In the past, most people grieved privately. The messy part about grieving took place offline. Now, tech companies have packaged, priced, and marketed grieving through apps. AI now lets a person interact with their dead loved one by being able to speak to a grieving person with a voice that sounded like their loved one.
Griefbots provide comfort to the grieving, by mimicking loved ones in texts, via voice notes and via FaceTime-like calls. While it may sound like a very sweet way to deal with loss, it is purely a business model. Grieving is now monetized through subscriptions, minute charges, and data scraping.
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Grief as a Subscription Product
Griefbots may seem like a good option; however, the reality is, they are just there to make money from you. The costs vary considerably but start from approximately $10 per session and can be as high as $15,000 in the USA.
Some providers charge a monthly subscription fee and other options allow you to pay by the minute. After all of the expenses associated with a traditional death, companies are now repositioning the grieving process to allow for continuous charges related to grief management. To be honest, it is quite disturbing how commercialized the grieving process is becoming. Most of the options provided are built on large language models, which was developed from existing information on humans in grief.
Some of these companies have done questionable things, such as pushing people to continue to “check-in” regularly, which just happens to extend customer subscriptions longer. Therefore, the longer a customer is using the service to grieve, the more money the company is going to make.
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So Where Do Consent and Privacy Come into Play?
For many griefbots, there is no explicit consent obtained from the deceased; only a few companies obtain consent. Rather than getting explicit consent from the deceased, many griefbots use what they refer to as family-uploaded data. Therefore, there are fundamental questions that arise regarding ownership of digital remains, specifically, who has control over how the deceased’s voice will be used.
Data re-use will also be of concern. For instance, many Griefbots companies do not inform users that conversations they have with the bot may be stored and analyzed for other purposes. The easiest way to think about this is that the Griefbot is taking advantage of your emotional vulnerability to train AI to be able to provide better services in the future.
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