Today the dead can answer us
When I for Six years ago, when I was told that my mother had cancer, my first thought was: how am I going to cope? The second: I’m not ready to lose her. I temporarily left the US, which had been my home since 2002, to spend the last months with her.
Turns out she had more time than that.
My dad didn’t have that. He died ten years ago, also of cancer, just months after diagnosis. I no longer remember exactly what he sounded like – the tone of voice, the way he said certain things. Death is also the slow erasure afterwards.
So when my mom got sick, I started joking about turning her ashes into a diamond to wear around my neck. The idea was that she would always accompany me, continue to travel, see the world. She liked the idea.
But the more I thought about dad, the less a stone was enough.
When generative AI broke through came talk of digital clones and avatars. The digital afterlife industry is expected to quadruple to nearly $80 billion within ten years, according to NPR. Microsoft was granted a patent for chatbots by the dead back in 2020, built on messaging, voice and social media. The interactive memory app HereAfter AI interviews people while they are alive to make bots of them. Video platform StoryFile pre-recorded an 87-year-old woman so she could answer questions from her own funeral guests. In South Korea, a mother met a VR version of her dead seven-year-old daughter in a documentary that has been viewed nearly twenty million times.
People have always spoken to their dead, through prayers, dreams, graves and letters. The difference today is that they respond.
The idea seemed obvious to me. I’ve been writing about technology since 2008. When the diagnosis came, I knew I wanted to do something, but not what. I stopped deleting mom’s messages, but didn’t realize at the time what a gold mine the thousands of WhatsApp messages would become.
At first, mom was skeptical. She firmly said no in that way she does when she thinks I’m messing things up. But the more we talked, the more she understood what I was after.
We started with the interviews. The hard part was not the facts of her life, but the tone. She never swears, but when she’s angry she chooses her words, and they hit harder than swear words. “Don’t mess with your brother” she has said all my life, and still says, to two grown people. That’s the kind of thing I’m after. Not a transcript, but a behavioral fingerprint. An avatar that gets the facts right but the tone wrong is not her, but any mother.
I asked what she wanted the avatar to look like. Would it speak from the grave, or as if she never passed away? At what age did she want to be immortalized? And the look, her signature look before she got sick: the copper-red hair, Versace sunglasses, jeans with a tailored blazer? She chose 40 years, and that’s probably also the version I remember most when I think of her.
Building the avatar has taken longer than expected. Some questions are not asked over a fifteen-minute coffee break. You have to wait until it feels right. We both know why I’m asking. Six years since the diagnosis, hundreds of doctor visits. You can cheat death for a while, but not forever.
But the closer the avatar gets, the clearer the reverses become. The voice is the most sensitive. When Val Kilmer lost his voice to throat cancer, he had the voice company Sonantic recreate it digitally. For the famous, the choice disappears the fastest. Robert Downey Jr has said his law firm is suing whoever touches his image after his death.
We’ll see, says Chris Mattmann dry when I talk to him. Mattmann is an American data scientist and one of America’s foremost AI experts, today director of the consulting firm Mattmann.AI. People have already copied Downey, he says, mentioning the clip there Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise fighting on a rooftop and arguing about Jeffrey Epstein’s death. It looks like an action movie but is AI generated, from two lines of text.
For the public, there is rarely any choice. But what does it look like for the rest of us?
Consent is still ours to give. When I asked friends and colleagues if they would consider doing this, the answers were about 50/50. One flatly said no. Her mother, dead for a year, had thought the AI was uncanny, and that was respected.
My mother has said yes, but I wonder if a yes is enough. She has said yes to the years after she is gone. But a yes cannot be taken back when you no longer exist. And the avatar may not even survive her. StoryFile — the company that let a woman answer questions from her own funeral guests — filed for bankruptcy. When such a company closes, the avatars disappear with the servers. Then you lose the dead a second time.
None of this stops anyone, says Chris Mattmann. The only thing that counts is how easy it is to do. He points to the Legacy Box, where you post old photos and cassette tapes and get everything digitized back. When the step is easy enough, people take it. The raw material is already available. An entire person’s life can fit in about one terabyte, which is what fits on an ordinary laptop. The pictures, messages and voices are in our mobiles.
Of course, I don’t expect an exact copy. I’m not cloning my mother à la Dolly. But if Mammatar can say “put on your jacket, it’s cold” when I’m 60 years old, in exactly that mother tone that never gives up, well, it’s come close enough.
When I ask Chris Mattmann if he would want his own children to do this with him, he says he would welcome it. It is not for the sake of the dead.
“Who knows what it’s like on the other side,” he says. “But this is for the children, for those who are left. It gives them comfort.”
My mother already knows what it’s like to want someone to stay. She thinks about dad and her youngest sister Satuwho also died of cancer. If she had the messages, the recordings, the voice, she would have wanted to do this. A Satu to talk to.
“It’s her voice I miss the most,” says mother.
Camille Tuutti has been active as a writer in the USA since 2002 and has written about technology since 2008, first as a journalist and today as a ghostwriter and columnist.
