How to grieve in the age of artificial memory
After losing both her parents, writer Natalie Morris found their faces resurfacing in the most unexpected place: her phone. As algorithms, archives and AI increasingly mediate our memories, she explores how technology is reshaping the way we grieve.
My phone knows it’s my mother’s birthday.
Barely awake, my eyes adjusting to the blue glare of the screen, there she is: a carousel of different versions of her face sliding across my vision. There’s a pastel backdrop. It’s set to music. This would be fine – nice, even – if my mother weren’t dead.
Both my parents died when I was in my early 30s. Cancer. Aggressive. Quick. Just as my brain hasn’t fully processed the cumulative trauma of these losses, neither has my phone. It serves their faces back to me with the casual callousness of something that has never known loss. Because, of course, that is exactly what it is.
Unfeeling, incapable of love, and yet increasingly intelligent, our phones – and by that I also mean the internet and technology more broadly – are encroaching on how we process grief. Sometimes that intrusion feels jarring or cruel, but as AI proliferates into all corners of life, might it serve another function?
Where our social language for grief remains lacking, technology is stepping into the void.
DIGITAL AFTERLIVES
Navigating the digital footprints of the dead is nothing new. Technology has become intricately embedded in our rituals of death. People use social media to announce bereavements and memorial information, to fundraise for funerals. Profile accounts of the dead haunt our homepages, never deactivated. Most UK crematoriums now have live-streaming capabilities.
But tech is not neutral in grief. It has the power to both disrupt and reshape the ways we mourn. As AI advances, we must ask how an increasing reliance on it might erode our human experience of loss. “To live is to grieve. It’s part of our social contracting,” says Amber Jeffrey, founder of grief community The Grief Gang. “The idea that future generations may no longer know an era of grieving and death without AI – that they could just say, ‘it’s OK because I can boot Mum up in the app’, that’s dystopian.”
But Amber understands why people are increasingly drawn to these tools. In her communities, she sees how isolated grievers are, and how few resources are available to help them. “Tech can never compete with human connection,” she says, “but it can compete with its accessibility. If our culture fostered real support for grief – with the purpose of witnessing, not trying to ‘fix’ it – we wouldn’t bat an eyelid at AI.”
FILLING A GAPING HOLE
When my dad died in 2020, I stalked the streets listening to podcasts about death. I spent sleepless nights scrolling forums, blogs and Instagram accounts about loss, searching for something I could recognise. A validation of my pain. I was looking for community. And in the eerie connection-dearth of lockdown, I found it online.
More than one in four people in the UK say they can’t talk about their grief. 88% say they feel alone. Culturally, we’re pretty terrible at this stuff. We don’t know what to say. We avoid the bereaved – sending flowers instead of sitting with them in their pain. The few rituals we do have are polite, brief, and often spiritually hollow.
Under capitalism, Amber argues, there is scarce little space for grief. “When the focus is getting people back to ‘functioning’ as productive members of society, the process is rushed,” she says. “AI can speed it all up. Our society is not equipped to allow for the natural unravelling of bereavement.”
For a universal human experience – something that will, without exception, come for all of us – our collective ineptitude around grief has created a vacuum. And as waiting lists for mental health support stretch ever longer, digital therapy, grief forums, and online support groups offer immediacy and connection that is more accessible than ‘IRL’ support.
THE RISK OF GETTING STUCK
In this context, the rise of AI grief therapy feels almost inevitable. But when we turn to bots in our darkest moments, the relationship we form with them may be skewed in ways that aren’t always overt.“At times, the bots are overly prescriptive,” says Deborah Cohen, a public health specialist researching how large language models are reshaping healthcare relationships. “So it will tell you how you feel. You might just put in a statement, and it will follow on and say you are feeling this – even though you haven’t expressed a feeling.”
That subtle shift, Cohen says, is concerning.
“I wonder how much we will start to rely on the bots for understanding how we feel, rather than our own senses and sensations.” Grief is something we move through – slowly, unevenly. Human therapists understand this rhythm. They know when to push deeper and when to draw a session to a close. They know when silence matters more than words. Bots do not. “They keep asking you more and more and more,” Cohen says. “Because they want you to continue to interact. That’s the underlying foundation – to keep it going. The bots don’t know when enough is enough.” That dynamic can be dangerous for grievers. If the support system guiding you through that process is built around engagement, not recovery, Cohen believes there is a risk of becoming trapped in the pain you are trying to escape.
HOW FAR COULD THIS GO?
Grieving is an inherently vulnerable state. At its core is desperation. An impossible, endless longing. In that space, the idea of recreating connection is seductive. The emerging ‘digital afterlife’ industry is already experimenting with ways to simulate presence: AI chatbots trained on a person’s texts, voice recreation tools capable of mimicking speech, interactive platforms that allow relatives to ‘converse’ with the dead. Researchers have warned of the potential for significant psychological harm if these technologies blur the boundary between remembrance and simulation. But grief is already driving people online in huge numbers. Around 100,000 people in the UK search Google each month for “what to do when someone dies”. Many are looking not just for logistical advice, but emotional guidance – often encountering AI systems that present answers with the authority of fact, despite the well-documented risk of errors and hallucinations.
Meanwhile, the market for grief technology is growing rapidly, with billions invested globally in digital memorials and AI-driven support tools. This is not just an emerging cultural shift – people are making huge amounts of money. “Technology is a double-edged sword in grief,” says Cohen. “But we have to ask – who is it that benefits from keeping people engaged with their grief? And currently, the regulation for these tools just isn’t there.”
THE CLOUD REMEMBERS
My memories of my parents span both analogue and digital timelines. There is my childhood in the 90s, preserved in a couple of battered photo albums and a few home video cassettes we no longer have any way of watching. Then there is adulthood: an almost overwhelming archive. Endless selfies and videos stored in the Cloud. Years of WhatsApp conversations. shared Spotify playlists. Their names and addresses are permanently etched into autofill functions.
It can be comforting. I can hear my mother’s voice whenever I want, replaying a voice note she sent years ago. But the permanence of these records also changes the texture of grief. Memories used to fade softly at the edges, contained within objects we could choose to look at, or not: a stack of photos under the bed, a letter tucked away in a drawer. Now they live in our pockets. In our feeds. In algorithms that surface them when we least expect it. “It’s that lack of control,” says Cohen, “of our narrative, of what we see and when – that is where it becomes problematic,” she says.
Technology can connect us to communities that understand loss. My phone helps me remember, nudging me to face the pain where I might otherwise have turned away. But tech can also interrupt, intrude and prolong. And as AI begins not just curating memories but generating them – the line between remembering and recreating gets thinner. In Silicon Valley’s language, the goal is to make life ‘frictionless’. But grief was never meant to be streamlined or optimised. “This isn’t meant to be easy,” says Amber. “This shit is tough. And it is in that toughness – in that friction – where transformation happens. “If we bypass the pain, we miss the beauty. So much of my perspective and sense of self has come through being rock-bottom and thinking, ‘oh my god, this is so ugly.’ But this is life. This is the human experience.”
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