Can AI help us grieve, or does it blur the line between comfort and delusion in ways we’re not ready for?
In this episode of The People’s AI, we explore the rise of grief tech: “griefbots,” AI avatars, and “digital ghosts” designed to simulate conversations with deceased loved ones. We start with Justin Harrison, founder of You, Only Virtual, whose near-fatal motorcycle accident and his mother’s terminal cancer diagnosis led him to build a “Versona,” a virtual version of a person’s persona. We dig into how these systems are trained from real-world data, why “goosebump moments” matter more than perfect realism, and what it means when AI inevitably glitches or hallucinates.
Then we zoom out with Jed Brubaker, director of The Identity Lab at CU Boulder, to look at digital legacy and the design principles that should govern grief tech, including avoiding push notifications, building “sunsets,” and confronting the risk of a “second loss” if a platform fails.
Finally, we speak with Dr. Elaine Kasket, cyberpsychologist and counselling psychologist, about the psychological reality that grief is idiosyncratic and not scalable, the dangers of grief policing, and the deeper question beneath it all: who controls our data, identity, and access to memories after death.
In this episode
- Justin Harrison’s origin story and the creation of a “Versona”
- What griefbots are, how they’re trained, and why fidelity is hard
- The ethics: dependence, delusion risk, and “second loss”
- Consent, rights, and the economics of data after death
- Cultural attitudes toward death and why Western discomfort shapes the debate
- A provocative question: if relationships persist digitally, what does “dead” even mean?
Presented by the Vana Foundation. Learn more at vana.org.
The People’s AI is presented by Vana, which is supporting the creation of a new internet rooted in data sovereignty and user ownership. Vana’s mission is to build a decentralized data ecosystem where individuals—not corporations—govern their own data and share in the value it creates.
Learn more at vana.org.
