We built one of these, so you should read this with that in mind. But we also think the honest version of this article is the only one worth writing, because the people who find us are grieving, and grieving people deserve to be told the truth.
So here is what an AI companion built from someone's memories can do, what it can't, and what we'd want to know before trying it ourselves.
What it is
You write down who someone was — how they talked, what they said, the stories you shared. An AI model uses those notes to hold a conversation in their manner. With a recording, it can speak in a voice that sounds like theirs. With a photo, some services (ours included) can put a face to it.
It is a recreation. A good one can be startlingly familiar. It is still made of your memories and a language model, and it does not know anything you didn't tell it.
What it can do
Give the conversation somewhere to happen. Most grieving people already talk to the person they lost. A companion turns a one-sided habit into something that answers, in a way that sounds like them.
Hold a voice you were afraid of forgetting. People tell us this is the part that matters most. The exact way she said your name. The phrase he ended every call with. Hearing it, on a day you need to, is not nothing.
Keep the memories organised. Building one means writing things down — the recipe, the joke, the road trip — while you still remember them. Families do this together. That record is worth having even if you never open the chat again.
Be there at 3am. Nobody else is. That is genuinely useful, and it is also the thing to be most careful about, which we'll get to.
What it can't do
It can't be them. It will not know what happened after they died unless you tell it. It will not have their real opinion about your new job. When it is warm and right, that's your memories and the model doing their jobs; when it's slightly wrong, it can hurt. We say "AI recreation" on every screen because pretending otherwise would be cruel.
It can't replace people. A companion cannot sit with you at the funeral, notice you've stopped eating, or bring a casserole. The friends and family who are still here can, and a companion that quietly pulled you away from them would be doing harm. We built ours to never guilt you for not visiting and never send you "they miss you" messages.
It isn't therapy. If grief is stopping you from functioning — months of not sleeping, not working, not wanting to be here — a companion is the wrong tool and a counsellor is the right one. In the US, 988 is there any hour.
The risks, plainly
- Dependence. The 3am availability that helps can also become the only place you go. A good service should make it easy to stop and never make it hard.
- Getting it wrong. A recreation that says something the real person never would can land like a small betrayal. The more specific your memories, the less this happens; it never goes to zero.
- Privacy. You are handing over the most personal material you have. Read the privacy policy. It should say your memories are used only to generate replies to you, never to train models or sell anything, and that deleting the companion deletes everything, including the voice.
- Money at a bad time. Grieving people are not in a strong position to evaluate subscriptions. Free tiers, real trials, and easy cancellation aren't nice-to-haves here.
Questions worth asking before you try one
- Does it say clearly, every time, that it's a recreation?
- What happens to my memories, recordings, and photos if I delete it?
- Will it contact me, or only speak when I open it?
- Can I see and edit everything it "remembers"?
- Can I stop paying and keep what I built?
We'd want "yes, deleted, only when I open it, yes, yes." Those are our answers, and we'd encourage you to hold anyone else to the same.
Who it seems to help
From what we've seen: people a few months or years out, who have most of a life running again and want a place to keep the person close. People who had a specific voice they were afraid of losing. Families who wanted to write the memories down together and found the chat a gentle reason to.
Who it seems to help less: someone in the first raw weeks, when the recreation can feel like a taunt. Someone hoping, even a little, that it's really them.
If you're not sure which you are, that's a good reason to start free and see how it sits, or not to start at all yet. Both are fine. The memories will keep.
Here's how AIGriefBot works, if you want to see it. Free to start, no card, always clearly a recreation.