A visit to HereAfter AI doesn’t feel like a visit to a necromancer. The company’s website is clean and attractive, and it is accented in purple and yellow. A 37-second demo video with fun cartoons and a friendly female voice tells you that the app is just a new way “to save and share memories about your life.”

The program uses artificial intelligence to conduct hours of interviews about your life and personality — both by prompting you to text responses to a chatbot and by encouraging you to record videos. The bot asks questions about your childhood, origins, career, and worldview. All the while, it analyzes your unique style of speaking. Then, the program creates an AI version of yourself that can respond to questions, relate memories, and tell jokes using your voice. It’s a deepfake of you for your friends and relatives to enjoy once you’re dead. (RELATED: Conversing With Chatbots)

No, this isn’t the premise of some sci-fi movie or Lois Lowry novel. This is what the world looks like with AI.

Using AI to Satisfy Human Grief

There are plenty of unsettling things about the rapid development of AI. Its ability to create convincing deepfakes is challenging lawmakers, big tech, and social media. It is changing the nature of modern warfare and altering the way massive internet industries, like porn, interact with consumers and victims. AI empowers both the best of man’s creative instincts and the worst of his destructive inclinations.

There is nothing unusual about wanting to speak with deceased loved ones, hear their voice one more time, or say the things we should have said when they were alive. But there is something deeply unsettling about using technology to create a digital avatar of a loved one so that you can ask him or her, as the New York Times proposes, how they “deal[t] with racism” or how they “succeed[ed] when the odds were stacked against [them].” (RELATED: The Astounding Era: The Men Who Made Science Fiction)

In a recent interview with the New York Times, Dr. David Spiegel, a psychiatrist at Stanford School of Medicine, said technology like this could help people with grief by being the modern version of a photo album. “The crucial thing,” he said, “is keeping a realistic perspective of what it is that you’re examining — that it’s not that this person is still alive, communicating with you.”

The problem with that approach is that the companies selling this product (and the individuals using it) aren’t interested in approaching it that way.

The Ethics of Chatting With the Dead

While some services, like HereAfter AI, generally do require permission and cooperation from the individual the chatbot is trying to imitate, not every program does. For instance, You, Only Virtual (YOV) just needs access to past text conversations and phone calls to create what it calls a “versona,” or a digital version of an individual’s personality. A visit to YOV’s homepage reveals that the company believes (or at least purports to believe) that a “versona” is actually “one’s essence” and that its creation will ensure that grieving relatives “never have to say goodbye.”

The founder of YOV, Justin Harrison, told Good Morning America that he hopes that using AI to replicate and recreate deceased loved ones will mean that modern society can move beyond grief. “You absolutely don’t need consent from someone who’s dead,” he said. “My mom could’ve hated the idea, but this is what I wanted and I’m alive.” (RELATED: Physiognomy Is Real, and AI Is Here to Prove It)

HereAfter AI has a similar origin story — it was the brainchild of journalist James Vlahous, who founded the company after chronicling his creation of a “Dadbot” during his dad’s battle with Stage IV lung cancer. Unlike Harrison, Vlahous worked on his project with his dad’s permission so that his sons could meet and get to know their grandfather in a digital space after he died. Nonetheless, Vlahous’s project was essentially an attempt to immortalize his dad.

The question of whether it is a good idea to digitize a loved one is unique to the modern era. But it is hard to believe that sending texts back and forth with a computer program is a healthy way to grieve.

In an age that denies an afterlife and fundamentally misunderstands metaphysics and human nature, this is a flailing attempt to achieve what Adam and Eve lost for humanity in the Garden of Eden: eternal life.