The AI startups that are bringing back the dead

On 1 May 2025, in a Maricopa County courtroom, a dead man addressed his killer. Christopher Pelkey had been shot in a road-rage incident three and a half years earlier. At the sentencing hearing, an AI version of him spoke about forgiveness, then admitted it was a recreation built from his photos and voice.

His sister had made it. The words were not his, but what she believed he would have said. The judge said he loved it and handed down the maximum sentence. The defence noted you could make such a likeness say almost anything. So who, exactly, was speaking?

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The Pelkey case is the loudest version of something that has been arriving for years. The first widely reported instance came in 2020, when Joshua Barbeau paid five dollars to use a website called Project December and chatted through the night with a simulation of his fiancée, who had died eight years earlier.

Some of you will remember our recent video on AI and animal communication. Both stories promise an old dream now within reach, and both turn on pattern-matching. To be fair, there is an asymmetry. When AI decodes whale song there is something on the other end. When it talks back as a dead person, there is only the bereaved person's grief, rendered conversational.

In the five years since Barbeau's chat, an industry has formed around that reflection.

HereAfter AI was founded by the journalist James Vlahos, who recorded eighteen hours with his dying father and built what he called a Dadbot. Replika began when Eugenia Kuyda trained a chatbot on messages from her best friend, killed in Moscow in 2015, and now reports more than ten million users.

Others have followed. StoryFile recorded thousands of subjects, including Holocaust survivors, before filing for bankruptcy in 2024. Eternos.life charged a terminally ill German entrepreneur fifteen thousand dollars to record three hundred phrases so his AI voice could keep speaking German after his death.

The figures are slippery because the category is contested. Grand View Research valued the global digital legacy market at around thirteen billion dollars in 2024, projected to roughly double by 2030. Different firms publish different numbers, but they agree on the direction of travel.

In 1848, two sisters in Hydesville, New York, reported a knocking they claimed came from a spirit. Within two decades, Spiritualism had become a mass movement with millions of adherents across the United States and Europe.

The conditions were specific. The American Civil War had killed more than six hundred thousand men, Darwin had unsettled religious certainty, and new media seemed to dissolve the line between presence and absence. Around 1861, William Mumler began selling photographs in which a translucent ghost appeared behind the bereaved sitter.

Mary Todd Lincoln sat for one and was photographed with her assassinated husband's ghost behind her. She is reported to have died believing he had been there. In 1888, Maggie Fox confessed on stage that the rappings were made by cracking her toe joints. The movement barely flinched.

Spiritualism, it turns out, was never really about whether the rappings were real. It was about what the bereaved needed. Mary Todd Lincoln brought her grief to Mumler's camera, and the camera reflected it back. Stacey Wales brought hers to a language model, which did the same.

The obvious worry is that these tools stop people grieving properly. That is less obvious than it sounds. A 1996 book, Continuing Bonds by Klass, Silverman and Nickman, argued that healthy grief has rarely meant cutting ties with the dead. Talking to a parent at their grave, or lighting incense at Qingming, continues the conversation.

The harder question is whether the form matters, whether sitting with a memory differs from chatting with a simulation that answers back. The honest position is that we do not yet know. Prolonged Grief Disorder entered the diagnostic manual only in 2022, and there are almost no published outcome studies.

What the bot is also matters. It is not the dead person but a probability distribution over text, weighted toward outputs shaped like them. Patrick Stokes argues in his 2021 book Digital Souls that the digital dead are real objects of moral concern, yet are not the dead themselves.

Sherry Turkle, the MIT sociologist, offers the most pointed caution. Even when the experience feels good, she argues, the grief we hand to the bot is grief we do not do for ourselves. The dead do not speak, and never have. What we do, and have always done, is speak to them and listen for the echoes. The tools change. The longing does not.