identity, the main point lies in the mourners’ experience of interacting
with the bot and the extent to which they engage in this simulation game. The focus
on the mourners’ experience leads Ahmad (2016) to revisit the Turing Test—origi-
nally called the imitation game—through which a machine’s ability to exhibit intel-
ligent behaviour indistinguishable from that of a human being is tested by a human
evaluator on the basis of a conversation between a human and a machine designed
to produce human-like responses. In a gradualist approach to the challenge of simu-
lating interaction with a dead person, Ahmad (2016) envisions a griefbot operating
through a text modality only—similar to Kuyda’s application—as the simplest and
easiest way to pass the Turing Test within a mourning context, where familiarity and
emotional attachment to the deceased are, unlike in Turing’s original test, crucial.
Pushing the Turing Test to the limit, we might consider, following Ahmad’s (2016)
argument, the extent to which “the ultimate version of such a simulacrum would be
to interact with a live version of the deceased person” (p. 402). Even in the hypotheti-
cal case that an exact copy of the deceased could be made, what would then be the
dierence from the point of view of the survivor’s experience? In the Black Mirror´s

Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science
1 3
(Brooker & Harris, 2013) Be Right Back episode, it is suggested that the replacement
of the dead person by his replica does not work because he is not, after all, a perfect
copy. Despite being identical in almost every feature —same voice, same face, even
the same freckles—, the copy, as a whole, fails to react in the way that the deceased
would in the eyes of his ancée. However, an alternative explanation is also possible.
As Brinkmann (2018) points out, even if the copy were identical, the protagonist
knows it is nonetheless a copy of her departed boyfriend. According to this author,
along with an understanding of death, the other basic precondition for grief is the
capacity to love. Brinkmann (2018) argues that our emotional attachments to particu-
lars, including other human beings as individuals, are grounded in our extraordinary
sense of the concrete. For instance, even if it were possible to exactly replicate, down
to the last molecule, Da Vinci’s Giaconda—or the FIFA World Cup won by your
national team, for that matter—would it feel the same having these objects, or even
a picture of them, vis-à-vis having the originals? According to Brinkmann (2018),
despite knowing that these are identical copies in every respect, these replicas would
never have the same emotional value to us, as in our view they would still be two
independent objects with respect to the originals. Our attachment to particulars, our
love for unique and concrete persons taken as a whole —not as a set of features that
may be replicated—is at the core of our being-in-the-world, and grief reminds us of
the uniqueness and irreplaceability of others. In Brinkmann’s (2018) words, “onto-
logically, it means that genuine loss cannot be repaired” (p. 204).
However, authors such as Elder (2020) think that interaction with griefbots, as a
means by which to extend and express the continuing bonds with the deceased, does
not require large doses of illusion of reality to generate an emotional response on the
part of the mourners, as they might already be predisposed to nding this interaction
signicant. Since ELIZA, the rst-ever chatbot, the tendency of users to attribute
anthropomorphic qualities to computers and even to accommodate to their way of
interacting in order to make it easier for the bot to generate comprehensible responses
is well known (Natale, 2019). As Elder (2020) points out:
“Just as even stylised googly eyes can activate people’s social responses, the
right phrase or joke oered up by the bot might evoke a rich array of memories and
responses from a grieving person who has a substantial history with the original
source of the bot’s conversational data” (p. 76).
Again, what is relevant is not so much the griefbot’s capacity to replicate the iden-
tity of the deceased, but the experience of the bereaved, her or his particular person-
alization of the bot through the way that it is used, and the kind of attributes projected
onto it. Perhaps, we may hypothesise, the very fact that griefbots are not supposed
to replace the identity of the deceased could enable users to engage in the simula-
tion game, acting as if they were chatting with their loved ones. In fact, according to
Despret (2015), such “as if” often appears in mourners’ narratives—especially when
they feel the presence of their loved ones in their everyday lives—, acting as a kind
of operator that leaves open the possibility of such encounters between the living and
the dead. And yet, behind the point-blank refusal of some at the prospect of engaging
with griefbots is often the eerie feeling that there may indeed be something “true” in
the bot’s responses, as they are, after all, based on the deceased’s digital footprint.
This might be compared to the case of mourners who suer hallucinations or claim

Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science
1 3
that their loved ones respond to them—whether in dreams or in real life. Similarly to
the griefbot’s messages, these kinds of responses are perceived in the form of “signs”
that must be read; signs that, as Despret (2015) notes, mourners often care little to
question whether or not they are real. Either way, regardless of the illusion of reality
attributed to these interactions—be it imagined or materialized through text messages
in the case of griefbots—, it may be said, following Despret’s (2015) argument, that
the dead exist not just in the memories of the living, but also through the ongoing
impact the former have on the lives of the latter.
In any case, the two-way interaction made possible by griefbots, combined with
the material quality of the messages left by the digital version of the loved one, might
be problematic, particularly in mourners with avoidance/denial patterns or compli-
cated grief symptoms. While griefbots might be helpful as part of grieving rituals,
especially in the initial moments after death as a way of communicating with the
deceased one last time—similarly to what Kuyda did with her friend—, problems
could arise if the virtual relationship with the dead becomes a chronic coping strat-
egy of denial. In that regard, the main features oered by this new technology might
encourage the bereaved to become trapped in a perpetual two-way conversation
driven by a logic beyond their agency, not necessarily based on therapeutic criteria,
and outside the social connections provided by the SNS.
Discussion: Towards a More Individualist Grief?
Rather than an automatic reaction to death, grief involves an elaborated emotional
response whereby the bereaved tries to reconstruct a world challenged by loss and
integrate the death of the loved one into a life that will never be the same (Brinkmann,
2020). Along with the rituals intended to overcome the initial shock and to honour
the dead (Candle & Phillips, 2003), dierent technological artefacts have historically
been mediating the grieving process and shaping the continuing bonds between the
living and the dead (Klass et al., 1996).
As the literature shows (Walter et al., 2012), new digital technologies are chang-
ing the way we mourn by providing new spaces to express the ongoing connection
with our loved ones. These new technologies are certainly not necessary in order to
maintain a continuing bond with the dead, as “people talk to the dead oine, and
receive advice from them, not least in cemeteries” (Walter et al., 2012, p. 293). What
changes is the expansion that these new technologies contribute to the experience of
grief (Brubaker et al., 2013). Both the Internet—including SNSs and online memori-
als—and griefbots imply an obvious temporal and spatial expansion, as they provide
an easier and more direct way to communicate with the dead anywhere and at any
time. Moreover, the periodic updates on Facebook, or continuous chatting with a
griefbot, create a feeling that the dead are listening behind the screen and keeping
up with the living’s latest news (Kasket, 2012b). This in turn contributes to a sense
of tele-presence or co-presence which, “for members of the ‘Facebook generation’,
may feel as close as those who are present in an embodied way” (Kasket, 2012a, p.
62). However, this sense of being co-present might vary depending on the technology
being used. As Walter et al. (2012) note, “one of the curious features of SNSs, unlike

Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science
1 3
most e-mails and all letters, phone calls, and face-to-face conversations, is that a
reply is not necessarily expected” (p. 292). As a result, these authors conclude, “com-
municating to a deceased person online is thus no dierent from communicating to a
living addressee” (p. 292). Conversely, due to the two-way communication enabled
by griefbots, a reply is expected—eagerly expected we may say—from the dead
addressee, thereby potentially encouraging the development of a greater emotional
dependence on the bot in certain cases. Similarly to what occurs with certain proles
of dead people on SNSs (Kasket, 2012), this might result in the need to perpetuate the
communication with the bot to avoid losing the loved one for a second time.
While, as we have seen, both SNSs and griefbots bring a signicant spatial and
temporal expansion to the grief experience, they dier when it comes to the social
expansion alluded to by Brubaker et al. (2013). Thus, while co-presence between
mourners and loved ones is socially shared within the same virtual space in the case
of SNSs, with griefbots this co-presence is conned to the private conversational
space between the mourner and the deceased person. If, as Walter et al. (2012) point
out, SNSs have de-sequestered death from the private sphere by bringing it into the
everyday and communal space of the Internet, will griefbots contribute to conning
death and mourning back within the private domain? Will griefbots encourage indi-
vidual memorialization of loss over its commemoration—literally, remembering in
common? Along with these questions, we may also wonder about the extent to which
social authorization to address the dead—permitted by the presence of an audience
on Facebook—would have paved the way to a more private mode of communicating
with loved ones via a griefbot. To what degree, once this conversation with the dead
turns private, would mourners be willing to keep using a more public way of com-
municating with their loved ones through SNSs? Will griefbots contribute to a more
individualistic way of mourning? To what extent could this result in a self-centred
way of relating to and appropriating the deceased’s memory through exclusive, pri-
vate and unshared communication with the dead? For instance, will it be possible
for dierent people to privately interact with a griefbot based on the digital footprint
of the same relative? Will griefbots be a technology more suited to individualistic
societies increasingly deprived of collective rituals (Lalande & Bonanno, 2006) and
therefore more in need of spaces that allow for this private communication? And, last
but not least, will griefbots hold us back from moving on by “inviting us to interact
with them, both in ways that preclude forming new attachments […] and in ways that
keep us turning to the deceased for support when we ought to be reaching out to oth-
ers in our social network”? (Elder, 2020, p. 76).
This takes us back to the main question of this paper, the potential mediating role
of griefbots in relation to mourning and the continuing bonds with our loved ones
after their death; a question that we can hopefully address with broader perspective
at this point. To begin with, it is worth recalling that grieving processes are cultur-
ally mediated by manifold co-existing technologies and rituals that mourners have at
hand, thus enabling dierent ways of connecting with the dead, whether more pub-
licly or privately, both online and oine. It should equally be borne in mind that the
potential impact of griefbots on the continuing bonds with the dead will depend on
how, for what purpose or at what point in the grieving process this technology is used
by each particular individual. For instance, it will depend on whether the dialogue

Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science
1 3
held with the bot is aimed at connecting with one’s inner feelings and the reality of
the loss, at momentarily avoiding coping with the loss—e.g., during the initial days
following a traumatic death—or whether it is used as a way of installing oneself in
permanent denial. In Kuyda’s case, the griefbot did not replace her friend Roman; as
Kuyda herself comments, it was simply a tool that helped her to progressively inte-
grate the loss of her friend into her life. Similarly to other mediational tools—ranging
from the impersonators of the dead in ancient China to the wind telephone in today´s
Japan—, griefbots might ultimately provide a socially authorized channel for mourn-
ers to engage in the simulation game of communicating with the dead.
In any case, it is worth emphasizing that the mediational role of griefbots in the
grieving process cannot be fully studied by merely focusing on the technology alone.
As Elder (2020) indicates, “guring out in advance exactly what would constitute
best practices for supporting the bereaved via this technology may be impossible”
(p. 85). Although griefbots have a set of aordances that make them dierent from
other technologies—allowing two-way-dialogue, a sense of simulation, digital per-
manence and private conversation with the dead—this does not imply that they will
apply equally to all users. Aordances derived from the materiality and design of
technological artefacts provide a set of possibilities for action (Glăveanu, 2021).
Griefbots allow, facilitate, invite, and also constrain or prevent, certain ways of com-
municating with the dead. In short, mediation does not imply causal determination.
According to cultural psychology, there is always a distributed agency between indi-
viduals and the possibilities of action oered by the technologies available to them
in a given sociocultural context (Wertsch, 1998). Therefore, we may conclude that
while griefbots might be benecial in some cases, they could be counterproductive
in others, depending on manifold factors, such as the kind and frequency of use, the
type of loss, the point in the grieving process, the mourner’s age, etc.
Conclusions: Ethical implications of Griefbots
As a new technology having a potential impact on the way we mourn, conceive of
death and relate to those who are no longer with us, griefbots raise a number of ethi-
cal issues that will certainly generate debate in our increasingly digital societies. As
Natale’s (2019) work on the social discourses triggered by the invention of ELIZA
shows, “software artefacts become contested objects whose meanings and interpreta-
tions are the subject of complex negotiations within the public sphere” (p. 713). By
way of conclusion, we will briey map out some of the ethical issues that the advent
of griefbots may pose in relation to the living and the dead.
Ethical Implications for the Dead
While oering us digital immortality by promising to store, as it were, our personal-
ity after our departure (Basset, 2015), these technologies leave us “vulnerable about
where our traces may be situated and how they may bear on our lives and afterlives”
(Lagerkvist, 2014, p. 105). This raises ethical concerns about the kind of digital sur-
rogates that we will leave behind and the extent to which these technologies will

Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science
1 3
secure the integrity of the deceased’s memory. In this regard, it is important to bear in
mind that digital ngerprints are based on traces left behind in our on-line life, thus
leaving out our conversations and interactions in the o-line world, most probably
with people closer to us. However, there is not just the fact that data are dispropor-
tionately taken from certain conversations over others, thus failing to respect the
integrity of the deceased’s memory. As pointed out above, in drawing on the dead’s
total digital ngerprint, these technologies might disclose the dead’s multiple public
selves shown in conversations with dierent people in dierent digital fora through-
out their lives, thereby revealing some facets of our loved ones they did not want us
to discover—facets that perhaps we would rather not know either.
Our communications on the Internet or on smartphones are typically seen as mun-
dane and ephemeral. However, Kuyda’s use of Roman’s text messages to design a
chatbot for coping with her grief shows us how long-lasting and transcendental our
digital remains may be (Newton, 2016). From our multiple selves performed in dier-
ent digital domains, to all the unintentional digital traces—such as records of website
searches—, the exponential accumulation of digital remains in cyberspace is making
us increasingly aware of the extent to which our digital life may aect the way we
will be remembered after death.4 Even though mortality is probably perceived as
something beyond the horizon for most members of the Internet generation (Walter
et al., 2012), this scenario is leading some people to take pre-mortem decisions in
order to manage their post-death digital presence, for instance in the form of digital
wills, with instructions specifying what to do with our digital legacy (Savin-Baden &
Burden, 2019). Along these lines, Öhman and Floridi (2018) suggest approaching the
ethical debate on digital remains by seeking “inspiration from frameworks that regu-
late commercial usage of organic human remains” (p. 319). More specically, these
authors argue that digital remains “should be seen as the remains of an informational
human body, that is, not merely regarded as a chattel or an estate, but as something
constitutive of one’s personhood” (p. 319).
In sum, nascent afterlife technology is bound to navigate through delicate and
somewhat unchartered ethical and even legal territory in the years to come. A case in
point is Intellitar, a start-up that oered a ‘virtual eternity’ to its clients, which went
defunct in 2012 because of legal issues. In its CEO’s own words, “it’s a pretty simple
story really, […] we had a tremendous amount of momentum but then we got into an
intellectual property dispute. It was going to be a long, expensive IP lawsuit” (Fus-
sell, 2016, para. 10).
Ethical Implications for the Living
The future use of griefbots also poses important ethical questions in relation to the
bereaved and, more specically, regarding the potential impact these technologies
may have on their grieving process. These questions lead us to consider the dier-
ence between what is technologically possible and what is therapeutically benecial
4 This is also true in the everyday use of SNSs. As Currie (2007) points out, the speed of near instantaneity
enabled by modern technologies leads us to experience the present as the object of a future memory, as it
becomes apparent in today’s tendency to stream our lives through social media (see also Brescó, 2021).

Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science
1 3
for those who have lost a loved one, thus bringing to the fore the dierent—and
not necessarily convergent—logics involved in the use of these new technologies.
As Öhman and Floridi (2018) remind us, digital afterlife companies are, after all, a
prot-seeking industry based on the use of digital remains and the monetization of
the digital afterlife of Internet users, something that may not necessarily be in the best
interests of the bereaved or suited to their psychological needs during their grieving
process. According to these authors:
Such capitalization of digital remains may have far-reaching consequences,
especially as capital requires human labour to remain productive. In other
words, an increasing volume of digital remains necessitates an increase in post-
humous interaction online. If not deleting them, what would make the cost of
storing billions of dead proles nancially viable? (Öhman & Floridi, 2018, p.
319).
It goes without saying that the need to obtain an economic return on digital remains
by encouraging posthumous interaction might have serious implications for those
using a griefbot in their grieving process. We may well imagine afterlife companies
implementing dierent strategies to keep mourners hooked, for instance by sending
unsolicited messages, notications, or updates from their loved ones whenever users
are inactive. To what degree could a grieving person ignore or refuse to answer these
messages? Without attributing a deterministic causal role to these technologies, the
two-way interaction allowed by griefbots, along with their private use, might in cer-
tain cases be detrimental to the bereaved’s grieving process. This could become even
more serious depending on the cognitive and aective capacity of the mourners, as
well as on their social support. For instance, Ahmad (2016) wonders how children
would respond to such an interaction and poses the hypothetical case of a child grow-
ing up interacting with a griefbot of a dead relative. Would the child be capable of
dierentiating between simulation and reality?
However, considering the distributed agency between individuals and the possi-
bilities oered by the technologies available, one might also contemplate the ethical
issues concerning not only the role of griefbots in relation to the grieving process,
but also the use that mourners might make of these technologies. Along these lines,
Ahmad (2016) raises the question as to whether the interaction with the bot will end
up changing the perception we have of our departed loved ones. In other words, to
what extent could the appropriation of the dead through the private use of their digital
copy eventually aect our sense of loss? Brinkmann’s (2018) answer to that ques-
tion is that, if continuing bonds are understood as the ongoing connection that we
have with the deceased, we would be impoverishing that bond by turning the other
into something that only has meaning in relation to ourselves, as if our loved one’s
death only mattered because of its eect on us. As this author reminds us, “grief is
not just about the fact that I lose someone, but also about the more fundamental fact
that someone no longer exists” (Brinkmann, 2018, p. 182, italics in the original). In
this sense, for all the temporary relief a digital copy might bring, we may venture to
say that griefbots will never replace our grief (or love) for those who are no longer
with us.

Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science
1 3
Acknowledgements Authors received nancial support through a grant on bioethics by the Victor Grífols
i Lucas Foundation (Spain). The second author also received nancial support through the Culture of Grief
Project, funded by the Obel Family Foundation.
Data Availability Statement Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or
analysed during the current study.
Compliance with Ethical Standards
Conflict of interest The author declares no potential conicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Ethical Approval This article does not contain any studies with human participants performed by any of
the authors.
References
Abramson, D. I., & Johnson, J. (2020). Creating a Conversational Chatbot of a Specic Person (U.S. Pat-
ent No. 10,853,717 B2) U.S. Patent and Trademark Oce
Ahmad, M. A. (2016). After Death: Big Data and the Promise of Resurrection by Proxy. In Proceedings of
the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, San Jose,
CA, USA, 7–12 May (pp. 397–408). Association for Computing Machinery
Ávila-Tomás, F. J., Olano-Espinosa, E., Minué-Lorenzo, C., Martínez-Suberbiola, F. J., Matilla-Pardo, B.,
Serrano-Serrano, M. E., & Güeto-Rubio, M. V. (2020). & Grupo Dej@lo Dejal@Bot: Un chatbot
aplicable en el tratamiento de la deshabituación tabáquica. Revista de Investigación y Educación en
Ciencias de la Salud, 5(1), 33–41 DOI: https://doi.org/10.37536/RIECS.2020.5.1.196
Basset, D. (2015). Who Wants to Live Forever? Living, Dying and Grieving in Our Digital Society. Social
Sciences, 4, 1127–1139
Beischel, J., Mosher, C., & Boccuzzi, M. (2015). The Possible Eects on Bereavement of Assisted After-
Death Communication during Readings with Psychic Mediums: A Continuing Bonds Perspective.
Omega, 70(2), 169–194
Brescó, I. (2021). Prolepsis. In V. P. Glăveanu (eds), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible. Palgrave.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98390-5_142-1
Brescó, I., Roncancio, M., Branco, A., & Mattos, E. (2019). Cultural Psychology: a Two-Way Path
Between Mind and Culture / Psicología cultural: un camino de ida y vuelta entre la mente y la cultura,
Estudios de Psicología, 40(1), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1080/02109395.2019.1565388
Brescó, I., & Wagoner, B. (2019). Memory, Mourning, and Memorials. In K. Murakami, T. Kono, T. Zit-
toun, & J. Cresswell (eds), Ethos of Theorizing: Peer Reviewed Proceedings for the International
Society for Theoretical Psychology (pp. 222–233). Captus Press
Brinkmann, S. (2018). General Psychological Implications of the Human Capacity for Grief. Integrative
Psychological and Behavioral Science, 52, 177–190
Brinkmann, S. (2020). Learning to grieve: A preliminary analysis. Culture & Psychology, 26(3), 469–483.
doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/1354067X19877918
Brooker, Ch. (Writer), & Harris, O. (2013, February 11). Be Right Back [Television series episode]. In
Brooker, Charlie. (creator). Black Mirror. Zeppotron; House of Tomorrow
Brubaker, J. R., Hayes, G. R., & Dourish, P. (2013). Beyond the Grave: Facebook as a Site for the Expan-
sion of Death and Mourning. The Information Society: An International Journal, 29(3), 152–163
Candle, J., & Phillips, W. L. (2003). Grief Rituals: Aspects That Facilitate Adjustment to Bereavement.
Journal of Loss and Trauma, 8(1), 41–71
Cann, C. K. (2014). Virtual Afterlives, Grieving the Dead in the Twenty-First Century. The University
Press of Kentucky
Currie, M. (2007). About time. Narrative, Fiction, and the philosophy of time. Edinburgh University Press
Despret, V. (2015). Au bonheur des morts. Récits de ceux qui restent. La Découverte

Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science
1 3
Dilmaç, J. A. (2018). The New Forms of Mourning: Loss and Exhibition of the Death on the Internet.
OMEGA—Journal of Death and Dying, 77(3), 280–295
Doka, K. J. (1989). Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow. Lexington Books
Elder, A. (2020). Conversation from Beyond the Grave? A Neo-Confucian Ethics of Chatbots of the Dead.
Journal of Applied Philosophy, 37(1), 73–88
Fussell, S. (2016). You can create an online avatar that lives on after you die—but what’s the point? Splin-
ter. https://splinternews.com/you-can-create-an-online-avatar-that-lives-on-after-you-1793862007
Gamba, F. (2018). Coping with Loss: Mapping Digital Rituals for the Expression of Grief. Health Com-
munication, 33(1), 78–84
Glăveanu, V. P. (2021). Aordance. In V. P. Glăveanu (ed), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible.
Palgrave. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98390-5_10-2
Google (2020, February 2). Loretta. Google Super Bowl Commercial. Facebook. https://www.facebook.
com/Google/videos/loretta-google-super-bowl-commercial-2020/888363931601853/
Jiménez-Alonso, B., & Brescó, I. (2021a). Narratives of Loss: Exploring Grief through Photography.
Qualitative Studies, 6(1), 91–116. https://doi.org/10.7146/qs.v6i1.124433
Jiménez-Alonso, B., & Brescó, I. (2021b). Grief, Photography and Meaning Making: A Psychological
Constructivist Approach. Culture & Psychology. Advance online publication https://doi.org/10.117
7/1354067X211015416
Kasket, E. (2012a). Continuing Bonds in the Age of Social Networking: Facebook as a Modern-Day
Medium. Bereavement Care, 31(2), 62–69
Kasket, E. (2012b). The Dead’s Digital Being in a Facebook Prole. Existential Analysis, 23(2), 249–261
Klass, D., Silverman, P. R., & Nickman, S. L. (Eds.). (1996). Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of
Grief. Taylor & Francis
Lagerkvist, A. (2017). Existential Media: Toward a Theorization of Digital Thrownness. New Media &
Society, 19(1), 96–110
Lalande, K. M., & Bonanno, G. A. (2006). Culture and Continuing Bonds: A Prospective Comparison of
Bereavement in the United States and the People’s Republic of China. Death Studies, 30(4), 303–324
Leaver, T. (2021, April 21–23). Imagining Digital Death in ‘Loretta’ and Marjorie Prime [Paper presen-
tation]. Death Online Research Symposium #5. Death and the Digital: Methods, Challenges and
Interdisciplinary Convergences, Copenhagen, Denmark
Lingel, J. (2013). The Digital Remains: Social Media and Practices of Online Grief. The Information
Society, 29(3), 190–195
Mitra, A. (2010). Creating a Presence on Social Networks via Narbs. Global Media Journal, 9, 20–40
Myles, D., Cherba, M., & Millerand, F. (2019). Situating Ethics in Online Mourning Research: A Scoping
Review of Empirical Studies. Qualitative Inquiry, 25(3), 289–299
Natale, S. (2019). If Software is Narrative: Joseph Weizenbaum, Articial Intelligence and the Biographies
of ELIZA. New Media & Society, 21(3), 712–728
Neimeyer, R., Klass, D., & Dennis, M. R. (2014). A Social Constructionist Account of Grief: Loss and the
Narration of Meaning. Death Studies, 38, 485–498
Newton, C. (2016). Speak, Memory. When Her Best Friend Died, She Used Arti-
cial Intelligence to Keep Talking to Him. The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/a/
luka-articial-intelligence-memorial-roman-mazurenko-bot
Norlock, K. (2017). Real (and) Imaginal Relationships with the Dead. The Journal of Value Inquiry, 51(2),
341–356
O’Brien, T. [@_TimOBrien] (January 22, 2021). I’m looking into this - appln date (Apr. 2017) predates the
AI ethics reviews we do today. Twitter. https://twitter.com/_TimOBrien/status/1352645952310439936
Öhman, C., & Floridi, L. (2018). An Ethical Framework for the Digital Afterlife Industry. Nature Human
Behaviour, 2, 318–320
Paul-Choudhury, S. (2011). Digital Legacy: The Fate of your Online Soul. New Scientist, 210, 41–43
Rogo, S. D., & Bayless, R. (1979). Phone Calls from the Dead. Prentice Hall
Savin-Baden, M., Burden, D., & Taylor, H. (2017). The Ethics and Impact of Digital Immortality. Knowl-
edge Cultures, 5(2), 11–19
Savin-Baden, M., & Burden, D. (2019). Digital Immortality and Virtual Humans. Postdigital Science and
Education, 1, 87–103
Sofka, C. (1997). Social Support “Internetworks,” Caskets for Sale, and More: Thanatology and the Infor-
mation Superhighway. Death Studies, 21(6), 553–574

Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science
1 3
Stroebe, M., Gergen, M., Gergen, K., & Stroebe, W. (1996). Broken Hearts or Broken Bonds?. In D.
Klass, P. R. Silverman, & S. L. Nickman (Eds.), Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief
(pp. 31–44). Taylor & Francis
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Action: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Harvard
University Press
Wagoner, B., & Brescó, I. (2021). Collective Grief: Mourning Rituals, Politics and Memorial Sites. In E.
H. Kofod, & A. Koester (eds), Experiencing the Death of the Other: Cultural, Existential, and Phe-
nomenological Dimensions of Bereavement (pp. 197–213). Routledge
Walter, T. (2015). Communication Media and the Dead: from the Stone Age to Facebook. Mortality, 20(3),
215–232
Walter, T., Hourizi, R., Moncur, W., & Pitsillides, S. (2012). Does the Internet Change How We Die and
Mourn? Overview and Analysis. OMEGA, 64(4), 275–302
Wertsch, J. V. (1998). Mind as action. Oxford University Press
Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional aliations.
Authors and Aliations
BelénJiménez-Alonso1· IgnacioBrescó de Luna2
Ignacio Brescó de Luna
ignacio.bresco@uam.es
1 Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain
2 Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain