Why Human Grief?

Grief tech is here, and the people building it call it a "$35 billion market." Adam, Sloan, and Dr. Saed Hill dig into "grief bots," AI clones of the dead, and the question at the center: do we want AI companies managing grief for a whole generation?

A content warning up top: this one goes to hard places, including suicide and traumatic loss. If today is not the day, skip this one.

What You'll Hear

What grief tech actually is. Technology has long played a role in grief, from online memorials to telehealth. AI changes the stakes: pre-recorded legacy interviews versus generative bots that simulate a person's presence after death, sometimes without consent. Meta recently secured a patent to keep deceased users' accounts "active." More users, more data, more engagement.

Whose grief is it, anyway? We grieve in community, not isolation. The hosts unpack what happens when one family member turns a loved one into a chatbot while others want to let go, and why Adam predicts estate law and legislation will follow the first newsworthy case.

The therapy comparison that doesn't hold up. Dr. Hill walks through "empty chair" Gestalt therapy and why grief bots are not an upgrade. Real closure requires empathy, perspective-taking, and letting go. A chatbot that placates you keeps you on the app. As he puts it, that's a business model, not grief.

The capitalist afterlife. Sloan connects it to the Amazon series Upload, where loved ones pay fees to keep you in a branded digital heaven. Then it turns dark: subtle ad placement inside conversations with your dead parent, "grief premium" tiers, and an "empathy-driven revenue model" built to price the most sensitive moment of your life.

Why grief matters. Sloan explains the neuroscience: grieving literally rewires your brain to match a reality where someone is gone. Tech that blocks that process can leave a person isolated and out of sync with everyone around them. The team references the tragic case of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer to underscore the real danger of retreating into a fantasy world.

Research and References

• Meta's patent to keep deceased users' accounts active
• The digital afterlife industry, projected at roughly $80B by 2034 (up from ~$22B in 2024; the "$35B" cited in-episode is an earlier forecast)
• Sewell Setzer III and the Character.AI lawsuit
• Illinois Wellness and Oversight for Psychological Resources Act, banning AI therapy (signed August 2025)
• Upload (Amazon Prime Video)

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Transcript

0:05

Hello and welcome to the Why Humans podcast, where we talk about the really human reasons that people are turning to AI. My name is Adam Dodge. I'm one of your hosts. I am the founder of NTEB. My name is Sloane Thompson. I am the director of training and education at NTAB. And I'm Dr. Saeed D. Hill, and I'm a counsel psychologist and independent consultant in the field of men and masculinities. And today's episode is Why Human Grief? And in particular, we're going to be getting into grief tech and grief tech bros. And let's I just want to say something at the top here that we are all pretty grossed out by what we learned about the grief tech industry. And we are going to do our best to do what we always try to do in these talks, which is be really balanced and talk about both sides of the argument around AI replacing something that is very human. But there's some really gross, icky stuff that could come out of this. And that's why we want to talk about it, because we're going to need to be able to navigate this. And I think another thing that I just want to do up top is give a little bit of a content warning. Because and I've never felt the need to do that in the episodes that we've done before. But this is a conversation where we're going to be talking about people who've passed away and people who've maybe passed away in traumatic ways. And so if today is not the day that you want to listen to this episode, if you want to come back and revisit it another time, I would say that's that's absolutely valid because this is going to be a tough conversation. Yeah, absolutely. And I, you know, as somebody who has experienced deep loss myself, this was like very personal the research was for me because I could see how I mean, I am still pained 26 years later. And I can see how I would have been a perfect candidate for some type of marketing outreach to help me process this by connecting to the per me to the person that I lost. And so I I I feel really strongly about doing this episode because I think we do need to raise awareness about this so that we can support the people around us who have lost somebody and might come into contact with this technology. And I also just want to add, too, for folks, this isn't meant to disparage folks who might be thinking about using this sort of tech, right? Or are already using this sort of tech. I think like it makes a lot of sense for people to want to use this or engage with this for a myriad of reasons. But to do a service to you all, like as we always try to do, it is really about providing education, the digital literacy of this, what to be considering when making these sorts of decisions, to try to process grief in this way. And so that's that's the real desire that we have here, too. It's not to shame anyone, but to give you a lot of context and education and just uh things to think about as we move along in this process. Because we're going to be talking about individuals who use it and we're going to be talking about the tech companies who create it. And that's just two different conversations about two different groups of people. And this is not niche. This may sound niche, but this is forecasted to be over a $35 billion industry. And this is sort of a classic opportunity for AI startups and entrepreneurs to go after because it's a massive market because everybody experiences grief. Everybody experiences loss. And so there is money to be made here. And the last thing we want to do is not be thinking about this and reacting to it and be shocked by it, and we're having to navigate it in our own families or friends' circles and not know what to do. So let's let's talk about this. So, what is grief tech? This is not an AI thing, right? Grief tech, using technology to grieve, existed before AI. People would go on social media to memorialize somebody that they had just lost. They would seek out support from online communities, right? They might use telehealth to process loss with a therapist. Like technology has been an active participant in grief for a long time. But what changed with AI, and honestly, why we do this podcast in the first place, is AI has just taken it to a level that demands our attention because the risks are so profound. We really need to think about who we want managing the grieving process for a generation of people. And do we want that to be grief tech bros? Like I don't think so, but they're the ones who are going to be at the wheel. So what is grief tech? So grief tech really with AI or AI-powered grief tech sort of falls into just a couple different categories. Basically, preserving somebody's legacy before death, where they participate in some type of interview process where they answer hundreds of questions so that after they pass on, their loved ones can still interact with them. And in some cases, it's not generative AI. It's literally just you can ask them questions that they've already answered and that are prerecorded. Where it flips with AI is recreating interaction after somebody dies, simulating their presence, where you can have conversations with them, interact with them. And this can happen with the person's consent where they participate in this process beforehand, or it happens without their consent. And you use whatever materials you have available to you to recreate them. And that is how most companies are doing it. One of the big flags that I want to address is that Meta recently got called out for obtaining a patent on how to keep the social media accounts of deceased users quote unquote alive so that you can still chat and interact with them because more users means more data, more interaction, more advertising, things like that. So this is what I'm talking about when we said, ugh, this feels gross, because you know, I don't want Mark Zuckerberg managing grief for billions of people, but that's where I'm worried it's gonna go. I did just want to jump in because I think that one thing that's snagging in my mind is the fact that it's called legacy tech, that these are legacy chatbots. I think there's something interesting there. It's because to me, just the word legacy means not it's not just what are the memories that other people are going to have of me. I think it's something more than that. When I think about somebody leaving a legacy or being very concerned with their legacy, it's that they will continue to impact the world after they're gone. They're going to continue to have an effect other than just fond remembrance. And so I almost think if you know, if somebody was going to make a choice to preserve their memory in that way, the motivation for making the choice to become a chat bot rather than to just have photos or videos or my, you know, my loved ones are going to be able to read my diary after I'm gone. It's that I will still be an active participant in the world when I am gone, that I will still be thinking and feeling and impacting people. And I don't know. I think that's a fundamental shift in the way that people can expect to quote unquote live on. First of all, I'm going to be buried with my diary. Nobody's reading it. You don't want your daughters to learn all sorts of things about you. Dear diary. No, no, that's not happening. Yeah. Well, we talked about this before, right? That this is not just about the individual, right? It's about community and making an informed decision to use this technology, right? That it's not just about the person who creates a digital replica of somebody who passed on. And what are the implications on the other people who are grieving that person? Yeah. That's honestly a huge concern that I have here, that we don't just grieve in isolation, we grieve in community. And that's going to be one of the biggest things that's going to give us resilience in that grieving process is the people around us. So what happens when one person who knew this loved one makes this decision to recreate them with a chatbot and get immersed in a fantasy world with that chatbot? But other people loved that person too and are grieving too. And I can just see this being a very contentious thing within families, within friend groups that what's going to happen when this person, some people want to let them go and some people want to keep them forever in this artificial simulation. So I don't want to beer us off too much with this comment, but I will say one of the jobs I used to have was to help families going through the grieving process of loved ones who are making end-of-life decisions, you know, for medical reasons and stuff like that. My job was to train therapists on how to help families make these end-of-life decisions with loved ones, right? And which can become very contentious and there's a lot of grief involved, but there's a lot of legal things involved too. And something about what you were just saying, Sloane, when you used the word contentious, it just made me think of that process and how that might be impacted by something like this, where I could see people getting sued, honestly, and you know, suing for like, I don't know, is the word custody correct? Like ownership over the grief bot, or, you know, our our relative who's passed on and their their memoriam and all of these sorts of things. And I could just see it really interrupting the grief process in that way, and how people like, do people now, this part of their legacy, become who they are, like who owns them in death? And I think that to me feels really heartbreaking and not uh something that maybe people are really forecasting. So, as the as the recovering attorney in the group, I'm really excited to be able to talk about the law, because we never talk about the law, even though being an attorney wasn't for me. So, two things, Said, absolutely that's gonna happen. I think it's going to become something that estate attorneys start factoring into somebody's will, somebody's estate. Like, yes, you can do this, or no, you can't do this. And there's precedent, right? Like I'm sure celebrities think about this all the time. Like, if you're gonna make money off me after I die, I want to have a say on where that money gets spent or who gets the revenue, right? Or how you use my likeness. So there is precedent for this. We've just never thought about it for non-celebrities. And so that's that's one thing. Like, absolutely, I think that's gonna happen. And then two, I think we're gonna see legislation around this. I think that we're gonna see legislation where something awful is gonna happen. There's gonna be some newsworthy story about somebody misusing this technology or something really tragic happening around this technology. Because this is how it happens usually with legislators. Somebody in their district has an issue and then they and it makes the news, and then they say they're going to activate by creating legislation. So I think those are the two sort of legal inroads for this stuff. And I think that this is a good place to touch base on exactly what this tech is and all the different versions of it, because it's not just a one-size-fits-all, like if it's going to be a chat bot, it's gonna be this chatbot. I think about this sliding scale of ways that people can use another person's likeness after they're gone. And one thing would be something static, like a picture of that person. It just is a factual representation of how they were when they were alive. And then we get into all these things about, well, what if it's an edited image? What if it's a a story about them that is part fiction, part reality? Like, you know, we have we have all of these precedents for there is a mixture of fiction and reality. There's a mixture of fact and fantasy going into m the memory of this person. Uh, I think a chat bot, it's just a farther step down that road. And this is, I mean, a little bit of the AI literacy here. One question that I have around this is let's say that you are talking to a chat bot that is based on your loved one. Is the in is the entire data set for that chatbot only things that that person said, did, consented to, their voice, their thoughts. The AI is just recombining their thoughts and feelings into something that is really just them. Or is this like, we're running this off of Chat GPT and it is a mixture of this person's data, this person's memories, but also all of the other things on the internet. And that to me gets into a much trickier place where can we even really say it's this person anymore? Or is this a chat bot that is becoming increasingly just a mixture of everything else that it's interacting with? Yeah. And it can be much more influential on the person's life because it's not just some faceless chat GPT that you are interacting with. It's your dead parent. And if it starts veering outside sort of the guardrails of this person's memory or whatever questions they've asked, then I think somebody would be much more inclined to be influenced by this chatbot as well. And I think what I what I was thinking about when you're talking about the different ways people use like photographs, Sloan, I'm I'm thinking of a world where you have a digital photograph on the on the counter of your parent that passed away and it can talk to you, right? And it it sort of hogwarts-in, right, with the like talking paintings, right? It's like a very similar thing where you can have these interactions. And and when that happens and that narrative is controlled by AI companies, not by this person's legacy, how does that collide with memory and the fragility of memory? Another layer of this, and it feels like we're just like piling on the layers, but this is important things to be thinking about as we're getting into it. But I think of even things like, you know, how do you lose your loved ones, right? Because I'm one, I'm imagining some people might lose some loved ones, friends, family to say, for example, suicide, right? And something that we do know about folks who experience suicide in their lives is that they are also statistically at risk for themselves suiciding. Like there are some statistics about this, right? It's a phenomenon called suicide contagion, for example. So in my mind, suppose that this technology, if someone is expressing to this tech, you know, suicidality or processing suicide with the chatbot who has suicided, right? And this sort of thing and how that's impacted them, we already have documented cases of chatbots veering off and encouraging harm, you know, to people using the technology, whether it be suicide or other things, you know? So I think that this is another layer that I'm also considering here is if I'm expressing sadness and grief and even expressing like, oh, I wish it was me, or I wish, you know, uh, and all these other things, what will how will these chatbots respond? Will they respond in some helpful way, like our mother might have, or father might have, or something? Uh who knows, right? Or is it going to veer us into some potentially horrible situation? I mean, these are concerns I also have about this. Okay. Bear with me here. Let's just keep going. Said, can you see a space where using this technology as a therapeutic intervention for helping somebody who has experienced loss? Can you see a situation where that would be healthy? I imagine in sessions where people are processing grief, you might say, Well, what would you say to them if they were here right now? Or what was left unsaid, right? Or things like that. And now you can have this technology that allows them in a safe, time-limited way, have a more immersive way to do that. Am I just I mean, I'm out of my depth here, but it's just just another more immersive way to do what we're already doing? I think in some contexts, absolutely, right? We we already have some data on these sorts of chat bots, being able to just offer some sort of comfort or help or helpfulness to somebody going through the grieving process. And as a matter of fact, you might not even consider this that different than some therapeutic interventions. For example, there's something that a lot of my clinician folks out there listening would know called empty chair dialogue, for example, where it's a form of therapy through gestalt therapy, essentially, where basically you have somebody who might be have experienced some sort of loss and experiencing grief and an unfinished business, for example. You have them sort of basically talk to an empty chair that represents the person or entity that they want some closure with. And so you'll be able to sort of like talk to them about, you know, what you would like to have said and gotten into, and and and it's a it could be a potential form of healing, right? So this is an actual technique that has been used for closure in that respect. My biggest thing with this is I think that in that form of AI, I think that can be actually very helpful to the grieving process. But what we're uh disregarding, I think, and going back to some of the things we've we've already touched on here, is that part of the the last part of the grieving process is letting go. It is the ability to kind of look at that chair, right, and have the conversation and have control over the interaction without a response, but also to it in service of just letting go of that relationship. It doesn't mean getting over it. It doesn't mean you'll never think about them again, but that's what the closure part is. And so I had read, you know, one person in particular was in this sort of like 30-year grieving relationship with their grandmother who had died, right? Like um they turned their grandmother into like a chatbot. That's not closure, you know, that's keeping you on the app. And I think that's the problem. Like this is this is part of a business model at that point. This isn't grief and closure. And I think that's where my concern comes in. But it absolutely can be part of a grieving framework for people. But I'm concerned by how this is being labeled and whose responsibility is it to talk to you about what it means to move on at that point, right? If you're just always on it, then I I think that's a big problem. Well, and I one thing that's I don't know, that sort of snagged on me when I was listening to you talk right now is when people are doing that empty empty chair therapy, what are they actually exploring? What are the questions that they want to pose to that person who's not there? And I honestly, I've done that therapy before. I think it's pretty rare that it's gonna be I'm sad, I miss you, as the thing that's being explored. I think when we when we talk about things to work through, sadness is one dimension of grief. And I think what people often need to explore with a therapy like that is more feeling angry about something that that person did and really needing to dig into why would this person have done that? And to connect it to the point that you made about suicide, that is often something that the loved ones feel. How could you have done this? What were you experiencing? And I think the benefit of the empty chair therapy is that it sparks empathy and perspective in the person who's doing the talking because the the way that empty chair therapy works is that you say, I this is what I wanted to have said to you, but then you imagine the other person's response and you're working through your own understanding of what the other person was thinking and feeling as you're doing that therapy, rather than you've got plugged into that equation a chatbot who's just saying back to you, oh, as this other person, this is what I was thinking and feeling. But chatbots are sycophantic. And so in that moment where you could be empathizing, having the perspective of the other person, instead, you're talking to something that's just placating you. And I think that that's another place where people are gonna get trapped in the grief and they can't move on. Yeah. And and maybe one last thing about that is that also part of it also might involve you quite literally switching places with that person. Yeah. Uh, and taking their perspective and being able to respond as them. And it's Supposed to help build some sort of that empathy and understanding and perspective taking, right? As part of the grieving process or forgiveness process or whatever it might be, which again is another element that is taken away, you know, by this. And so this isn't a full-throated endorsement of empty chair dialogue, you know, in that sort of thing, but it's an example of how this, how therapeutically we might aversion of grief therapy and that sort of thing, and how this isn't really designed to help you process that, but might help you it might come at a long-term expense by keeping you kind of entrapped with this dynamic without the ability to just move on as well. Well, you can be pretty sure that somebody will, in the marketing, make it sound just like an enhanced version of that well-established empty chair therapy. Like, well, why have an empty chair when you can have the person sitting in it, right? And glossing over how it's not the same thing. The last thing I'll say on this is what the ugly side of this is more like a seance or a psychic who allows you to talk to someone who has passed on. I can see how that's an established business model. That's been going on for a long time. Psychics have existed for a long time. They take money, and people pay them to connect with people who have passed on. I can absolutely see these apps or people who are going to create these apps sort of falling into that lane too, not really thinking about a healthy therapeutic intervention, but like this is just let's stick with what works. We know people will pay psychics for this. Let's just create an app that's even more immersive and on-demand and cheaper than going to a psychic is. Like I just think, and this is getting into the vulnerability of your market. If you're building these apps, who are you marketing to? Right? Are you marketing somebody who's at the end of their life? Right. And giving them the opportunity to answer a bunch of questions to preserve their legacy, or are you marketing to people who have recently suffered loss and are grieving and offering them an antidote to that? And I think there are massive ethical considerations here. How do you make an informed decision when you are offered the promise to talk to your mom again? Right. Like and I guarantee you, the marketing copy on these websites is going to be so slick and so powerful that they are going to make a lot of money. And the people that are going to be moving into this market to create apps for this are not going to all be do-gooders, right? They're going to be people who see a $35 billion market and they want a piece of it. And not to take it to what I think is maybe the yuckiest of the yucky places in this conversation, but how else do tech companies make their money? Ads. I mean, I I can see like one of these companies and they make it two for one coffin sale. But yeah, but exactly. I I the same way that like, you know, if you are a funeral home and I'm sure you're getting approached by, you know, casket manufacturers saying, like, hey, carry my caskets. I mean, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that necessarily. And, you know, there is this fine line between I'm providing all of the things, all of the objects that this person needs in order to have the funeral that they want for this person. And then there's like the upsale, the like, oh, your father would really, he deserves this casket. And yes, it's a thousand dollars more, but how much did you love him? Like, are you gonna make this a cheap funeral? You know, and so the those sorts of exploitative dynamics have kind of always happened around grief. But I don't know. I'm thinking, you know, Adam, you made the point earlier about how susceptible is somebody to being told something by the memory of their loved one. And I don't know, like if you, you know, open AI is gonna start incorporating ads into Chat GPT. And that's not going to look like, oh, you're having your Chat GPT conversation and then all of a sudden stop. We're in an ad now, the way that you would be in YouTube, and then we're back on track with the chat. It's going to be subtly incorporating a preference for certain brands over others into the conversation. And I don't know. I think, I think that that would be a wildly explodative dynamic if you've got some company that's saying, hey, if your dead family member is going to be talking about this subject, I'd like them to say that this product is the best. I don't know. I absolutely see something that extreme happening in this space. I don't think that's a wild idea. I just, I just have a thought of like just being mid, you know, grief process and really getting vulnerable. And then there's just like a state format or something, you know, ridiculous, right? Like that just pops in, right? How how horrifying would would that really be? Unless you pay, you know, to be a grief premium, right? And then putting premium on your grief. No, there's there's this show called Upload that I talk about a lot actually, because I think it's really it's one of those shows that was, it came out like five or six years ago and it was total sci-fi, and now it's a hundred percent reality with all this stuff that's happening. But the concept of upload, and it's on Amazon Prime. If you hear me talking about it and you think it's really cool and you want to watch it, but the concept of the show is that when you are dying, you can turn all of your thoughts and memories and personality into data and you will be uploaded into the afterlife of your choice. And then your loved ones on earth keep paying a fee to keep you in that afterlife and to be able to interact with you nonstop. And there's so I honestly, I could talk about so many things from that show in this conversation. But one of the fascinating things about this show, I was listening to an interview with the screenwriters, and they were saying in the first conception of the show, each of the afterlifes were for different religions. And so there was like a Catholic afterlife and a, you know, but then they changed the concept of the show that it was data service providers. There was like an ATT afterlife and like a meta afterlife. And as soon as they hit on that, they were like, of course that's what it is, because it would be companies that are controlling these afterlives. It's it's suddenly a capitalist afterlife. And I we're there now. This is what that is. It's a capitalist afterlife. Speaking of capitalism, Sloan, I yeah, I'm getting a little of the people here, but this is like capitalism is driving this. And so one of the ways in which people are already taking advantage of a grief tech market that doesn't exist yet is to provide information about the market to incentivize people to jump into it, to incentivize people to start creating these products. And I just want to share the mindset that is being advertised for grief tech entrepreneurs, grief tech startups, grief tech bros, right? Where they say things like, we aren't just looking at a photo of a loved one. We are hearing them laugh again or asking for the advice they never got to give. Just as the pharaohs build monuments to ensure they were never forgotten, we are now building digital legacies. The real gold here isn't creating a perfect AI clone. The real opportunity is softening the blow of loss. And there's a lot of other gross stuff in here that I'll maybe bring up later, but I think about letting a bunch of tech bros soften the blow of loss. And again, I feel like we're getting into this space where grief is bad, right? Or loss is bad. And so we're going to make it feel more acceptable, more manageable, or not let you feel it at all, right? Because you don't actually lose this person. I think an important point to make about this, too, is if you map all of what we've been talking about so far on this podcast, whether it be about dating and, you know, chatbots writing messages for you to attract dates, or be in relationships with chatbots, or, you know, we're talking about grief in particular or commitment or all these other things. I think it gives you a real glimpse into the psychology of the tech bros who develop this sort of technology for us, because it's always about we need to soften the blow or eliminate human experiences that you are having. And in my mind, I think a lot of that is because to grieve, to be rejected, to want is to be vulnerable, right? And to put yourself in a vulnerable position. And I think this gives us a real glimpse into the psychology of the people that create this sort of technology where I imagine vulnerability can look like weakness, and we need to eliminate weakness from you. And I think about this from the masculinity standpoint when I do all this masculinity work, this idea that we're gonna make sure you're not vulnerable. We're gonna take away any feeling or experience of vulnerability for you because that is going to interfere with your ability to live and that sort of thing. And I think it's really from that standpoint, I don't even know that they're thinking about it, but it's so nefarious because I want to see the interviews with these people who develop this sort of technology that asks them, like, hey, like, what's it been like to lose loved ones in your life? Right? What's that look like for you? What has your grief process felt like? Because I think it can give you a real glimpse into why they think we need this sort of thing to soften the blow of grief, which grief can also be a very, it sounds painful, but it can be a such a beautiful process too. Life and death is human and it's part of a human cycle. And there can be a lot of beauty in death for people too, and a lot of beauty in processing and and grieving and remembering and this sort of thing. One of the worst parts about this, and I'll give like sort of a personal example for myself, is you know, I was very close to my grandmother growing up, my maternal grandmother, and we lived together for a significant portion of my childhood. And when she passed away, I was devastated. I was like nine, 10 years old. And I thought about her a lot. And I ended up randomly having a dream about her one night where I like ran into her arms and she hugged me, and she, you know, told me that everything was going to be okay and that she really like loved me and that she was safe and she was okay, right? And I remember that moment of feeling such comfort in that, in that that remembering her for who she was, but then it almost felt like a sign for me or something, right? As a child that this meant something. And it almost meant like she was always looking out for me and always protecting me and that sort of thing, right? Like that's the meaning I made from it. But I feel like I look at this sort of technology and and if it's always around and it's always like prolonging that grieving process and stuff, I don't know that you have those sorts of moments that you can achieve without this sort of technology, right? And also with the memory part, I was nine years old. Memories are fickle. This sort of technology can absolutely lead to some sort of false memories, implantation of fake things. We know that a lot of the tech bros already talk about how AI can be rather fickle and unpredictable and that sort of thing. This isn't as easy as just implanting a bunch of memories from somebody and that's all AI is pulling from. No, it absolutely is going to be more like jazz music here, where it's going to sort of like, you know, improvise quite a bit. And so what am I to remember what is real and what is not? Are my memories all of a sudden that are already a little fragile going to be completely different? And is there authenticity to that? And what does that do to my grieving process? And I think that to me feels really horrible, honestly, and really painful of a thought. Yeah. And I I mean, I'm gonna step into Said shoes here for a second, but like neurologically, the process of like moving on from grief, experiencing grief, processing grief, moving on from it is creating new neural pathways in the brain. You are up until the point of that person's death, reality is they are in the world. They are part of my world. And then they die. But your brain still expects them to be there because every neural pathway that's formed around this person is they exist and they are here for me and I feel these things for them. And so part of the grieving process is literally reordering your brain to match a reality where this person no longer exists. And so it is not just an emotional experience of, oh, I get some sort of pleasure out of this person being here, being there is a synthetic version of this person that I get to talk to. It's literally preventing your brain from doing a process that A, it is designed to do. Your brain knows how to do this. There would be a huge breakdown in humanity if we were not able to grieve and move on. But also that your brain is it deserves to do, should do. And it it really is. Yeah, it's it's creating a situation where one person in this social network that's lost a person is just trapped in a reality that everyone around them is not in. And I I don't know. I think that the potential for isolation of that, because you're literally out of sync with the world that everyone else is living in, is something that's important for this conversation. And honestly, you know, we talked about commitment in a past episode that that it's also someone just living in a different reality than the other people around them. Um and I think there's a lot of concern there. And, you know, there there have been instances you talk, I I I'm so sorry to keep bringing it back to suicide, but where, you know, there was that instance of Sewell Setzer, a 14-year-old boy in Florida, and he was talking to a chatbot of Daenerys Targaryen, and he took his own life because he believed that he could join this chatbot in her world if he died. And I I really see a danger here of somebody having sort of that same process, but they want to join their loved one who is now a chatbot in that world. And that, I mean, when somebody becomes that divorced from reality and that that just locked into a fantasy of this person, um, I don't know. I I think there's just so there's so much risk there, there's so much danger there for that person's safety. And the companies that are gonna be pedaling these apps, and I I don't mean to paint them with a brush, this, this one brush, like they're all bad, they're all taking advantage of people. Like, I don't think that's going to be the outcome, but there are going to be a lot of shady companies that are gonna jump into this market, and I think we're gonna see a lot of these predictable but awful outcomes, right? Because on the outside, they the the the the marketing language or the copywriting on the website's just gonna be very powerful and very meaningful. But on the inside, they're gonna be talking about things, and this is a real thing, like the empathy-driven revenue model, which is how to price for the most sensitive moment in a customer's life without losing their trust. That's what's going on on the other side that we don't see, which is why I think this is really tricky ground if we are coming into contact with somebody in our lives, either as professionals or personally, who are considering using grief tech or are using it and are heavily reliant on it. And all the challenges that we've sort of illustrated in this podcast, and frankly, we're supposed to be very balanced in this podcast. I'm very aware we have talked about a lot of the risks and downsides. I think there is some there is potential for beneficial use here, but how do we the stakes are so much higher here? It's not like somebody who's in a relationship with an AI campaign, and it's somebody who is grieving and by that very nature vulnerable and have been targeted by a tech company seeking to help unburden their grief. And then we come along and we see this as a risk for them, and we want to try to connect with them and talk to them about how to use this safely, highlight some of the risks, how to make informed choices, or how to just use the technology safely. And I've got to admit, I don't know how to have that conversation. I'm really struggling on how to have that conversation. Well, I I don't know. I I think a parallel here, and I know that it's it's different in key ways, but I think about if somebody's really caught up in a conspiracy theory, there's a lot of guidance on how to help them see outside of that reality and saying you are wrong and just coming at them with what you're doing is stupid or unreasonable, or you know, you're you're just being so naive. Like that is just going to to really make make them retreat farther into this alternate reality. I don't know. I I think that if there was someone in my life who was becoming very dependent on grief tech, one thing that I I might try with them is inviting them to interact with the memory of that person in a different way, like maybe drawing them back to some of the more human, natural ways that we remember someone else. So if they're if the primary way that they're interacting with this deceased person's memory is the chatbot of them, maybe invite them to, I don't know, a memorial service or a wake or just another way to say, hey, I want to remember this person with you too. So let's pull out that photo album and talk about them. Let's watch some home movies. And maybe I I don't know, I could see that both grounding this person in a different version of the memory of that loved one and also inviting them back in to a like a social circle with family and friends who also are grieving, also remembering them and just, I don't know, giving them an alternate route for the grief rather than asking them to just cut the grief off when they're clearly not at a place where they want to do that. So as we get to the end here, often my inclination is to say things like, we need to be talking about this, we need to have more literacy around grieving and why it's important and why moving on is important. Because I think when you don't understand why, and we've talked about this in other podcasts, why judgment or rejection or grieving are actually very human things to an ex to experience and are important things to experience. We need more literacy around those things so that when people, especially young people, encounter them, they don't see it as something to avoid. They see it as something to move through, hopefully with support. But in this conversation we've had today has really made me think about this that I want to really push legislators and I don't even want to say more accountability from tech companies, because that's just probably not going to happen. But we've seen how legislation around AI therapy apps has actually had impact and has prevented them from being available in certain states. Looking at you, Illinois, right? So what if we proactively legislated grief tech? Because it is such a fraught area to take advantage of vulnerable people. If it really is a $35 billion market, then exploitation of vulnerable people in exploiting their grief is inevitable. So I would encourage everybody to think about that. I may even stay tuned. I'm going to look into this. This is all coming to me in real time, but I'm going to look into how I can advocate that for that and maybe even create a model law around that so that people do get the beneficial uses of this technology, but that we can maybe mitigate the misuses and the harms. And if you're someone who's sitting there thinking, in 2026, does legislation get passed? Is this realistic? One thing that gives me hope in this area is that one place where there actually is a lot of movement in legislation and legal precedent is intellectual property. You know, in America, there is, there's definitely pathways to preserving someone's intellectual property against it being used in a way that they did not consent to. And so I think a good pathway is if you are going to use someone's likeness, if you are going to use someone's words or their voice, then you have certain responsibilities and they have certain rights. So saying so, I don't know, a law like you cannot mix this person's likeness with advertisements or something like that. I actually think that there are very clear paths to laws like that. And I would love to see something like that get passed. And I think like maybe the last thing I want to say, just as we sort of wrap up this idea of like grief and really talking it through, is grief is not a problem to be solved. You know, it's a process that like does something for us. You know, grief is not a malfunction. It is not like something that has to be softened completely or just eliminated. It's quite literally biological. It's quite literally psychological, social, it's spiritual. It it's evolved over time for us as human beings because it serves essential functions for us. And so when we talk about AI disrupting this, what we're really saying is AI is going to soften the blow or disrupt or just eliminate a core process for us that exists for a reason as human beings. And those reasons do matter. And so I just want people to know that too. You know, you're not wrong for going through this grieving process, and it's not wrong for it to hurt or have a lot of different feelings about it. Well said, Saeed. This was a little bit of a heavier episode, I'm realizing, but I think a necessary one. We weren't slinging as many jokes about this, but it's always important to address any topic that we think needs to be highlighted in this podcast. So if you have any thoughts about this episode, we'd love to hear from you. If you have ideas for other episodes, we'd love to hear from you and how you can use what we talked about today to have agency. Like let's This is a community. We are a community, and I get really excited by the idea of what we can do when we uh when we work together. Thanks for listening. We'll see you at the next one.