Last year, an Arizona man named Chris Pelkey addressed a courtroom from beyond the grave. Pelkey was killed in 2021 during a road rage incident. This past summer, at the conclusion of the trial of his killer, an AI version of Pelkey, co-created and authorized by his family members, gave a victim impact statement:
"I can't tell you how humbled I am for those that spoke up for me, everyone who flew in. took off work, those who are watching this remotely, and for everyone who has supported my family and loved ones through three and a half years and two trials, I wish I could be with you all today."
The moment rocketed around the internet, and became part of an ongoing debate about what role technology should play in grief and mourning. Pelkey’s story is just one example. There have been many stories about whether or not so-called “grief bots” are appropriate — or even legal.
These are thorny, important questions, and Alexis Elder said we shouldn’t rush to answer them. Elder is a philosopher at the University of Minnesota Duluth, and the author of the new book “The Ethics of Digital Ghosts: Confucian, Mohist, and Zhuangist Perspectives on AI and Death.”
The Show spoke to her about it recently, and she said the technological element of something like a grief bot might, at first glance, seem out of step with humanity. But in fact, it’s contiguous with an evolving conversation about how we remember our loved ones.
Full conversation
ALEXIS ELDER: As I started looking into this issue, it became clear to me that we're at this moment where folks are sort of moving away — especially in the United States, but also elsewhere — are moving away from like unified organized religion as a way of scripting responses to death. And I think that's part of a more general move away from organized religion. And people are experimenting with different things we might do with our dead.
We've seen everything from human composting to cremated remains being encased in resin in sort of memorial objects. I think one example was having cremains interred in polyhedral dice for enthusiasts of tabletop role playing games. We've seen people being interred in trees that might grow over them. There have been some businesses proposing basically using a rocket to send one's remains into space, right? We're just seeing this kind of explosion of possibilities.
SAM DINGMAN: Yeah, yeah, well, and so you are, if I'm not mistaken, inviting us to consider those solutions in the same category as something like a grief bot, for example, or an artificial version of a loved one reanimated via AI. Not to see these two things as radically different approaches to the question of how to mourn, but rather as of a piece?
ELDER: Yeah, that we're sort of at this moment, culturally and historically, where we're asking what we want to do with our dead. And we are both technologically and sort of artistically and otherwise at this space where we can consider so many different possibilities.
In technology ethics, my sense is that we've dealt with so many really urgent, pressing, clear concerns that there's a tendency to try to rush to solutions. And in many cases, this is appropriate and called for.
But as a philosopher, my training is to look for the sticky areas where we've been wrestling with problems, often for quite a long time. And grief and mourning and death seems to be an area where many complex values are coming into play, and I want us to resist the temptation to reach for a clear obvious solution in order to get something difficult but important right.
DINGMAN: Yeah, a lot of times as you were just alluding to tech quickly enables very dangerous things to happen and there is a need for rapid response. We're speaking in the days after the AI bot on X made it very easy for people to automatically generate sexualized pictures of young people. And there was appropriately a huge outcry about that and a need to change the levers very quickly to prevent that from taking place.
ELDER: Exactly.
DINGMAN: But something like grief, I mean, it seems like one of the things you're talking about in the book is we've never really figured out grief. I mean, that's not a tech problem, right?
ELDER: Right. It's a human problem. And technology has been involved for thousands of years because that's something we do as human beings is build tools to try to help us advance our interests and address our needs. But because grief is so complicated and involves so many potentially conflicting values, we shouldn't expect easy answers.
DINGMAN: So can I ask you, Alexis: In a perfect world, in your mind, if you were to put on your idealistic philosopher hats, how would you like to see this discourse play out?
ELDER: I do think there are some things we might be systematically getting wrong about attempts to have the conversation right now that I see as holdovers from trying to apply a different set of principles and standards from other domains that aren't necessarily fitting well into the domain of grieving the dead.
So I think, for example, from biomedical ethics, we get a great deal of attention on the question of individual informed consent. We get a great deal of attention paid to the autonomy of the individual and them sort of having ultimate say over what happens to them.
And I think those are, again, really good and important things to enforce in medical practice and medical research. But I think those are failing us when it comes to thinking about grief and death.
DINGMAN: Yeah, yeah. And there's fascinating questions here, like, can someone in their will stipulate that an AI grief chatbot won't be made out of them?
ELDER: Yes, right.
DINGMAN: But that raises an interesting question: Does the person who dies get to tell the people who love them how to remember them or how to grieve them?
ELDER: Right, right. And then you add in this additional complication that technological possibilities keep shifting. It might be that somebody hasn't stipulated something just because it wasn't a live option while they were alive.
DINGMAN: Yes, absolutely. Well, finally, Alexis, I wonder if I could get your perspective on one of the reasons that this whole question is top of mind for me, which is that we have seen so much debate on social media about the way that Erica Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk, has or has not, depending on how you see it, been grieving his death.
There are a lot of people judging her for the way that she is behaving in her public appearances. She has been criticized for crying too much, for talking about God too much, for hugging J.D. Vance too much, but also for being in public at all. What have you made of all this discourse?
ELDER: Just to kind of foreground this, I think there are lots of reasons to think different things about Erika Kirk that have very little to do with the phenomenon of grieving, so just sort of with that disclaimer out of the way.
DINGMAN: Yes, only asking you to weigh in on the grieving, to be clear.
ELDER: Yes, appreciate it. To sort of tie this back into my earlier point, we're at this time where we don't have a uniform script for how to deal with death, but many of us still have strong feelings about it.
And so we're in this kind of funny state where there are and there are not rules. And that makes it, I think, easy to lapse into a kind of free to be you and me, everybody gets to grieve how they want to until we see somebody else doing it in a way that we don't like.
And one of the purposes of having a conversation about death and grieving together is it lets us be clear about what's expected and appropriate. And we either have to own that different people are going to have different expectations and it doesn't matter what you pick, or admit that death is something that matters to us not just individually, but collectively, that we mourn well together, and that's going to mean somebody needs to sit down and hammer out what those expectations are. And I think we're seeing some of that playing out right now.
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