Artificial Intelligence and Grief

One early morning in December 2023, just as the sun rose and surrounded by our family, my dear wife, Carina, took her last breath and peacefully passed away after a battle with cancer.

For a time, I was in shock. I was numb as I was swept into the funeral preparations and the flurry of activities that surrounded it. But as family and friends dispersed and I found myself alone, I became overwhelmed with a raw sense of grief. At that point the tears came. The tears flowed as I cleaned up her things and as I did the last laundry load of her clothes. St. Augustine records a similar experience in the Confessions after the death of his mother, Monica. He writes about the burial of his mother in which he “went and returned without tears.” However, he wrote that it was only sometime later that “I gave way to the tears which I before restrained, to overflow as much as they desired.”¹ The words of Psalm 42:3, “My tears have been my food day and night,” took on new meaning. There are some verses in the Bible that can best be appreciated after you have experienced lament and grief.

Kubler-Ross famously identified five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.² Some of these stages ring true to me, but not all —and they are certainly not linear. I have found a more helpful description in identifying two states of grief: acute grief which describes the initial response that is “often intense and disruptive”, and integrated grief which is a “permanent response after adaptation to the loss.”³ I noticed the intensity of acute grief subsiding over time, even as I continue to be periodically ambushed by episodes of grief. In the preface to his book Lament for a Son, philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff describes the later state of grief after the loss of his son as follows: “Rather often I am asked whether the grief remains as intense as when I wrote . The answer is, No. The wound is no longer raw. But it has not disappeared…”⁴ C.S. Lewis provides a vivid portrayal of ongoing grief in his book A Grief Observed, comparing grief to a “bomber circling round and dropping its bombs each time the circle brings it overhead” and in between “there is spread over everything a vague sense of wrongness, of something amiss.”⁵

Some recent developments in the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI) have sought to assist those who are dealing with grief with an emerging “digital afterlife industry.” One development is so-called “Griefbots” that use the data trails left behind to simulate the patterns and personality of a dead loved one.⁶ By training on emails, messages, and voice recordings left behind, such a bot can enable people to continue conversing with a simulation of their deceased loved one.

It is my contention that using a Griefbot to postpone or deflect the journey of grief is going to have consequences. The social science research is already suggesting that high use of AI companions is “correlated with higher loneliness, dependence, and problematic use, and lower socialization.”⁷ One of Marshall McLuhan’s insights into the laws of media is that when pushed to an extreme, media “reverse” their outcomes—something we are beginning to see with AI companions: tools that promise connection ultimately bring loneliness.⁸ I suspect that research that will eventually emerge showing AI tools that promise comfort to the grieving will, in the end, compound grief. It seems to me that there is no way over, around, or under grief. One must go through it, and it is only by going through it that you can enter a healthy state of integrated grief.⁹

One of the most helpful things for me was the presence of other people in my grief journey. In the words of Wolterstorff: “What I need to hear from you is that you recognize how painful it is. I need to hear from you that you are with me in my desperation. To comfort me, you have to come close. Come sit beside me on my mourning bench.”¹⁰ A chatbot does not have feelings, empathy, understanding, or embodiment. It does not know what it is like to have a friend or a spouse or to grieve.

Another AI development is the emergence of “therapy bots” to provide counseling.¹¹ Already in the 1960s, the early AI pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum explored the notion of automating psychotherapy with a chatbot named ELIZA. Weizenbaum observed, “I had thought it essential, as a prerequisite to the very possibility that one person might help another learn to cope… that the helper himself participate in the other’s experience of those problems, and, in large part by way of his own empathetic recognition of them, himself come to understand them.”¹²

Weizenbaum concluded, “There are limits to what computers ought to be put to do.”¹³ In his book, Humans Are Underrated, Geoff Colvin suggests asking the following question: “What are the activities that we humans, driven by our deepest nature or by the realities of daily life, will simply insist be performed by other humans, regardless of what computers can do?”¹⁴ A Christian anthropology sees humans as distinct from machines, a someone rather than a something, made in the image of God.¹⁵ In grief we need each other; an AI has no empathy and cannot take a meaningful place beside us on the “mourning bench.”

I did not turn to AI for grief support, but I did find consulting a chatbot helpful in my new state as a widower. I recall querying ChatGPT for information about dimensions of memorial stones and querying chatbots for mundane assistance with chores I was unaccustomed to doing on my own.

What I did find immensely helpful was meeting with other people who were grieving, including in grief groups like Griefshare. What I have appreciated most were people who came alongside me—without platitudes or pious pronouncements—and simply sat with me on the “mourning bench.”

In addition to the comfort of others, the Christian faith teaches about a God who understands and is “acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3). I am grateful for my faith which enables me to grieve with hope and a comfort that death does not hold the last word. Wolterstorff observes that “Faith is a footbridge that you don’t know will hold you up over the chasm until you’re forced to walk out onto it.”¹⁶ My faith has certainly held me up and even grown through the journey over the chasm of grief.

Some, like Ray Kurzweil, look to AI to eventually solve the problem of death, believing that “there wonʹt be mortality by the end of the twenty‐first century” when we will be able to “take advantage of the twenty‐first centuryʹs brain‐porting technology.”¹⁷ I believe these posthuman predictions are sadly mistaken and based on reductionistic presuppositions about what it means to be human. While AI offers solutions to many practical problems, it is my contention that it will never solve the problem of death, or even offer much in our grief.

The Heidelberg Catechism poses the question: “What is your only comfort in life and in death?” The answer given by the catechism is simple yet profound: “That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.”¹⁸ I find that a deep comfort; one that I believe no technology could ever offer.

References

1. Augustine, The Confessions of Saint Augustine, Book IX, Translated by E. B. Pusey.
2. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, On Death and Dying, Taylor & Francis Group, 1973.
3. Shear MK, Ghesquiere A, Glickman K, “Bereavement and Complicated Grief”, Current Psychiatry Reports, Volume 15, 2013.
4. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son, Eerdmans, 1987, 5.
5. C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, HarperOne, 1996, 35,41.
6. Hollanek, T., Nowaczyk-Basińska, K., “Griefbots, Deadbots, Postmortem Avatars: on Responsible Applications of Generative AI in the Digital Afterlife Industry”, Philosophy and Technology, 37, 63 (2024).
7. Fang, Cathy & Liu et al., “How AI and Human Behaviors Shape Psychosocial Effects of Chatbot Use: A Longitudinal Randomized Controlled Study”, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.17473.
8. McLuhan, Marshall and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science, University of Toronto Press, 1988, 98-99.
9. There can be challenges moving from acute grief to integrated grief. “Prolonged Grief Disorder” or “complicated grief” is a condition characterized by prolonged intense and persistent grief symptoms that interfere with daily life and well-being.
10. Wolterstorff, Lament, 17.
11. Katia Riddle, “The (artificial intelligence) therapist can see you now”, NPR, April 7, 2025. https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/04/07/nx-s1-5351312/artificial-intelligence-mental-health-therapy
12. Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, W. H. Freeman, 1976, 5–6.
13. Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, 11.
14. Geoff Colvin, Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will (New York: Penguin, 2015) 42.
15. Robert Spaemann, Persons: The Difference Between “Someone” and “Something,” trans. Oliver O’Donovan, Oxford Studies in Theological Ethics, Oxford University Press, 2017.
16. Wolterstorff, Lament, 31.
17. Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, Penguin, 1999.
18. https://www.crcna.org/welcome/beliefs/confessions/heidelberg-catechism

19. Derek Schuurman, 2024, “Lament for a Wife” https://www.christiancourier.ca/lament-for-a-wife/

Views and opinions expressed by authors and editors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of AI and Faith or any of its leadership.