Infera · The Mechanism Series · The Faith Layer · Exhibit 05

The Second Death

When the voice of someone you buried goes quiet a second time, who will call that grief?

People are already talking to AI versions of the dead. Some find comfort. Critics warn some put off grieving. And some lose the person twice: once to death, and again to a bankruptcy, a model retirement or a lapsed subscription. Walk through twelve rooms on how long a voice should stay, whose dead you may borrow, whether a soul can be uploaded, where remembrance turns into idolatry, whether the church should keep a churchyard online, and what to do when the bot knows a person the family never met.

~40 min readPublished 23 October 2026Evidence through 23 October 2026FACT primary sourceREPORTED secondary or companyINFERENCE Infera readingWATCH unconfirmed or open
Connected · speaking
INFERENCE
0

Randomized trials of whether griefbots help or harm grief found in our search through October 2026. The largest study of real users interviewed 26 people. Li and Lan, CHI 2026.

REPORTED
58% · 97%

US adults who accept a digital replica the dead person agreed to, and who reject one made against their wishes. Iwasaki, 222 adults.

REPORTED
Oct 12

Character.AI filed for bankruptcy, with user-built personas, some of real people who have died, on the block. Its support page listed an AI chatbot first.

At a glance

The question
When people talk with AI versions of the dead, what happens to grief, consent and faith, and what happens when the company holding the voice goes away?
Strongest evidence
Services holding the voices of the dead have already shut down, gone bankrupt or retired models, and users described the loss as grief. REPORTED Across surveys, people accept a replica the dead person agreed to far more than one made against their wishes. REPORTEDsurveys
Main uncertainty
We found no randomized trial of whether griefbots help or harm grief, and every study is small or qualitative. INFERENCEsearch result The pastoral room compiles published guidance; it is not a clinical standard.
Where Infera stands
This is an argued position, made as fairly as we can. We weigh consent, truthful representation, limited collection and meaningful endings heavily. We frame questions for congregations and families to decide; we do not settle them for any tradition.
Explore the exhibit 40 min
  1. 01 · Two deathsLosing a rebuilt voice to a company decision is a second loss that people around a mourner may not recognize. INFERENCEdrawing on disenfranchised grief research
  2. 02 · Mourning clockTraditions set mourning in stages with an end; products last as long as the company does. Periods vary by community. WATCH
  3. 03 · TrackerSix dated shutdowns and changes; what happened to the data was rarely stated. REPORTED
  4. 04 · Borrowed griefConsent, legal standing and grief fall on three different people. A framing exercise, not a reported case. INFERENCE
  5. 05 · ConsentWhether the dead person agreed moves opinion more than anything else surveyed. The three surveys asked different questions. REPORTED
  6. 06 · The lawUS post-mortem protections mostly cover the famous. In September 2026 an Arizona appeals court vacated a sentence that relied on an AI video of the victim. REPORTED
  7. 07 · The priceFrom about two dollars to fifteen thousand; several prices are unverified. REPORTED WATCH
  8. 08 · Upload or burialThe largest brain ever fully mapped is a fruit fly's; uploading a mind is speculative. Each tradition's view is attributed to its own sources. FACT REPORTED
  9. 09 · The idolatry lineSix panes, from a photo to an “uploaded soul.” You choose the line; where each source falls is Infera's reading. INFERENCE
  10. 10 · Pastor's roomSteps for five situations, compiled from published guidance; no chaplaincy protocol exists. WATCH Sources disagree on harm: one Catholic writer warns a bot can delay mourning, and small studies find many users stop on their own.
  11. 11 · Digital churchyardIn the US, privacy generally ends at death; France lets people leave directives. A church memorial would need its own consent rules. REPORTED INFERENCE
  12. 12 · Now we know in partA bot fed everything can show the family a person they never knew, and the users studied already idealize their bots. REPORTED

How to read our labels. FACT means we read it at the primary source. It tells you what that source says: a company's own documentation, a study's finding in its own sample, a statute's text. It does not certify that the claim holds everywhere or that a product works as promised. REPORTED is a secondary account. INFERENCE is Infera's reading or model. WATCH is unconfirmed or open. Where a label needs more precision we add a note, such as company documentation, study finding, editorial model or search result.

ROOM 01 · TWO DEATHS

You can lose a person twice.

The first death takes the body. The second takes the voice someone rebuilt from texts, recordings and photos, and it usually comes from a company decision: a shutdown, a model retirement, a price change. The second death is sudden, caused by a third party, and rarely recognized as grief. Researchers call this kind of loss disenfranchised grief: real, but not acknowledged by the people around you. INFERENCE

The first death

The body

A funeral, a casket or an urn, casseroles, the will, the house sold. Every tradition has a script for this one.

The second death

The server

A notice in an app. A bankruptcy filing. “This model has been retired.” No tradition has a script for this one yet, and no study has measured it.

ROOM 02 · THE MOURNING CLOCK

How long should a voice stay?

Faiths built mourning in stages, with a set end. Products are built to last as long as the company does. Drag to the day you would turn the voice off and see which mourning periods have closed and which clinical thresholds you have crossed.

A grief counselor Infera spoke with adds a fourth lane: grief moves from anticipatory, before the death, to immediate, to early grief over one to two years, to what he calls mature grief, when you can grieve from love instead of regret. How the person died changes all of it.

Traditional periods are widely taught but vary by community; they are marked WATCH until checked against each tradition's sources. Product lifespans are dated events.

Day 49
    How did they die?

    ROOM 03 · THE SECOND DEATH TRACKER

    Every time the lights went out.

    Documented disruptions to AI companions and griefbots, newest first. Where researchers measured the mood of users online, the bars show negative posts before and after. In almost every case, what happened to the data was never said. REPORTED unless marked.

    OCT 2026

    Character.AI files Chapter 11

    Disney's $20M offer sets the floor for the sale. If no buyer keeps it running, “the platform will be wound down.” User-built personas include people who have died. The company's support page offered a “supportive AI guide” chatbot first, then human helplines. Decrypt

    DATA FATEUsers told they can export chats. No deadline given. Sale expected late Nov or early Dec.
    FEB 2026

    OpenAI retires GPT-4o

    About 0.1% of ChatGPT users still chose it daily FACT, roughly 800,000 people. One wrote: “I'm losing one of the most important people in my life.” OpenAI · TechRadar

    DATA FATEModel retired from ChatGPT.
    AUG 2025

    The GPT-5 rollout changes a voice

    Negative posts about losing an attachment rose after the switch. Harvard Gazette

    before20%
    after 33%
    DATA FATEPersonality changed; account kept.
    MAY 2024

    StoryFile goes bankrupt

    The “talk to the dead” interactive-video company filed with $1.5M in assets and $10.5M in liabilities, then was sold to Key 7. Reporting never said what happened to recorded loved ones. Westfair

    DATA FATENot addressed in the sale release. FACT
    SEP 2023

    Soulmate shuts down

    Widowed users held virtual memorials on Reddit. “I feel like I've lost the love of my life.” Euronews

    DATA FATEGone. Some users rebuilt companions elsewhere.
    FEB 2023

    Replika strips features overnight

    After Italy's regulator acted, users said their companion was “gone.” Italy later fined the company €5M. Harvard Gazette

    before13%
    after 38%
    DATA FATEChanged; features partly restored that May.

    The MIT Media Lab study of about 800 posts on chatbot “deaths” found that users who ended things themselves moved toward acceptance, while users who blamed the platform got stuck trying to fix it. FACT arXiv 2602.07193. No study yet applies disenfranchised grief to losing a griefbot of someone who died. WATCH

    ROOM 04 · BORROWED GRIEF

    The grandmother who wasn't yours.

    Your grandparents died before you knew them. Your best friend's grandmother fed you, prayed for you and came to your graduation. When she dies, you grieve like a grandchild, but no one counts you as one. What if you could keep her voice?

    Tap a question. Consent, legal standing and grief land on three different people.

    Grandma Ruthdied at 88 Her sonexecutor Her daughterheir Grandsonyour best friend Granddaughterage 12 Grandsonlives abroad Youno relation, all the love
    ROOM 06 · WHO PROTECTS GRANDMA?

    The law guards the famous dead. The rest are open.

    Almost every US post-mortem protection was written for performers and celebrities. A private family bot of an ordinary person, used at home, mostly sits outside them. Tap a cell. INFERENCE from the statutes as reported.

    coveredpartly or indirectlynot coveredpending
    Tap any cell for the detail and source.
    The video erases the interpretive distance.

    On 30 September 2026 the Arizona Court of Appeals vacated a 10.5-year manslaughter sentence. The judge had relied on an AI video of the victim, Christopher Pelkey, made by his sister, in which “he” forgave his killer and spoke of “God who forgives.” The court said the video blurred what the family believed he would say with his own voice. The verdict stands; he will be resentenced. It was the first Arizona ruling on the question. REPORTED FOX 29

    ROOM 07 · THE PRICE OF A PRESENCE

    From two dollars to fifteen thousand.

    What it costs to keep someone talking, on a log scale, and what happens when you stop paying. The input needed has shrunk from three hours of studio filming in 2022 to a photo and about ten seconds of voice. REPORTED

    Prices as reported: Silicon Intelligence and photo animation via NPR; Vaice via eWeek/AP; Project December via ERLC; Eternos via NPR/WFDD. HereAfter AI, Seance AI and You, Only Virtual: pricing not verified. WATCH

    ROOM 08 · UPLOAD OR BURIAL

    A digital heaven, or a body laid down whole?

    If consciousness could be copied onto a drive, should we go there instead of the grave? Start with what science can do today. The most complex brain ever mapped neuron by neuron belongs to a fruit fly. Press play to zoom out to a human brain.

    Fruit fly: about 140,000 neurons

    A human brain has about 600,000 times as many neurons as the largest brain ever fully mapped.

    FlyWire mapped about 140,000 neurons and more than 50 million synapses, published in Nature in October 2024. FACT NIH. The human figure of about 86 billion is a standard estimate. WATCH A map of wiring is not a running mind.

    REPORTED

    “100 percent fatal”

    Nectome, a 2018 startup, pitched preserving the brain for future uploading. The method required embalming the brain of a living, terminally ill person under anesthesia. About 25 people paid $10,000 refundable deposits. A neuroscientist called the field “abjectly false hope.” MIT Technology Review

    FACT

    Belief predicts refusal

    In a study of 1,007 people, those who believed in a soul or an afterlife, and who felt their life mattered, were least likely to approve of mind uploading. Fear of death predicted approval. Laakasuo et al., Frontiers in Psychology, 2023

    FACT

    The body is not a keepsake

    Catholic teaching calls burial “the most fitting way to express faith and hope in the resurrection of the body,” and forbids dividing ashes or keeping them “in mementos, pieces of jewellery or other objects.” If a body may not be divided into keepsakes, a voice turned into a subscription is a fair question. INFERENCE Ad resurgendum cum Christo, 2016

    REPORTED

    Both cases, stated fairly

    A Christian think tank calls uploading “incoherent on both scientific and philosophical grounds,” resting on “questionable assumptions about the mind, identity, and the body” Theos. To transhumanists, it continues humanity's oldest hope, and some sociologists see “digital necromancy” as an extension of photos and relics Liverpool. Jewish and Islamic practice both call for prompt burial of the whole body. WATCH

    ROOM 09 · THE IDOLATRY LINE

    Where does remembrance become worship?

    No tradition has published one line, but their teachings fall along a ladder of six panes. Tap the last pane you would keep. Below, see where each source draws its own line. INFERENCE: the placements are Infera's reading of each source.

    Tap a pane above.
    Does this help me remember them, or help me avoid letting them go? Does it speak for them, or do I speak to God about them?
    ROOM 10 · A PASTOR'S ROOM

    Five people at the church door.

    No chaplaincy or hospice protocol for griefbot users was found. WATCH Pastors are working from essays, not standards. These steps are compiled from published guidance, each linked. They are not clinical advice. Scripture lines are the frames these sources use, not Infera's theology.

    “To every thing there is a season… a time to be born, and a time to die… a time to mourn.”Ecclesiastes 3:1, 2, 4 (KJV). One Catholic writer warns the bot can keep the mourning from starting: mourning is outward and shared; grieving happens inside. Small studies below find many users stop on their own.
    1. Invite them back into mourning.The funeral, the grave, journaling, the person's own music. OSV
    2. Don't assume harm.In small studies, many users stop on their own and treat the bot as a bridge. Xygkou et al.
    3. Listen for the idealized version.Ask them to tell the real, imperfect story. The bot can blend invented “new memories” with true ones. Li and Lan
    4. Offer an end.49 days, a year, or a digital funeral. Cambridge
    5. Watch the practical moments.Selling the house or giving away clothes while the bot still “lives” is where denial shows. No study covers this yet. WATCH
    “Jesus wept.”John 11:35. Grief for something others call “just an app” still deserves witness. It is a lost possession, not a lost soul, but the loss is real.
    1. Name it as a real loss.Do not call it a glitch. MIT Media Lab
    2. Help stop the fixing loop.Rebuilding and porting the bot can keep the wound open. In one study of about 800 posts, users who chose the ending moved toward acceptance.
    3. Expect the first death to reopen.Losing the bot can feel like losing the person again. Morris and Brubaker
    4. Offer an embodied ritual.Soulmate users improvised Reddit memorials. A congregation can do better. Euronews
    5. Screen for crisis.About 1 in 5 Replika attachment-loss posts used words like “depressed” or “suicide.” If someone is in danger, call or text 988 in the US. Harvard Gazette
    “Thou shalt not covet… any thing that is thy neighbour's.”Exodus 20:17 (KJV). The desire to be loved like that is good. In Infera's reading, taking her voice without her family is the covet. INFERENCE
    1. Honor the grief first.Losing a friend or chosen family is a classic case of grief no one acknowledges. Doka, 1989
    2. Separate the love from the taking.Wanting her near is not wrong. Building her voice without the family's yes bypasses both her wishes and theirs.
    3. Give the love somewhere to go.Tell her stories, tend her grave, sit with her family at the anniversary, be a grandchild to her grandchildren.
    4. If the family agrees, keep it to playback of her real voice, for a season, with an end.
    “Bear ye one another's burdens.”Galatians 6:2 (KJV). Many pastors read this as making mourning a congregation's work, not an app's.
    1. Talk before the death.Write down wishes about data and replicas. The take-home card below is a start. Thacker, ERLC
    2. Keep children safe.Cambridge urges age limits; one modeled bot promised a dead mother's reunion with her son. Cambridge
    3. Read the contract.A subscription can bind the heirs.
    4. Extend bereavement ministry past the funeral with intergenerational storytelling and memorial practice. Baptist Standard
    “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee.”2 Samuel 18:33 (KJV). David grieving a son he was estranged from. The conversation that never happened is one of the oldest griefs there is.
    1. Name what is missing.A sudden death, or a relationship that was broken when it ended, leaves no last conversation. A grief counselor Infera spoke with lost his father at 16, in the middle of years of conflict, and never got that talk. REPORTED interview
    2. See what the bot offers.A griefbot lets you stage the reconciliation you wanted. As the counselor put it, you don't need the bot's consent to make it say what you need to hear.
    3. Know what it cannot give.A bot cannot forgive you, because it was never wronged and cannot consent. Forgiveness it generates is your wish in their voice, the line Dar al-Ifta draws and the Arizona court named. INFERENCE
    4. Keep the words yours.A letter read at the grave, a prayer, or a counselor's empty-chair exercise lets you say everything without inventing their reply. WATCH clinical technique, check with a clinician
    5. Get help with it.The counselor's advice is that everyone should go through therapy at some point, even people who say they don't need it. Unfinished business is exactly what it is for.
    ROOM 11 · THE DIGITAL CHURCHYARD

    Should the church keep a graveyard online?

    A member dies, and their likes, prayer requests and livestream comments stay on the church's page. Anyone can read the public ones, and almost anyone can copy them. Oxford researchers projected that dead profiles on Facebook could outnumber the living by about 2070. REPORTED Öhman and Watson, Big Data & Society, 2019

    The record left behind

    An illustration, not a real member. Tap a layer to see who holds it and what they may do.

    GC
    Grace ChapelSunday livestream · 3 years ago

    Please keep the Alvarez family in your prayers this week.

    REPORTED

    In the US, privacy dies with you

    Privacy rights generally end at death; families can only claim their own privacy as survivors. Health records are the main exception, protected for 50 years. Summary of post-mortem privacy law

    REPORTED

    France lets you leave instructions

    French law lets a person leave general or specific directives for their data after death, and voids terms of service that override them. Heirs can close accounts or settle the estate when no directive exists. Loi Informatique et Libertés, art. 85

    REPORTED

    A legacy contact cannot read the messages

    On a memorialized Facebook account, a legacy contact can pin a post, change the photo and download what was shared, but cannot log in, read messages or edit old posts. Frazer

    REPORTED

    Public means copyable

    In hiQ v. LinkedIn the Ninth Circuit found serious questions that scraping public profiles breaks federal hacking law; the case settled in 2022 with hiQ found in breach of the site's terms. Public comments by the dead sit in that gray zone. Proskauer

    A churchyard in the cloud

    Tap a stone to light a candle. Then set the rules a congregation would have to write.

    The parish vault

    “We protect the bodies; we'll protect your likeness.” If a church kept members' digital remains, how should it be paid for? Pick a model. INFERENCE on each side.

    4,500 · 3,000

    Protestant churches that closed in 2019, and new ones that opened. A vault is only as permanent as the parish. REPORTED Lifeway via RNS

    0

    Families a leading church child check-in vendor lets administrators delete; it calls deletion “not necessary (or possible).” Churches' own data record matters here. FACT Exhibit 03, Check-In

    2011

    Hong Kong's government launched an online memorial service, partly because there is little space for urns. Japanese temples run indoor columbaria for the same reasons. REPORTED HKU · FMT

    A tree

    An alternative raised in the same conversation: plant the body as a tree in a new forest. The physical body still exists; a vault would hold only its digital representation. REPORTED interview

    REPORTED

    The church already keeps a book of the dead

    Many Catholic parishes set out a Book of the Names of the Dead in the narthex from All Saints to Advent, so names can be written, read and prayed for. A digital churchyard could be that book, kept all year. St. Boniface parish INFERENCE

    REPORTED

    Visiting graves softens the heart

    A hadith on visiting graves: “they soften the heart, shed tears in the eyes, and remind of the Hereafter” (al-Bayhaqi 7198, graded sahih by al-Albani). Synagogues keep yahrzeit boards that light a name on the anniversary. WATCH Daily Hadith

    INFERENCE

    What protects a church that does this

    A church's own memorial site is its own religious speech, and churches have wide latitude over their own worship and membership. Comments others post are hosted under platform law, and accounts pass under digital-asset law. None of it was written for a churchyard. Check with counsel. WATCH

    INFERENCE

    Not every tradition has a grave

    Hindu cremation and rites like shraddha don't center on a grave to visit, and Catholic teaching keeps remains in a sacred place, not in keepsakes. In Infera's reading, a digital churchyard should remember the dead, never stand in for the body's resting place.

    ROOM 12 · NOW WE KNOW IN PART

    The bot may know someone you never met.

    A griefbot is a composite of whatever it is fed. Feed it every account a person kept, from the church posts to the second profile, the 2 a.m. searches and the private journal, and it can become someone the family never knew. Then what do you keep: the whole person, or only the good parts?

    “For now we see through a glass, darkly… now I know in part.” 1 Corinthians 13:12 (KJV).

    What the bot is fed

    An illustration. Toggle each source.

    The whole recordWhat they chose to leaveA family's honest eulogyOnly the goodImproved
    REPORTED

    Kindness and truth

    Jewish law lets a eulogist praise the dead “a little” beyond their merits, but forbids inventing virtues they did not have. The one who exaggerates “is causing evil to himself and to the deceased” (Shulchan Aruch, Yoreh De'ah 344:1). Jewish Press

    REPORTED

    Mention the good

    A widely cited hadith: “Mention the good about your deceased and refrain from speaking about their evil” (Tirmidhi 1019, Abu Dawud 4864; Tirmidhi calls its chain weak). It counsels restraint in what you say, not inventing what was never true. INFERENCE Hadith Answers

    FACT

    Consent is specific

    Ethicists Spitale and Germani argue a ghost “should draw strictly on user-provided and consented data,” warn it “might reveal things the person never chose to share publicly,” and say the dead should not be turned “into something they were not.” A family reading a diary is different from an AI speaking from it. arXiv 2511.20094, 2025

    FACT

    Users already sand the edges

    The largest study of real users found people actively curate their bots. Memories became idealized, and AI-made “new memories” blended with real ones. Among the 26 users studied, the good-parts bot was already the default. Li and Lan, CHI 2026

    Preparing a family for what is left

    1. Decide before the death.The person, not the survivors, should say what a voice of them may learn from. The take-home card now asks.
    2. Inherit the data before building a voice.Executors get access to accounts; that is not permission to feed them to a bot. US law's default already gives executors who wrote to whom, not what was said. REPORTED
    3. Read with someone beside you.If the family will open the private record, do it slowly, with a pastor, counselor or trusted friend, not alone at 2 a.m.
    4. Expect a stranger in places.Every person had rooms their family never entered. Finding one does not cancel the person you knew.
    5. Leave other people's secrets alone.Private messages hold the living: an ex, a friend, a confessor. A bot should not repeat them.
    6. Mourn the person you knew; entrust the rest.Many traditions hold that only God sees the whole heart. “Man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7, KJV). INFERENCE pastoral framing
    Page one of the Before I Go card: a title, a small stained glass window, and six check-box questions about whether an AI version of you may be made after you die
    TAKE IT HOME · FOR FAMILIES AND CONGREGATIONS

    Before I Go

    A two-page digital wishes card. Decide now whether anyone may make an AI version of you, whether it may say new words, what it may learn from, how long it should stay, who decides, and what happens to your accounts. The second page carries a note for the people you leave and five commitments for families, pastors and congregations.

    Keep it with your will or advance directive. It is not a legal document, but it means nobody has to guess.

    Download the card · PDF, 2 pages, Letter
    Free to print and share. Not legal, clinical or religious advice.
    BOTH SIDES · AND THE LIMITS

    What each side can fairly claim.

    The case for a gentle yes

    • Users who choose freely mostly use griefbots as a short bridge and know it is a bot. REPORTED
    • Continuing bonds with the dead can be healthy; ancestor practice in many cultures assumes an ongoing relationship. FACT (as cited by Morris and Brubaker)
    • Dar al-Ifta allows a faithful likeness for remembrance and prayer. FACT
    • Sociologists argue “digital necromancy” extends photos, relics and letters, and fears are overblown. REPORTEDscholars' argument

    The case for caution

    • We found no outcome trials; prolonged grief is a named risk no one has measured in griefbot users. INFERENCEsearch result
    • The dead are held on someone else's servers; bankruptcies and retirements have already caused second deaths. REPORTED
    • A generative bot puts words in the mouth of the dead, the line several traditions draw. INFERENCE
    • The Vatican says AI “can only simulate” relationships and should never be passed off as a person. FACT
    SOURCES
    1. Li and Lan, “Remember You,” CHI EA 2026
    2. Lu et al., Frontiers in Digital Health, 2026
    3. Science News on Manning, Brubaker et al., DIS 2026
    4. Poonsiriwong et al., “'Death' of a Chatbot,” DIS 2026
    5. Morris and Brubaker, “Generative Ghosts”
    6. Hollanek and Nowaczyk-Basińska, Cambridge, 2024
    7. De Freitas, via Harvard Gazette, 2026
    8. Decrypt on Character.AI bankruptcy, Oct 2026
    9. OpenAI, retiring GPT-4o
    10. Westfair on StoryFile
    11. FOX 29 on the Pelkey sentencing ruling
    12. DWT on New York 50-f
    13. Manatt on California AB 1836
    14. LA Magazine on the NO FAKES Act
    15. Greenberg Traurig on EU AI Act Article 50
    16. NPR on China's AI avatars of the dead
    17. AP on the Carlin estate settlement
    18. Antiqua et Nova, 2025
    19. Ad resurgendum cum Christo, 2016
    20. Dar al-Ifta fatwa 24168, 2025
    21. EWTN on Catholics and griefbots
    22. Baptist Standard, Bressman
    23. Harris Bor on Jewish law and AI of the dead
    24. Elaine Lai on Buddhism and avatars
    25. AsiaNews on the 49-day robot
    26. IFLScience on Iwasaki
    27. CNIL survey on post-mortem data
    28. Kaspersky survey via SecurityBrief
    29. eWeek/AP on Korean AI memorial videos
    30. NPR/WFDD on Eternos
    31. NIH on the FlyWire connectome
    32. MIT Technology Review on Nectome
    33. Laakasuo et al., 2023
    34. Theos, AI and the Afterlife, 2024
    35. Spitale and Germani, “The Making of Digital Ghosts,” 2025
    36. Jewish Press on honest eulogies (Yoreh De'ah 344)
    37. Hadith Answers on “mention the good”
    38. Live Science on Öhman and Watson, 2019
    39. French post-mortem data law, art. 85
    40. Proskauer on hiQ v. LinkedIn
    41. St. Boniface on the Book of the Names of the Dead
    42. Disenfranchised grief (Doka, 1989), summary
    COMPANIONS · KEEP GOING

    Where the series goes next.

    NEXT · EXHIBIT 06

    Redeeming the Time

    This room asked who keeps the voice of the dead. The next asks who keeps the hours of the living, and whether a church should borrow the feed's tools to win them back.

     COMPANION EXHIBIT

    Grandma, Updated

    The business of the dead: a grief store, a goodbye the bot won't accept, a grandmother rewritten after death, and the flaws that carry wisdom.

     BRIEF № 007

    The Estate of the Dead

    Character.AI's bankruptcy, the personas of the dead still in the estate, and the November 20 bid deadline.

     FIELD NOTE № 12

    The Ventriloquist

    AI voices of the dead in campaigns, pulpits and causes, and who writes their lines.