A personal reflection that links the Ship of Theseus thought experiment to AI attempts to recreate the dead, family losses over decades, and why grieving matters.
The Ship of Theseus asks whether something remains the same after every part has been replaced, and it is a tidy way to talk about identity over time. When our cells turn over, are we still the same person, or does identity reach beyond the physical? That question keeps coming back to me when I think about how technology tries to preserve what cannot be preserved.
I saw a short ad for an AI app made by 2wai that pressed that question into an unsettling direction. The ad runs about 90 seconds and feels like a quick glimpse of how the technology could be used to deny death.
The short answer to the question posed above is: no. This product feels like an attempt to erase an essential part of life, and that attempt is what makes it troubling. Death is part of living, and pretending otherwise rewires how people process loss.
My family recently gathered to bury my aunt, who died at 93, a little over nine years after my uncle, her husband of more than 60 years, passed away. We celebrated a long life that included hosting holidays, recipes, and routines that anchored the family, and still there was grief. Her passing changes how the holidays look and who will carry on the traditions she loved.
She is not the only one I have lost. In January of last year my ex-husband and the father of my three boys died after a sudden, brief illness. My dad died in 2020, and before that his twin brother and another uncle passed away. That generation of my family has largely moved on, and each absence arrives with its own set of small, stubborn pangs.
My maternal grandmother died in 2012 when I was pregnant with my youngest, and my maternal grandfather, who I was very close to, died in 1993. My other grandparents died in 1967 and 1978, years before I was born. All of those losses add up into a pattern of grief that resurfaces in moments, sometimes unexpectedly as the boys grow and I remember the people who shaped us.
I grieve them all, and that grief shows up now and again in ways that are both heavy and oddly funny. When COVID kept us from having a proper funeral for my dad, I coped by getting a large color tattoo on my arm instead of attending a service as I would have wanted. At the memorial we finally held two years later, my mother put her sweater on backwards and we laughed so hard we could barely breathe.
After all, grief is just love persevering. It is okay to mourn, to remember the absurd and tender moments, and to carry the ache forward. That slow, imperfect work of grieving is where we keep the living edges of our relationships intact.
AI recreations of dead loved ones aim to smooth out those edges into something flat and always accessible, and that flattening has costs. When a phone offers a speaking, smiling simulation of someone who lived and loved you, it can short-circuit the real work of processing absence and moving through sorrow. The comfort it promises can be a trap that delays honest grief.
There is also a cultural layer to this technology; it can encourage a view that everything worth preserving must be kept in digital form. For many people, the belief in an afterlife or a continued existence beyond this world brings genuine solace. A product that implicitly says the only way to continue is as a preserved digital echo steers people toward replacing spiritual or communal frameworks with a gadget.
In hospice work I heard the same wish over and over: more time together. Families do not want a recording; they want a few more afternoons, a single missed call returned, an argument resolved. An app that promises a pocket-sized recreation can, even if unintentionally, suggest that those finite hours are less urgent because a substitute can stand in later.
That brings us back to the Ship of Theseus. You can capture a voice, a cadence, the way someone laughed at a certain joke, and stitch it all into a convincing simulation. But when those pieces get replaced by lines of code, what remains is a copy, not the person who lived, loved, and held specific, unrepeatable moments with you. A twinkle in an eye, the sudden fondness in a voice when you said something small, those are not data points to be perfectly cloned.
Technology can mimic surface details, but it cannot reach into the lived history and the inner life that made a person who they were. The result may be eerie and comforting in the moment, but it is not the relationship, and it cannot replace the strange, necessary labor of grieving. And technology can never recreate that.
