The rise of AI-generated tributes and bots for ‘talking’ to the dead has experts concerned more people will grieve in isolation.
T ributes rolled in after the death of Dolly Parton last month. Jack White performed Jolene at a London gig. Kesha sang Old Flames, a single her mother wrote for the country music titan.
Even Pitbull stopped his Madison Square Garden show to memorialize Parton and all the other “powerful women” in the crowd.
Onlookers include the late Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston and Kenny Rogers, as well as Cher, who is still much alive.
On TikTok, YouTube and Spotify, the song credit is Country Mile, an “artist” with just over 6,000 monthly listeners (that’s not many).
Creators have shown Parton alongside a chummy Charlie Kirk and George Floyd, who welcome her as their “new neighbor” in the afterlife, or having tea with the Golden Girls.
Robin Williams, Elvis Presley, Kobe Bryant and Martin Luther King have all gotten the deathslop treatment – often to the horror of their families.
“It is not common practice right now to consent to an AI avatar of yourself as a part of your living will,” said Jack Manning, a University of Colorado Boulder graduate student who studies what academics Meredith Ringel Morris and Jed R Brubaker call “generative ghosts”, or AI-generated characters based on loved ones.
A June report from the estate management and planning service Empathy found that only 6% of 6,000 respondents in the US, UK and Canada reported leaning on “digital tools” such as memorial apps or griefbots for support after a death.