AI 'resurrects' the dead: grief becomes a subscription

According to Le Figaro, which publishes an investigation on the subject, new artificial intelligence tools, now available to the general public, make it possible to create a virtual double of a deceased loved one or to animate photos of the departed. The paper cites the testimony of a person who says they have "a version of [their] late father" on their phone, and speaks of a border blurred between the living and the dead. The full text is not accessible to us: we therefore do not know which companies are involved, at what prices, or with what guarantees over the data of the deceased. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

Let us begin with the framing, which is already a small victory. "Resurrect": the verb comes from theology, and marketing has bought it up. When a product appropriates the vocabulary of miracle, one may suspect that the question "should we?" has already been settled behind closed doors, in favour of "how do we use it?" This is how what Gramsci called hegemony works: there is no need to impose anything; it is enough for the innovation to seem self-evident, and for anyone who questions it to pass for a grumbler. Mourning, an old affair of rites, silence and long time, is recast as a technical problem to be solved with an app.

The role of "common sense" is precious here. To say that these tools "help you grieve" sounds like a benevolent truism. Perhaps this is true for some, and we do not scorn anyone who seeks consolation: pain is no laughing matter. But one may ask whom the truism serves. A memory that lives on a platform no longer quite belongs to the family: it depends on a server, a licence, a business model. The dominant ideas, Marx reminded us, are those of whoever controls the means of production, mental ones included. Here, the means of production are the means of manufacturing presence.

There is also a question of labour, which people happily forget. To imitate a dead person, one needs voices, messages, images, that is to say the traces of an entire life, turned into raw material. The dead, for their part, do not negotiate their terms. And the living who supply this data do so in grief, the moment when consent is at its most fragile. We call this a user experience; one could just as well call it extraction.

The press, finally, has its share of responsibility. The genre of the AI "investigation" readily oscillates between fascination and moral unease, two stances that leave the question of ownership untouched. We debate the strangeness of speaking to a digital father, and rarely the reason why this market may, tomorrow, decide what a "healthy" grief is. The sensible grown-up of these stories is almost always the clear-sighted user, rarely the regulator or the collective.

What we would like to know: who holds these doubles, what becomes of them if the company closes, and who decides on their deletion. Until those answers are forthcoming, the miracle is mostly a contract.