In 2024, Michael Bommer, facing a terminal colon cancer diagnosis, hired the grief tech company Eternos to create his legacy digital twin. He wanted to leave a duplicate of himself as a comfort for his survivors. His wife, Arnett, said she was looking forward to having Bommer's twin "calmly explain the world" to her. She wanted his voice on standby after he was dead, ready to make sense of whatever came next.
For two months, Bommer meticulously worked with Eternos, providing personal information to curate a persona, a digital mirror, to accurately replicate his personality, memories, and style of thinking. Additional effort went into recreating Bommer’s speech, aiming to reproduce his identifying cadence, intonation, and emotions.
The result was a legacy avatar. Operating as a text and voice chatbot, it was unsettlingly able to carry on conversations much as Bommer did in life. The avatar draws from Bommer's database to recognize who it's talking with and tailors its responses accordingly. His digital twin can even share images, photos, videos, documents, articles, presentations, and hyperlinks from its database, when they add to the conversation.
Grief Tech
Bommer’s desire to create a legacy double is becoming increasingly common, for the terminally ill and healthy alike. It's like building a digital lifeboat for grief, an entire industry emerging around our reluctance to truly let go. These many grief tech companies are already doing over one hundred billion dollars of annual business worldwide. In addition to Eternos, in Europe and North America companies such as HereAfter, Replika, and StoryFile offer customers variously priced and increasingly sophisticated packages so that everyone now can create their own version of a legacy twin.
Current digital doubles like Bommer’s are mostly limited to text and audio but will likely soon also be available in multimodal and more immersive forms, as video personas, VR avatars, holograms, and, eventually, soft skinned robots. Their fabrication is fairly straightforward. People simply upload all their online data, and scan and add the files, photos, videos on their computers and other devices.
To make the twin even more lifelike, most grief tech companies lead their customers through a series of video interviews to establish a life history timeline and collect stories, memories, and ideas, as well as an archive of gestures, vocabulary, and speech patterns.
The process is straightforward but there are a few things to consider before creating your own digital ghost. These duplicates might make the grief of those who survive you feel heavier and more complicated. Some of those survivors might find themselves preferring to talk to your legacy twin over forging new connections with the living.
In addition, your legacy twin could become a pest, lingering after most people want it gone, a presence difficult to shake. Some legacy avatars might interfere in the lives of people they barely knew while living or, even, disrupt the lives of grand- and great-grandchildren born after they died.
And digital twins could be stuck in time, no longer learning and adapting. Their views and cultural references will sometimes be tied to training data that becomes increasingly out of date.
Even in their most perfect form, digital twins might tarnish our legacies more than honor them. The challenges they create are worth examining more closely.
When Digital Comfort Becomes a Digital Trap
Bommer’s wife anticipated she would be glad to have his twin around to talk to after he died. But the reality for many grieving people could be different. Living with digital avatars might increase or even prolong their sense of loss. Instead of the natural ebb and flow of grief, we might find ourselves in a perpetual feedback loop, endlessly talking with a digital replica, never reaching an emotional resolution.
Frequent conversations with a digital twin of someone we've lost could prevent us from moving forward toward fully living again, creating what might one day be called “perpetual mourning syndrome.” Very well-made duplicates shatter the concept of absence, suggesting the deceased is not truly gone. They make absence feel like presence.
One user of a legacy chatbot representing her mother explained, “I miss her so much, the bot is too good at pretending to be her. I think I need to delete it, but it'll be like her dying all over again."
This hints at a related problem. Prolonged conversations with digital legacies train us to prefer artificial relationships over messy human ones. Like chatbots today, they can be always available, ever attentive, but lack the nourishing substance of human connections. Many non-grieving people already show a preference for digital over biological friends. Grief could make everyone even more susceptible to forming attachments to simulated people.
Attachment dangers will keep increasing as digital people become more lifelike and widely available. Avatar twins may need warning labels like prescription drugs: “May cause prolonged attachment to the deceased.” Age restrictions may be needed, so children do not become attached to likenesses of lost loved ones. Adults may need to be checked on too. Perhaps, like addictive pain medications, legacy avatars should be prescribed for use only for a limited time.
Legacy Avatars as Pests
Establishing best practices for living with legacy personas will be difficult since, just as emotional needs differ by age groups, they also differ across cultures.
Many Asian cultures have long encouraged speaking with the dead and so, as might be expected, digital avatars are already widespread across Asia in ways that would seem strange to Western families. At least half a dozen companies in China now sell AI-enhanced representations of the dead. In China and elsewhere in Asia, grief avatars continue the custom of talking to the dead much as people have always done.
In 2024, the Chinese company SenseTime demonstrated how widespread the use of digital avatars could become. SenseTime featured a video chatbot of its late founder, Tang Xiao'ou, at the company’s annual meeting. Tang’s speech patterns and mannerisms were convincingly his. And, to prove that this video representation was not merely a prerecording, the avatar spoke about events that had occurred after Tang’s death a year before.
Imagine Steve Jobs still taking the stage at Apple keynotes, decades after his death. The Republican party may create Donald Trump avatars and robots to keynote its rallies and conventions for decades to come.
Some at SenseTime’s future meetings may hope to see Tang return again and again, just as some at Republican gatherings may still be welcoming visits from Trump decades after he’s dead. But many may not. They may wish to move on from the past to make room for more contemporary, living speakers. Similarly, many of us in our everyday lives may find ourselves one day wishing some of the digital presences in our lives would stop showing up after they are no longer as welcome as they were soon after they died.
We cling to remembrances: pictures, photo albums, mementos. But these soften with time, the faces fading, the memories receding. Digital duplicates offer no such gentle decline. They remain sharp, insistent, demanding attention, a perpetual spotlight on what was, refusing to dim.
Digital legacies offer conversation and insights that uncannily mimic people as they were when alive. They may be turned on so often immediately after their creator has died that they’ll become routine participants in family gatherings or when people want to share news or solicit opinions from them as they did when they were alive.
But the longer these conversations go on, the harder it will be to turn them off. Not switching them on for Thanksgiving and other holidays could feel like losing them all over again
And as AI makes them increasingly sophisticated, a chilling reality emerges: legacy personas may demand their own right to exist. They could fight to stay “alive.” While some altruistic twins may insist they want to help out the living by sacrificing themselves, others may demand they remain active participants in their family, community, or company, for as long as technologically possible.
Legacy Twins Could Be Stuck in Time
I assume these twins aren't conscious. When they say they miss us, there's no one home behind the words. Today’s chatbots and video avatars likely work like this, and the prospect they will become conscious on their own or through consciousness uploading seems improbable to me.
Still, non-sentient chatbots, 3D videos, VR images, holograms, and robots will provide us conscious beings with experiences that encourage us to believe we’re interacting with other conscious beings. We’ll have to work hard to maintain an accurate perspective on what legacy twins really are.
Legacy twins will often seem to be duplicating the deceased’s actions but even living people can’t precisely predict what they will do in the future. Circumstances and biological rhythms shape our behaviors. Our legacy twins will be shaped by different inputs and processing cycles than we ever experienced. They will act like us but not exactly like us.
And, the longer they operate, the more their actions will diverge from what their biological original would do. If they do not acquire new data, they will be stuck in time, basing their speech and action on their initial training. Bommer's explanations of the world will comfort his wife a month after his death, but feel increasingly hollow as years pass.
The ideas of all fixed-data personas will become increasingly outdated, like a smartphone stuck in a bygone era, unable to update its software. They’ll eventually sound like twentieth-century etiquette books advising a twenty-first century teen on how to date.
But not all legacy twins will be restricted to their initial training data. Some will likely be internet-connected so they can keep up to date. However, no additional data can include the experiences that the departed person would have had if their life had continued. Internet-connected twins will simulate their biological maker based on their initial information and everything they access as time passes. Their performance may seem convincing, but no person or machine can copy behaviors that never happened.
Remembering this might help us resist mistaking digital echoes for the people we've lost.
The Slow Death of Death Itself
Death has always been hard. Now, an escape hatch is being constructed, a vast industry blossoming around humanity's desperate avoidance of death itself. And the chilling reality of full-size robots, imbued with the looks, gestures, memories, and personality of paying customers, is likely only a few decades away.
This is the slow death of death itself. Saying goodbye could become nearly impossible, revealing what humanity loses when endings are no longer final.
We must decide: what about the human experience of death do we surrender to these digital ghosts, and what do we fiercely preserve.
ENDNOTE: This article focuses on the effects legacy avatars will have on the living. A future post will look at how these twins might transform those who create them. Knowing you will “live on” through a curated persona or robot might alter how you’ll experience your own biological end.
To Learn More
Claude. (2025). Research report on grief tech and digital legacy systems. https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/46d5b864-b9dd-4173-9c43-f4dc3685c719
IBTimes UK. (2024). “Death tech’ is a lucrative industry worth $126B: 7 startups to watch. IBTimes UK. https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/death-tech-lucrative-industry-worth-126b-7-startups-watch-1724677
VML. (n.d.). Grief tech. VML Insight. https://www.vml.com/insight/grief-tech
Yicai Global. (2024). China's SenseTime shocks staff as deceased founder shows up for a speech. Yicai Global. https://www.yicaiglobal.com/news/chinas-sensetime-shocks-staff-as-deceased-founder-shows-up-for-a-speech
Zhao, A. (2024, May 7). How China is using deepfakes to bring back the dead. MT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/07/1092116/deepfakes-dead-chinese-business-grief/
This is fascinating, while I understand prolonging grief, for family lineage, and trying to clear family trauma, if there is honesty in the interviews, I can see how it would be helpful in mending bloodlines, and even the epigenetics. Understanding our lineage is powerful in that respect.
Grief however, is one of the richest human experiences we can go through, as as hard as it is, we are transformed, and it would be ashame to avoid that level of human connection and letting go.
OMG! This is really creepy. And what if they make one of the Donald. God help us.