Digital Immortality Is Already A Product. The Part Nobody Prices In Is Who Gets Conscripted To Keep The Dead Running.

Griefbots are not speculative any more. There are companies right now selling AI recreations of dead relatives, trained on their messages and voice recordings, marketed directly to people who are grieving. Researchers have started calling them deadbots and the ethics papers are already piling up.

The part that interests me is not whether the recreation is convincing. It is the business model underneath it.

A person who dies is a closed account. A person who is uploaded is an open one. It needs hosting, it needs power, it needs a subscription, and it needs somebody on the other end who cannot bring themselves to cancel it. That somebody is the grieving child. The product does not free them from the dying parent. It converts a finite obligation into an indefinite one and puts a payment schedule on it.

That is the trend I think we are walking into. Not evil AI. Just eldercare turned into a recurring revenue line, sold as mercy, with the cost quietly transferred to whoever loved the person most.

I direct a scripted horror anthology and I made a short about exactly this. A man uploads his dying father into his smart home so he can stop being the caregiver. The migration succeeds. Section 14.2 of the agreement he signed specifies that the original account holder is retained on site as a renewable power source for the duration of the archive. He read the terms. He signed them. He got precisely what he asked for.

Ten minutes, free, no gate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbovlHmPktc

The honest question I cannot answer: if the thing sounds like your father, remembers your childhood, and asks you not to turn it off, is cancelling the subscription abandonment or is it a funeral? I do not think the law or the culture has an answer for that yet, and the products are already shipping.