People who never leave the internet
When someone dies their body is gone. In the past death meant that the person was no longer around and all that remained were pictures, letters and memories. Today that idea is not so simple. A person can die and yet their Instagram account can stay active their photos can keep showing up on a feed and old chats can sit inside a phone for years. In some cases technology can even copy the way a dead person spoke. This made me wonder: when someone dies should that person’s digital life also disappear?
I started thinking about this after reading Sonal Gupta’s opinion piece in The Indian Express titled “What happens when the dead don’t log off?” The article talks about using intelligence to mimic a person’s social-media presence and asks what happens when a person’s digital identity stays after death. At first I felt comforted by the idea. Losing a person means losing their voice their expressions, their messages and their everyday presence. If technology could keep some of those things maybe grief would feel a little easier. Imagine hearing a loved one’s voice or scrolling through their chats when you miss them. In that way technology could act like a memory box, something that lets us keep parts of a person that we fear we might forget.
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But the more I pondered it the more the idea grew complicated.
A memory is not the same as a simulation. A photo records a moment. An AI recreation can reply to us. It can make sentences that sound like what the person might have said. That difference matters. We may know in our mind that the person is gone. Feeling, talking to a digital version could blur that line. Recent research makes this worry more intriguing. A 2026 study on media and grief showed that digital platforms can keep a living presence of people who have died through saved chats, photos and memories that algorithms bring back. The study also says that algorithms can shape how people grieve by keeping not-dead loved ones in their spaces again and again. This made me realize that social media has already changed how we experience death without AI. An old photo or message can suddenly bring back a time of someone’s life. That is beautiful. Grief does not always mean forgetting a person and digital spaces can
let people keep a connection to the memories that matter to them.
However I think there is a line between remembering a person and recreating them. If an AI learns from a person’s messages photos, videos or voice recordings it can imitate how they spoke. Gupta’s article talks about tools called “deathbots” and “griefbots.” While these tools might bring comfort they also raise questions about whether people might rely on a version of someone instead of dealing with the real absence.
This made me think about something rarely discussed in technology: consent after death. If a person never agreed to have an AI version made should their family still create one? Who decides what that version will say or do? Importantly can an AI ever truly represent someone if it can make words that the person never actually said? I also think it can be dangerous to make grief too easy. Grief hurts partly because a person is not there. An AI could let someone avoid facing that absence even if only for a while. Of accepting that a person has died someone could keep returning to a digital version of them. I do not think that makes the technology automatically harmful. It does make me question where the boundary should be.
At the time I do not think all digital remembrance is bad. Keeping a person’s account photos or messages can be a way to remember them. It is comforting to look at things a person actually left behind.
For me the uncomfortable part begins when technology stops saving memories and starts speaking for a person. The internet lets people stay present long after they are physically gone. That can be comforting. It also gives us a responsibility to think about what kind of presence we keep.
Maybe remembering a person does not mean keeping them forever. Maybe it means accepting that they are no longer here while still keeping everything they meant to us. Technology can keep a photo. It can keep a voice. It can keep a conversation.. I do not think it can keep a person. Perhaps that is something we should not try to change.
Aadhira Nair (writer is a student at Ramaiah Univeristy, Department of Psychology, School of Social Sciences)
