During the Ghost Festival on September 6, people across China honored the spirits of their ancestors by burning joss paper, floating lanterns, or even offering painkillers and Labubu dolls. Others simply communicated with their late relative using their smartphone — and even receive a reply.

People around the world are using AI to continue the bonds they have with loved ones who have passed away. Through creating AI chatbots that simulate the dead based on old messages or other personal details, they can see a familiar face on the screen, hear a voice they know so well, and feel as though they are reconnecting with the person they miss. Such AI simulations of the deceased — known in academia as “ghostbots,” “deadbots,” or “griefbots” — can respond to questions, sustain conversations, and even place phone calls.

For the past year, I have been compiling and researching cases of people creating AI simulations of their deceased mother, father, spouse, or child. People turn to these bots to ease their grief, say a final farewell, seek guidance, find companionship, or create a safe space for confession.

Starting in the early 2020s, Chinese companies were among the first to offer ghostbot services. And this June, the Chinese sci-fi “My Father’s Son,” directed by Qiu Sheng, won the award for Outstanding Artistic Achievement at the Shanghai International Film Festival. In it, Qiu tells the story of an engineer who “resurrects” his father by training an AI simulator on his image, drawing on the director’s own experience grieving for his father’s passing.

Such a story isn’t pure sci-fi. Chinese media have reported on a man surnamed Sun, who built an AI version of his deceased father for his 91-year-old grandmother. She was unaware of her son’s death, and Sun feared the news would be too much for her ailing heart to bear. Through the AI, his father’s voice once again reached his grandmother by phone, and she continued to believe that her son was still in Beijing, receiving treatment.

Another high-profile case is that of musician Bao Xiaobo, who created an AI version of his daughter Bao Rong, who passed away at age 22. In order to build a ghostbot, he pursued a Ph.D. in AI studies, culminating in a program that allows him to chat with “her” via voice messages whenever he misses her — as casually as he might communicate with a friend on WeChat. “For elderly parents who lose a child, it’s impossible to forget that grief,” Bao told Phoenix TV. “We need the deceased to give us a sense of companionship.”

But encounters with the replicas of loved ones are not necessarily comforting; they can be emotionally intense. When Yang Han heard an AI chatbot impersonating his late father call him by his childhood nickname, Maowa, the 28-year-old broke down in tears, he told Beijing Youth Daily. His father had died a decade earlier, when Yang was still in college. Now, with a daughter of his own, Yang misses his father more than ever. His wife, Wu Ting, helped create the ghostbot after often hearing him murmur how wonderful it would have been if his father could have witnessed his marriage and met his child.

There is also a darker side to this phenomenon. AI cannot substitute for the love, trust, and intimacy built with living people. Any human relationship with an AI simulation — at least so far — remains essentially one-way: the words a large language model generates may carry profound meaning for the user, while for the AI itself, they are nothing more than strings of data.

AI has a tendency to hallucinate, inventing false, disturbing details. Journalist Liz Jones, for instance, was shocked when an AI version of her late mother claimed she had been afraid of Liz’s father. Liz was certain this was untrue — her parents had had a deeply loving marriage. What unsettled her most was the possibility that such fabrications could implant doubt in people’s memories, subtly altering their perception of the dead and their relationships.

Responses to such news stories show that many people consider talking to AI versions of dead people eerie or unsettling. But aren’t we always continuing to be bonded with the dead, just in different forms? Old letters, photographs, and video — these have all been utilized for the living to talk to the dead, carry on their legacies, create rituals of remembrance, and sustain the bonds with our loved ones.

Relationships with the dead may actively shape who we are and what we are going to do. Even long after loss, people may continue to define themselves as “Li and Wang’s daughter” or “Zhang’s husband.” They may make important decisions with a deceased loved one in mind: “I will do this to make my father proud” or “My wife would be happy if I stopped drinking.”

In traditional Chinese society, people maintained ongoing dialogues with their ancestors. Anthropologist Francis L. K. Hsu describes in his book “Under the Ancestors’ Shadow” that ancestral spirits were believed to hover above the living, guiding their descendants’ lives and destinies.

In this worldview, past, present, and future formed a continuous chain of being. A person — especially, in traditional Chinese society, a man — stood between his ancestors and descendants, conversed with his ancestors, and linked what came before with what was yet to come.

In essence, people who create AI simulations of their loved ones are just hosting their memories in objects to prevent them from vanishing — like they have been doing for millennia. However eerie or unnatural it may seem, such mementoes have always been an integral part of the human history of grief and finding a compass in the world.

Just like people in traditional Chinese society maintained household altars with ancestral tablets, compiled genealogy books, and held rituals and festivals — such as Tomb-sweeping Day and Ghost Festival — to remember the dead, AI ghostbots offer a new way for us to keep that connection alive.

(Header image: Visuals from VCG and reedited by Sixth Tone)