The Digital Afterlife and the Posthuman
The Digital Afterlife
The concept of a digital afterlife, the digital extension of life after physical death challenges the notion that death is final. The digital afterlife is not denying that the dead are dead but that they are still part of our lives. AI expands the possibilities of commemorating the deceased and managing the grief of those left behind, complementing or replacing formal structures of faith and belief systems. Death is integrated into online networks and mobile communication machines. The digital afterlife creates everlasting memorials in the post-mortem context of mixed religious and secular beliefs.
Saved-Baden defines the digital afterlife as an active or passive presence after death. Passive memorialization is Facebook memorial pages of the deceased. Active presence technology consists of conversational chatbots or avatars where the person communicates back to the human. The distinction between a live physical person and the dead is becoming increasingly blurred. When reality and online reality overlap it is difficult to distinguish between what is real and artificial. Sofka introduced the concept of Thanatology as a means to articulate the interplay between death and technology and examine the implications of emerging digital platforms for death and dying practices.
In her examination of the death tech industry before 2019, Savin-Baden sees the durable biography evolving into an enduring biography created from the digital legacy of the dying and the bereaved. Wright suggests that “digital remains” should refer to digital data and the digital data of memories should have value and status and therefore be protected otherwise there is a risk of a second death, referring to the loss of the deceased online and mobile.
Moreman and Lewis describe the digital afterlife as “the restless dead in the digital cemetery,” referring to cultural shifts with digital commemoration, social and cultural ideas around death, and the linking of Victorian post-mortem photos of the deceased at rest or asleep. In the digital afterlife, the posthumous deceased are anything but asleep, they wait for the living to be active and animated. Cyberspace interrupts previous limitations of physical cemeteries and biological death, they wait with “digital persistence…If death is the spectacle, technology is the lens.”
Morris and Brubaker argue that allowing mourning to leak into everyday life blurs the separation of life and death. The internet blurs traditional spatial boundaries when the dead are virtually present. The dead are reembodied within our digital devices, regenerating a dynamic relationship by constructing a durable biography. AI personas of the deceased echo Victorian post-mortem portraits but instead of the bereaved sharing stories about the dead, AI personas tell their own stories for a digital legacy, reshaped by technology, perhaps creating a digital essence.
Digital legacy is information that exists in digital form after death and includes social media profiles, email, digital music, photos, videos, and other digital assets. Walter suggests that the purpose of grieving is to construct a durable biography that allows survivors to continue to integrate the deceased person into their lives. While Walter focused on a durable biography based on the physical life of the deceased, digital technologies have enabled the creation of new forms of durable biographies that extend beyond the physical.
The Digital Afterlife Industry
The digital afterlife industry is a commercially driven sector where the dead are digitally mediated within our everyday technologies to maintain ongoing relationships between the living and the deceased. In our digital society, death is mediated, not through thought and prayer but through Facebook, WhatsApp, and animated avatars created from still photographs. “For the digitally connected, the internet enables millions of people to embark on a quest to be remembered by leaving digital traces that can be stored and inherited.”
The commercial death tech industry is a profit-seeking industry, using digital remains for the monetization of the digital afterlife of users, such as the capitalization of human remains, which requires the payment of subscription fees by the bereaved or suffering a second loss, while creating a culture of ongoing grief where the bereaved never move on from death, which may be detrimental to the grieving process.
Lindeman argues that there are serious ethical implications to consider when the bereaved create chatbots of the deceased, such as dignity and autonomy of the deceased, and should only be used for medical purposes and not by commercial for-profit death tech companies. She suggests that there needs to be more focus on the possible negative impact on the bereaved, such as prolonged grief disorder, and that regulation is needed.
Grief in the AI World
There is a shift in how we relate to the world and why we incorporate AI personas into the grieving process. From a phenomenological perspective, grief is not about our relation to the dead but our relation to the world. Our identity shifts when someone close to us dies. Their accumulated history and experience, a shared life, and roots in a place go out of sync while the bereaved and the dead take on new roles.
Buben suggests that as we create and interact with AI versions of the dead, we move from recollecting to replacing the dead, and that replacement will mitigate loss and grief.49 The practice of remembrance with photographs becomes the practice of replacement by bots and avatars. Are these “conversational goods” a mere resource? If bots and avatars are the Yamagushi for the AI generation, and they rely on human interaction to communicate, do they lack subjectivity and agency, and therefore essence?
Essence and Death in Portrait Photography
Since its invention in the 19th century, portrait photography has been a medium that captures a person’s likeness or physical appearance. However, the concept of essence in portrait photography adds more meaning to the image. The 19th-century portrait photographer aimed to interpret the self beyond the physical, the sitter’s essence. Julia Margaret Cameron experimented with the daguerreotype process and photographed some of the great thinkers and creatives of the day, and aimed to capture “the greatness of the inner, not the outer man.”
Photography is also associated with death, influencing how people remember and mourn the dead. In an era of high mortality rates in Victorian Britain and during the American Civil War, and the absence of commissioned photographs during a loved one’s lifetime, a post-mortem photograph was proof of their existence and helped keep the deceased memory alive.
The mourning rituals in Victorian post-mortem portraits and mourning tableaux, created images in an evocative manner, with the living posed with the dead in life-like poses or the “last sleep.” Creating this inner essence of an individual with photography was highly praised within the photography community. “To secure a portrait of a man in his completeness, mind, and body, instead of a mere mask of his physical presentment, I consider the highest aim of the most skillful portrait painter, the crowning glory of the photographer.”
Post-mortem portraits gave proof that death had happened. “Photographs are relics, material objects of the deceased and connect the dead with the living.”26 Derrida suggests that the self is constructed through photography, an interpretation through representation. But in death, the trace of our selfhood is remembered with technology, but as time passes, there is an “effacement of traces.”
Photographs culturally mediate the experience of death, stimulating conversations, and identifying the hierarchy of the family, reinforcing the social bond with the deceased. Photography is an aid to scaffolding more complex and layered narratives and contextualized experiences and rendering loss comprehensible. Photographs are mediational tools for meaning-making and are used to reflect on and regulate emotions and grief experiences. Niemeyer and others suggest that creating a narrative backstory of our relationship with the deceased restores a sense of attachment and continuity.
Describing analog photography, Barthes states, “Photography has something to do with resurrection.” Chung suggests that “digital techniques produce images in cryogenic form: they can be awoken, reanimated, brought up to date, digital manipulation can resurrect the dead.”
Essence in Philosophy
The concept of essence provides a philosophical framework for examining whether AI personas can possess human essence. Essence is relevant to the discussion on personhood, human agency, and the self. Essence is the basic nature of things and the qualities that define them. Plato’s theory of essences was the key to true understanding and wisdom. He argued that by contemplating the Forms, we can gain knowledge of the eternal, unchanging realities that underlie the world of appearances. This knowledge is superior to knowledge gained through our senses, which can be deceptive and changeable. It refers to the true nature or underlying reality of a thing, and it is closely tied to his theory of Forms. For Plato, knowledge of essences is essential to true understanding and wisdom.
Aristotle’s essence is essential for understanding reality and that underlying reality determines an object’s existence. 20 In acquiring knowledge and understanding the nature of existence, essence is the defining characteristic of an object or a thing that makes it what it is. Locke defines essence as the “internal constitution or nature of anything, whereby it is what it is.” Locke argued that essence is not something that can be directly observed or known, but rather must be inferred from the observable qualities of the object.
According to Sartre, essence is not something given or determined but is a product of ongoing human existence and the choices made within it. Sartre’s existentialism centers on the notion of existence preceding essence, suggesting that individuals define themselves through their actions and choices rather than possessing inherent predetermined characteristics. Individuals have the freedom to define their essence through conscious choices and actions. Sartre emphasizes the significance of subjective experience in defining essence. Replicating this complex web of experiences and interactions in a digital afterlife raises philosophical questions regarding the authenticity of the identity created within an AI persona.
The Digital Afterlife of Grief and the AI Posthuman
The proliferation and dissemination of the internet changed the way we communicate with other human beings and machines, how we interpret reality, and what it means to be human. The Posthuman reflects this intimate relationship we have with online technology. The transhuman has human autonomy and freedom and is not shaped by biology but by experiences and aspirations. These ideals can be established through the development of technology that allows humans to reshape material existence. Transhumanists believe that the only universal feature of mankind is the procuring, processing, and distribution of information to extend humanists’ goals of freedom and autonomy. The body is therefore a hindrance to post-human species.
Informational technologies create the process of identity construction by allowing the subject to rearrange patterns of information to create a different sense of “self”, a self-constructed from stored informational patterns, as a result, there is the transformation of the experience of the limitations of the body.53 Identity on the internet is a process of identity construction where people present to be something they are not.
The insertion of the subject into cyberspace has “the potential to transform the relation of the subject towards its sense of embodiment.” Heidegger argues that “only the representable is “the goal of human existence.” When existence is reduced to what is represented, there is nothing to be further asked, therefore the Transhumanist idea of the Posthuman fails to recognize that positioning the human as the representable informational body, limits the frame of what can be revealed, the representable technology.
There is no freedom, autonomy, or being, as Transhumanists claim, all is conceded in its self-created immortality. Death is a singular and irreplaceable aspect of every human being. “Irreplaceability is therefore conferred, deluded, given or can be said by death…it is from the site of death as a place of my irreplaceability, that is, of my singularity, that I feel called to responsibility. In this sense, only a mortal can be responsible.”
Waters suggests that human indenting cannot be reduced to the mental faculties of each person in isolation but through relationships with others. Therefore, digital traces are inadequate at representing who we are fully because they are static and isolated and have no relation to others. Meisel and others disagree. If the dead can communicate online, they have personhood, then they have a technologically mediated status, being in the online world. However, this relationship communication relies on the living to live on and communicate with posthumous personas, such as chatbots.
Hayles argues that there is an absent understanding of the human with changing conceptions of subjectivity made by new information technologies. The posthuman networked self creates the post-mortem subject related to Heidegger’s Self, an absent Dasein, “but the posthuman does not mean the end of humanity. Onishi suggests that by uncovering the digital self, there is an absence of the human, technology reveals human mortality’s ineffability, a mortality that prevents the human from being reducible to representational terms. In Heidegger’s terms, is an authentic post-human existence possible? Can the postmodern, networked subject described by Hayles and Carlson, enjoy an authentic existence while living wired, cybernetic lives?
Placing death and bereavement in the posthumanist context, the digital is an extension of the deceased, and technology is the source for the reconfiguration of the human. Digital remains contain the essence of the deceased person, digital remains are ephemeral, extensions of the body. Belk suggests the self extends beyond the body through interactions between humans and technology.
Affective technology like smartphones, is connected to the emotional lives of users and is thought to embody the apparatgeist of the user, connecting and extending the physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual aspects of the self. The term was introduced by Katz and Aarhus “as a way to capture and categorize a novel way of thinking about how humans, when alive, invest their technology with meaning and use devices and machines to pursue social and symbolic routes.”
Pitsillides and Jefferies argue that the posthumous approach is a new way to think about the role of the dead in society and that the dead have “the agency they still have through memory, things they leave behind, social networks, spaces, paths, digital or otherwise.” From a posthumanist perspective, user-driven engagement is changing practices related to loss and grieving. Digital remains are seen to contain the essence of the deceased embodied in the digital device. From a phenomenological perspective, existence does not have to be biological, existence can be virtual.
Fuchs believes that we experience the dead in an enduring and material way and a tangible sense of “presence-in-a sense..moving through spaces we share with the dead.” Riley suggests that we animate the dead into the living, two temporalities, the past embedded with the present, creating a new relationship between the living and the dead.
Could this new relationship create a new identity or essence of the dead? Pitsillides suggests that agency is imported through actants, extending their legacy and shifting the role of the dead online. However, in the case of digital photography, Diane argues that it lacks indexicality because it records reality differently. Digital photography does not bring back the past but constructs it from the perspective of the present.
Savin-Baden states that the digital afterlife is a virtual space where digital remains, in the form of human information, assets, legacies, and digital remains reside to create a persistent digital presence. Could virtual humans and digital immortals have agency? Messed, Nansen, and others argue that digital media can extend personhood through persistent online presence on social media and death tech and legacy platforms, and therefore, identity does
not end with physical death. The dead can communicate online, creating a digital personhood, a technologically mediated status. The digital afterlife is not a simulacrum for ongoing relations or representation, it is an ongoing form of relation, relationship communication, that relies on the living to continue communication, maintaining agency and meaning. These interactions are ontological, not representative. The online persona is performed through the networked data of text messages, photos, and videos.
There is a motivation for commercial platforms to push for the preservation of posthumous personhood to prevent the loss of data and the continuation of the self that is supported by commercial interests. Lambert argues that social networks and vernacular posthumous engagement, assist in the formation of personhood. Immortality is symbolic in networked media, the boundary between the living and the dead is blurred. If the persona of the dead is present in the communication networks of the living, they should be considered as having agency.
Can personhood extend to post-death in the digital afterlife? Personhood can be extended, according to Meese and others, who state that human-computer interaction (HCI) with a chatbot or avatar is central to the development of posthumous personhood. However, according to Hallam and Hockey, the virtual afterlife on social networks can de-centre personhood, when the spaces of the living and the dead are crossed. The living and the dead become indistinguishable.
Fisher argues that mixed reality increases social and spatial presence in HCI and that interactive posthumous personas, created by big tech are not accurate representations of a person’s personality, rather they are a constructed performance created from our constructed selves on social media platforms. Fisher warns that if we use only social data to create a posthumous persona, we risk losing the history and memory of who the deceased was. Does this mean essence can not be created in the digital afterlife?
Jandric and others suggest that human consciousness or essence transferred to another entity would break continuity. But Steinhart suggests that “after you die, you can remain as something else,” within a thing that carries information about the deceased’s life, “remaining is a matter of degree; you remain more in things that carry more information about your life,” such as online data in the digital afterlife. The dead also remain in physical objects but the difference is that your dead grandmother’s table doesn’t communicate within a two-way dialogue.
The embodiment of the deceased can refer to a physical object or a digital entity. Heidegger distinguishes between objects and things, an object becomes a thing when it no longer serves its purpose, like an unused mobile phone. Pitsillides asks if an AI bot is an object or a thing when digital platforms and mobile phones contain the deceased and these things become objects of memorial and are used to contain the deceased. Does this mean that social media sites and AI personas have agency? Steinhart suggests that the deceased digital persona or ghost is an embodied conversational agent or chatbot, “after you die, your ghost remains in large systems of files stored in digital media. Your ghost is physical, your ghost face looks like you and talks like you.
Ferrando suggests that with AI, there is a restructuring of the human when the physical world no longer represents the primary space of social interactions, and therefore agency includes the non-human because the digital world shapes the human world as much as the human shapes the digital. Furthermore, he argues that digital traces are tangible objects but with limitations because the digital trace has lost the translation of the original meaning, that of the physical human.
Who decides which traces should be selected of the dead? Are they representative of the deceased? In my work, I have selected active social images from my Facebook page, family photographs from my childhood, studio self-portrait photographs, and video stills to represent different aspects of my life. However, does this random selection best represent my true essence? Immortality can be deconstructed or destabilized. Derrida argues that such stabilizations of meaning have political, practical, and economic implications which we can relate to death tech companies that provide goods and services to consumers.
Does this destabilize the concept of identity and what it means to be human in the digital world when our digital traces are inadequate? Malabou asks if identity depends upon a person retaining memories of themselves when considering identity as the sole and restricted possession of a single individual. Walter and others disagree and argue that human identity cannot be reduced to the mental faculties of each person in isolation, but through relationships with others. Therefore, are digital traces inadequate at representing who we are because they are static images presented in isolation on digital devices, and have no relation to the memories of others? In my work, I am not pictured with family or friends, I am presented in isolation.
Can an AI essence be recreated in isolation from others in a bot or avatar? Walters argues that “representing an individual’s life in whatever form is only part of who and what they are or were,” and we can not capture “their essential or original self.” Deconstructing identity online may distort a person’s life or fail to capture their impact on others. Simondon suggests that we continue to learn because of our engagement in the world and with others. Our identity and relationship with others is not stable but forever changing. Our identity evolves when we interact with the world around us.82 Distributed agency brings together the human and the nonhuman.
Are these changes to our digital identity problematic, when different versions of our online selves are represented by a single digital trace in the form of a bot or avatar? If we are in a process of permanent development in relationship to the world and others, then why would we freeze-frame a person’s life, digitally? However, in my work with AI technology, specifically, Generative AI, we can create new content, new dialogue, perhaps a new identity, and by extension, a new essence. When we become an AI human, are we constantly becoming?
Final Thoughts
Can AI replicate the true essence of a person more accurately than a still photograph? Can AI personas recreate human essence, perhaps a new essence that represents the deceased in the digital afterlife? What is the consequence of engaging with AI personas of the deceased and how does it impact the grieving process? What are the moral, ethical, and legal implications of digital afterlife creation? My practice aims to answer these questions by creating photorealistic AI personas and synthetic voice audio, blending photography with narrative storytelling.
(References available on original and on request)
Ginger Liu is the founder of Ginger Media & Entertainment, a Writer/Researcher in artificial intelligence and visual arts media — specifically Hollywood, death tech, digital afterlife, AI death and grief practices, AI photography, entertainment, security, and policy, and an author, writer, artist photographer, and filmmaker. Listen to the Podcast — The Digital Afterlife of Grief.
Ginger Liu is a writer who covers the latest developments in artificial intelligence, entertainment, and art.
