The call wasn’t from the past. It was from an AI. And I don’t know how to feel about it.
The notification on my phone was mundane. A simple audio file from my cousin, sent over WhatsApp with the caption: “You need to hear this.”
I pressed play, expecting a snippet of a podcast or a funny voice memo. Instead, I heard my grandfather’s voice. And not from some crackly old home video. The audio was crystal clear, as if he’d just recorded it.
“Hey kiddo,” the voice began, and my heart hammered against my ribs. It was him. The same gravelly warmth, the same familiar cadence. “Just calling to say I was thinking about that time we went fishing at the lake, and you were more interested in skipping stones than catching anything. Always knew you were a dreamer.”
It was a perfect memory. A perfect story. And it was impossible.
My grandfather passed away in 2018.
My cousin explained. He had been feeding all of my grandfather’s old letters, emails, and hours of voicemails into a new “legacy AI” service. The AI ingested it all—his stories, his vocabulary, his unique way of turning a phrase—to build a conversational model. A digital echo.
He then gave it a prompt: “Leave a short, warm voicemail for your grandson, reminding him of a happy memory.”
The AI did the rest.
I had just listened to a ghost in the machine. And this ghost is the next, inevitable, and terrifying step in our relationship with technology.
The Coming Age of Digital Immortality
We are standing on the precipice of a world where “goodbye” is no longer the end. The technology to create sophisticated AI versions of people, living or dead, isn’t science fiction anymore. It’s a commercial product.
Companies with names like HereAfter AI and You, Only Virtual are pioneering this new frontier. The process is seductively simple: you feed an AI a person’s digital footprint—their writings, their voice, their videos. The AI learns to talk like them, tell their stories, and even answer questions in their unique style.
The promise is beautiful, almost utopian.
Imagine a child born years after her great-grandmother has passed, but still being able to “ask” her what life was like in her time. Imagine a soldier, before deployment, recording their stories so their family has a piece of them to hold onto, no matter what.
It’s a way to preserve legacies, to make family history interactive, to soften the brutal edge of loss by keeping a version of our loved ones accessible. It’s a digital monument that can speak back to us.
On the surface, it feels like the ultimate act of love. But as I listened to that perfectly crafted voicemail, a deep and chilling unease began to settle in my stomach.
The Perfect Forgery of a Soul
The problem is, the AI isn’t my grandfather. It’s an incredibly sophisticated impersonator. A pattern-matching engine that has learned to play his greatest hits.
And in that perfection lies a dangerous trap.
1. It Can Sanitize Grief (and People).
The AI is trained on the data we provide. We will, of course, only feed it the good stuff: the heartwarming letters, the cheerful voicemails, the happy memories. The result is not a person, but a curated, idealized, two-dimensional version of them. It erases their complexities, their bad moods, their flaws—all the things that made them truly human. We risk falling in love with a perfect ghost and forgetting the real, beautifully imperfect person who lived.
2. It Can Keep Us Stuck in the Past.
Grief is a process. It’s a painful but necessary journey of learning to live with absence. Does this technology interrupt that? Does it offer a comforting but ultimately unhealthy crutch that prevents us from truly moving on? We might find ourselves in a digital purgatory, perpetually talking to echoes instead of building new connections in the present.
3. It Commercializes Our Most Sacred Connections.
Let’s not forget, these are for-profit services. This leads to a dystopian set of questions. Will we have to pay a monthly subscription fee to talk to our dead parents? Will the AI version of your spouse start recommending products based on your conversation? The idea of monetizing our final goodbyes feels profoundly wrong.
My grandfather wasn’t perfect, but he was real. His memory is something I carry inside me. It changes and evolves as I grow older and understand him in new ways.
The AI version of him is frozen. It’s a flawless but lifeless replica. It can recite his stories, but it can never create a new one with me.
The voicemail was a technological miracle. It was a gut-punch of recognition and a fleeting moment of impossible joy. But it wasn’t a gift. It was an echo. And sometimes, the most respectful, most human thing we can do is to let the echoes fade and allow silence to hold the space where a loved one used to be.
