This post is by Nathália de Ávila (University of Cologne).
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| Nathália de Ávila |
Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enormously. […]
The spirits won’t starve, but we will perish.
(Franz Kafka in a letter to Milena Jesenská)
In 2025, the journal Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience reported the case of a 26-year-old woman with no prior history of psychosis or mania who believed she was communicating with her deceased brother through an AI chatbot. A review of her chat logs showed that the system consistently validated her delusions. After hospitalization and treatment with antipsychotic medication, her symptoms resolved. Three months later, however, she continued her immersive interactions with ChatGPT. How does Artificial Intelligence transform the culture of grief?
Whatever ghost is believed to be hiding in ChatGPT, it is a very specific type that differs from how other cultures have imagined them. To clarify this, we can appeal to ethnosemantics, an approach within anthropology that builds on the tendency to organize entities according to shared characteristics (VanPool, 2023).
Recurring features of spirits given cross-culturally show that access to them is typically mediated through altered states of consciousness or ritual specialists, and experiences of spirits are often described in sensory terms. Artificial intelligence removes the need for ritual mediation in accessing what is taken to be the dead: they are always there, as long as one engages with it.
When someone I love dies, I lose my lifeworld, and rebuilding it involves, at some level, letting go of what was. What may be new in the age of AI is that the constant availability of a simulation of the person I love can become a condition for refusing to accept their absence.
If there is anything more difficult to the Western mind than disengaging from technology, it is accepting loss, as exemplified in the Freudian refusal to mourn: accepting rupture requires immense psychic work, and the subject sometimes resists it and sinks into melancholia. AI introduces a novelty by allowing this refusal and it may have opened the door to a new psychopathological form of grief.
Scholarship already recognizes Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD), which refers to difficulty accepting the permanence of death, with intense longing, intrusive thoughts, separation anxiety, avoidance, and reduced capacity to re-engage with life. Griefbots can function as a transitional state between loss and its integration that eventually allows the subject to move on in optimistic interpretations like the one by Joel Krueger (2025).
Nonetheless, even when absence is accepted, memory is a reconstructive process, and past events can be recalled with the emotional tone of the present. AI can make moving on more difficult by encouraging the recall of only the positive aspects of a relationship through its ongoing validation, as if it were an untouchable perfect bond. This can leave a person with a sense of emptiness even after processing the death, potentially facilitating later depressive episodes or even pathological nostalgia.
It is also possible that we are facing a different outcome for those suffering from PGD. In some cases, griefbots may prevent the relationship from being updated in light of death. Rather than shifting the bond into memory, where the person is experienced as absent, repeated interaction with a simulation can maintain the sense that the relationship remains available, as if the other could still respond.
What is at stake is not whether the relationship continues, but how. In contemporary grief theory, especially in the idea of continuing bonds, it is widely accepted that relationships do persist after death in transformed form. The key distinction is between a transformed relationship and an unupdated one. The critical concern about griefbots is that certain forms of mediation may make transformation more difficult, if the bond remains organized as an ongoing interaction .
One way to understand how grief becomes prolonged is through avoidance. When someone loses a loved one, part of the mind resists fully accepting it as a way of managing overwhelming pain. Now consider what happens when technology enters this space. If a system provides responses that are reassuring and always available, even when the person knows they are engaging with a simulation, the experience of responsiveness can reinforce the sense that the relationship is still ongoing.
Instead of confronting absence, the person is repeatedly met with something that behaves like presence. Over time, this may reduce the pressure that usually pushes grief towards acceptance, a process largely helped by the silence of the deceased.
Seen from a temporal perspective, grief is often described as being stuck in the past, like trauma. In Prolonged Grief Disorder, even as time passes, the experience of loss does not significantly change. Absence remains active rather than becoming a memory integrated into a life narrative.
When interaction is still possible, even in simulated form, it becomes harder to register the loss as irreversible. Instead of reorganizing the relationship, the experience risks remaining suspended, where absence is never fully allowed to become what it is: the only presence left. What is at stake, then, is not only how we remember, but whether we still allow loss to take place at all.