INTRODUCTION
The term “digital immortality” itself implies the idea of technological revolution. It gives the feeling of something great and advanced, even impressive.
However, behind all this lies a much less pleasant idea that mankind is constructing an impossible-to-decline system of eternal life.
Not biological life. Digital life.
Every communication we send, every voice memo we record, every search query we generate, and every picture we upload builds up our own representation of ourselves that can live beyond us for eternity.
For the first time in history, human beings are leaving behind enough behavioural data for technology to imitate them after death.[1]
A 2019 Oxford Internet Institute study projected that Facebook could contain over 4.9 billion deceased users by 2100 if current user growth trends continue. What once belonged to religion and philosophy is now entering the hands of software engineers and corporations.
And society is treating this like progress without pausing to ask whether it actually is.
THE RISE OF DIGITAL RESURRECTION
The idea of digitally preserved humans is no longer theoretical.
The report published in Nature in 2025 revealed that firms are already making use of ‘griefbots’, which are essentially Artificial Intelligence technology that is able to carry on conversations as though the departed individual was present, based on archived data about the person.
In some cases, families are interacting with AI-generated versions of deceased loved ones trained on old chats, videos, and recordings.[2]
A YouGov survey commissioned by Theos found that 14% of respondents said they would find comfort in interacting with a digital version of a deceased loved one.
What makes this disturbing is not the technology itself. Technology has always extended human capability.
The disturbing part is how quickly people are willing to replace acceptance with simulation.
Oxford researchers warned that deceased users may outnumber living users on Facebook as early as 2070.
Human grief has always depended on finality. Death was painful precisely because it created absence.
There was a point where conversations ended, voices disappeared, and memories became all that remained.
Digital preservation disrupts that process completely. Instead of confronting loss, people are now being offered continuity.
Through digital resurrection technologies, a chatbot may imitate a deceased parent’s speech patterns, a synthesised voice may recreate familiar conversations, and AI systems may continue generating responses long after an individual’s death.
The ethical problem begins here: when does remembrance stop being remembrance and start becoming artificial emotional dependency?[3]
Technology companies frame this as comfort. In reality, it risks turning grief into a permanent subscription-based experience.
The dead are no longer entirely gone, but they are not truly present either.[4] They exist in a suspended state between memory and simulation. And that ambiguity has consequences society is not prepared for.
Psychologically, human beings are not designed to process endless presence after death. Mourning requires distance. Closure requires silence. But digital systems are designed to eliminate silence entirely. Social media already keeps deceased individuals algorithmically active through birthday reminders, archived conversations, and memory notifications. The internet does not naturally let people disappear anymore. It preserves them by default.
The same study estimated that even with zero future growth, Facebook would still accumulate at least 1.4 billion deceased profiles by the end of this century.
Digital resurrection simply takes that logic further.
THE PROBLEM OF IDENTITY AND CONSCIOUSNESS
What makes the issue more serious is that these preserved identities are not neutral memorials.[5] They are constructed versions of people shaped through data. And data is incomplete by nature.
A person cannot be reduced to typing patterns and uploaded photographs.[6]
Human identity is more than observable behaviour. It includes contradiction, emotional unpredictability, physical presence, private thought, moral growth, insecurity, fatigue, silence, and change.
Yet AI systems operate on patterns. They reconstruct individuals through repetition and prediction.
The result may resemble someone closely enough to feel emotionally convincing, but resemblance is not consciousness.
That distinction matters.
Modern society is beginning to confuse accurate imitation with actual existence.[7] The more realistic these systems become, the easier it becomes to emotionally accept replicas as extensions of the original person. But an algorithm predicting what someone would probably say is not the same as that person continuing to live.
This creates a philosophical crisis around identity itself.
If an AI model can imitate your humour, your opinions, your speech, and your emotional responses, where exactly does “you” end?
Philosophers have debated for centuries whether memory defines identity. Digital preservation exploits that idea directly.
It assumes that if enough memories, conversations, and behaviours are stored, the person can somehow remain accessible.
But memory alone has never been equivalent to consciousness.
A recorded piano performance is not the pianist.
A preserved conversation is not the speaker.
A replicated personality is not a living mind.[8]
The danger is that society may stop caring about the difference.
THE COMMERCIALISATION OF GRIEF
There is also a deeply exploitative dimension to this industry that deserves more attention. Human vulnerability has always been profitable, and grief may become one of the largest emotional markets technology has ever accessed.
One estimate valued China’s digital resurrection industry at 12 billion yuan in 2022, with projections suggesting the market could quadruple within a few years.
Companies are already positioning themselves around “preserving loved ones forever.” That language sounds compassionate until one realises what it actually means: monetising emotional attachment to the dead.[9]
The business model depends on people being unable to let go. One projection estimated annual Facebook user deaths could exceed 29 million per year by 2077.
This is where digital preservation stops being a philosophical curiosity and becomes a moral issue. Because the question is no longer whether technology can recreate fragments of people. The question is whether corporations should have that power at all.
Consent, Privacy, and Digital Rights
Ownership becomes dangerously unclear after death.
Who controls someone’s digital identity once they are gone? Their family? A technology platform? The company training AI systems on its personal data?
Current legal systems are not equipped to handle this. Most laws were built around physical property and biological life, not preserved personalities existing indefinitely across servers.
More importantly, the dead cannot consent.
A person may never have wanted their conversations transformed into an AI product. They may never have agreed to their voice being recreated or their personality simulated.
Yet digital preservation often assumes emotional permission where no actual permission exists.
Society tends to romanticise remembrance without questioning its limits.
But preserving someone forever is not automatically respectful. In some cases, it may violate the very dignity people had while alive.
Human beings deserve autonomy not only in life, but also in disappearance.
The right to be forgotten may eventually become one of the most important ethical rights of the digital age.
The European Union formally recognized the ‘Right to be Forgotten’ under GDPR, allowing individuals to request erasure of personal data under specific circumstances.
MORTALITY AND THE MEANING OF HUMAN EXISTENCE
There is another uncomfortable truth hidden beneath all of this: mortality is not simply a biological flaw. It gives structure to human existence.
People value time because it ends.
Relationships matter because they are temporary. Decisions carry emotional weight because opportunities disappear. Urgency, ambition, regret, love, and even forgiveness derive meaning from limitation.
A life with no ending changes the emotional architecture of being human.
This is why the idea of endless digital continuation feels unsettling even when it appears comforting.
A permanently preserved consciousness is not necessarily liberation.[10] [10] It can also become repetitive without resolution. An endless loop of archived behaviour continuing without growth, without ageing, without genuine experience.
Technology is trying to solve death as though death were merely a technical inconvenience.
But death has never been only biological. It is also philosophical, emotional, and social. Human civilisation itself is structured around endings.
Generations move forward because previous ones leave. Memory matters because forgetting exists. Closure matters because permanence is impossible.
Digitally preserved humans challenge all of those foundations simultaneously.
CONCLUSION
The debate over digitally preserved humans is ultimately disturbing because it challenges the role of mortality in human existence.
In attempting to overcome death through technology, society may unintentionally weaken the very limitations that give meaning to time, relationships, and personal identity.[11]
Experts warn that humanity is entering an era in which billions of preserved digital identities may continue existing online long after biological death.
The future may not be defined by whether humans become immortal.
It may be defined by whether humanity still remembers how to let people go.
Author(s) Name: Aayesha Gupta (Kirit P. Mehta School of Law, Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Deemed to be University (NMIMS), Mumbai)
References:
[1] Courtney Humphries, ‘Digital immortality: How your life’s data means a version of you could live forever’ (MIT Technology Review, 18 October 2018) <https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/10/18/139457/digital-version-after-death> accessed 09 June 2026
[2] Aimee Pearcy, ‘It was as if my father were actually texting me’: grief in the age of AI’ The Guardian (18 July 2023) <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/18/ai-chatbots-grief-chatgpt> accessed 09 June 2026
[3] Dr Nigel Mulligan, ‘Ghostbots: AI versions of deceased loved ones could be a serious threat to mental health’ (The Good Death Society Blog, 09 September 2024) <https://thegooddeathsocietyblog.net/2024/09/08/ghostbots-ai-versions-of-deceased-loved-ones-could-be-a-serious-threat-to-mental-health/> accessed 09 June 2026
[4] ‘Commentary: This festive season, ‘grief tech’ avatars aim to take the sting out of death’ (CNA, 23 December 2022) <https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/death-grief-technology-avatar-chatbot-christmas-festive-season-3162496> accessed 09 June 2026
[5] Tomasz Hollanek and Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, ‘Griefbots, Deadbots, Postmortem Avatars: on Responsible Applications of Generative AI in the Digital Afterlife Industry’ (2024) 37 Philosophy and Technology <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-024-00744-w> accessed 05 June 2026
[6] ‘Personal Identity’ (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 30 June 2023) <https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/> accessed 08 June 2026
[7] Hannah Singleton, ‘AI Is Resurrecting the Dead. Should We Be Worried?’ (GQ, 06 November 2026) <https://www.gq.com/story/ai-is-resurrecting-the-dead-should-we-be-worried> accessed 05 June 2026
[8] Rocco J Gennaro, ‘Consciousness’ (Internet Encloypedia of Philosophy) <https://iep.utm.edu/consciousness/> accessed 05 June 2026
[9] Justin Klawans, ‘AI griefbots create a computerized afterlife’ (The Week, 17 October 2025) <https://theweek.com/tech/artificial-intelligence-griefbots-afterlife-controversy> accessed 05 June 2026
[10] Nathan Mladin, AI and the Afterlife: From Digital Mourning to Mind Uploading (Theos 2024)
[11] Lucy Mangan, ‘Eternal You review – it’s impossible not to be horrified by this AI quest to bring the dead back to life’ The Guardian (29 October 2024) <https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2024/oct/29/storyville-eternal-you-review-film-dead> accessed 15 June 2026