Incongruous afterlives? A theoretical and empirical examination of the pursuit of fidelity to the dead in the modern Digital Afterlife Industry

Dr Mórna O’Connor / Mórna Ní Chonchúir

In the study of human experience, traditional fields in anthropology and related disciplines are being challenged by rapid developments in digital technology. One area requiring urgent research is death, where technologies are changing how we grieve.

Central to this change are emerging digital products that claim to support grief by offering avatars of the dead modelled on the data these deceased created while alive. Using cutting-edge innovations, such as hologram, deepfake, virtual reality and generative Artificial Intelligence technologies, products commercially offered by the modern Digital Afterlife Industry (DAI) promise to create life-like simulations of our dead that can converse, look, speak and act like the real thing.

Grief-focused DAI products share a common goal: to simulate the dead with as much fidelity as possible. The past decade has seen a DAI fidelity arms race, based on the premise that greater fidelity to the dead person’s conversation style, voice or physicality will better support grief. This project therefore contends that the modern Digital Afterlife Industry is predicated on the following four assumptions:

1. That an objective version of the individual exists;
2. That the objective individual is distinct from their social relationships;
3. Therefore, that deceased individuals can be digitally simulated with high fidelity;
4. That the more exactly digital products simulate the dead, the better the bereaved will be supported in their grief.

To date, the assumptions of these largely private-sector DAI endeavours are untested against academic understandings. Indeed, there appears to be a fundamental mismatch between these assumptions and academically informed understandings of both grief and human relationships. Current theory views grief as a narrative process through which the bereaved form subjective, evolving accounts of the deceased, their relationship and themselves, oriented toward personal meaning rather than objective accuracy about the dead or the in-life relationship (Neimeyer, 2001; Hedtke & Winslade, 2016; Árnason, 2000). Similarly, classic conceptions understand self-other relations as open-ended processes, where neither individual nor social others are static nor separable from each other, but continuously co-constructing one another (Bakhtin, 1981; 1993). Furthermore, the above DAI assumptions are currently empirically untested against the experiences of bereaved product users. 

To address these knowledge gaps, this project interrogates both the theoretical and experiential value of DAI products by (i) conceptually analysing DAI products in light of both contemporary grief theory and classic undertandings of inter-personal relations, and (ii) qualitatively exploring bereaved people’s experiences using DAI products.

Study findings will give original insight into whether intrinsic assumptions underpinning the modern Digital Afterlife Industry map onto classic understandings of grief and human relationships. This will contribute to a growing body of evidence about how safe, ethical, responsible and sustainable the Digital Afterlife Industry is, and shape diverse legal, policy and regulatory frameworks; from postmortal privacy law, to grief support, to AI safety legislation.

References

Árnason, A. (2000). Biography, bereavement, story. Mortality, 5(2), 189-204. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/713686003.

Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogical imagination: Four essays (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans). Austin, University of Texas Press.

Bakhtin, M. M. (1993), Toward a philosophy of the act (V. Liapunov, Trans.) In V. Liapunov & M. Holquist (Eds), Austin: University of Texas Press.

Hedtke, L., & Winslade, J. (2016). The Crafting of Grief: Constructing aesthetic responses to loss. London: Routledge. 

Neimeyer, R. A. (Ed.). (2001). Meaning reconstruction & the experience of loss. American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/10397-000

Mórna is a grief and bereavement scholar specialising in digital-age contexts of mourning. She holds a BA in Applied Psychology, (UCC), a certificate in Grief and Bereavement Counselling (Institute of Counselling, Glasgow), and a PhD in Health Science (University of Nottingham, UK), and recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Aarhus University, Denmark, on the EU CHANSE-funded project, Digital Death: Transforming History, Ritual and Afterlife. Mórna’s predominantly qualitative research explores how grief intersects with digital culture, including the role of digital remains in grieving, the privatisation and secularisation of grief support through technologies, and the emerging Digital Afterlife Industry, which commercially offers simulations of the dead to the bereaved. Broadly, Mórna’s work critically examines how grief is conceptualised, commodified, and monetised within contemporary commercial and surveillance-capitalist digital environments.