Summary: Generative artificial intelligence is quietly reshaping how humans process grief, remembrance, and mortality. Digital reconstructions of the deceased may offer comfort, but they also risk blurring the natural boundary between presence and absence.
Experts warn that reliance on AI for emotional support could weaken our ability to tolerate uncertainty and deepen human empathy. These changes may ultimately alter how societies understand death, dignity, and what it means to truly let go.
Key Facts
- Digital Afterlife: AI chatbots can now simulate deceased individuals, extending memory but complicating emotional closure.
- Psychological Risk: Maladaptive use of grief chatbots may interfere with acceptance of loss and impermanence.
- Human Connection: Face-to-face empathy and shared community remain central to healthy perceptions of death.
Source: Kyoto University
Shisei Tei claims he is clumsy with technology and doesn’t even own a smartphone, yet he has found himself thinking a lot about what we call generative AI.
Tei is cautiously optimistic about AI. As a researcher, he uses it to help with analyzing psychiatric data, and outside work it helps him plan personalized hikes.
But Tei is concerned that AI will change how we think about death, which he discusses in a chapter he wrote for the book SecondDeath: Experiences of Death Across Technologies.
“Today, I often see how AI reframes grief and remembrance,” says Tei. Though he thinks mental health chatbots have the potential to lower barriers to care, maladaptive use of chatbots that reconstruct deceased individuals can distort our perceptions of death and existence.
“AI-induced virtual continuations of the deceased can comfort the living and extend memory to some extent,” says Tei, “but they can also blur presence and absence, potentially hindering our capacity to accept impermanence.”
In our conversation, Tei explained that historically, many cultures and philosophical traditions have considered the mind and body to be separate entities, supporting the belief that the mind is eternal.
This idea has penetrated modern society, which often treats death as something to overcome or delay rather than an essential part of life. It has also been reinforced by attempts to use AI to preserve the human mind.
Tei, who is from Taiwan and works at Kyoto University, has dedicated his research to bridging psychiatry, religious philosophy, and neurophenomenology, a framework proposed by biologist Francisco Varela.
In this book chapter, the author explores death through the lens of selfless selves, a term introduced by Varela, who was influenced by Tibetan Buddhism. It describes how living systems sustain themselves through the mutual interdependence of their parts, like cells in a body.
“Selfless selves refers to being both altruistic and autonomous — maintaining one’s individuality while remaining in harmony with others and the wider world,” says Tei.
“In this sense, like cells in a larger body, people can be viewed as simultaneously distinct yet co-creating a collective life, with the self understood as fluid and shaped through interaction to serve biological and social needs.”
Tei writes that this concept also describes characteristics of AI agents, as they present artificial identities while lacking a fixed selfhood, along with our interconnectedness and anonymity online.
However, while traditional belief systems and modern mental health care emphasize the importance of accepting uncertainty, AI can make us reliant on quick, straightforward answers, most of which we will never obtain, thus flattening complex experiences and reinforcing cost-benefit reasoning.
“Outsourcing decision-making or emotional support to machines risks weakening the very wisdom we aim to cultivate,” Tei says.
For humans, empathy formed through face-to-face and nonverbal communication enhances a sense of belonging, showing how it feels and what it means to be alive, while loneliness and solitude can nurture hope.
Perceptions of death arise from these interactions. Dying can evoke a sense of connection to something broader — we may die, but part of ourselves may live on in our communities.
Tei stresses that incorporating these ideas into end-of-life care and engaging with these ideas ourselves and in our communities can help us to both treat the dying with dignity and accept death’s inevitability.
“Death becomes certain once life begins,” Tei writes in the book, “and denying its anticipation risks denying life itself.”
Key Questions Answered:
A: AI can simulate the presence of the deceased through chatbots and digital avatars, which may comfort the living but also blur the boundary between life and death.
A: By offering ongoing digital “continuations” of the dead, AI may interfere with the natural process of accepting impermanence.
A: Outsourcing emotional regulation and meaning-making to machines could weaken human empathy, tolerance of uncertainty, and emotional resilience.
Editorial Notes:
- This article was edited by a Neuroscience News editor.
- Journal paper reviewed in full.
- Additional context added by our staff.
About this AI, grief, and death research news
Author: Whitney Hubbell
Source: Kyoto University
Contact: Whitney Hubbell – Kyoto University
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: The chapter “Death in the Cybernetic Era: AI, Virtual Agents, and Selfless Selves” appeared on 16 October 2025 in SecondDeath: Experiences of Death Across Technologies
