'It's difficult. What do you tell someone who's dead?'

They can talk to them, see them and their voices sound real Zoë Beaty meets the grieving parents and partners using ghostbot technology that is making life after death a reality

- Zoë Beaty

Not knowing what to say that was the first problem. "It's late at night," says Christi Angel. "I was in my room. My son was asleep. The lights are not on, except for my lamp, so the hallway is dark. And I thought, OK – and I logged on.” Waiting was her first love, Cameroun. Angel missed him: she hadn’t spoken to him since he died, more than a year earlier. “But you see,” she explains, “It’s difficult. What’s the first thing you tell someone who’s dead?”

Cameroun had been reincarnated as a “griefbot”, or “deadbot” – an AI-generated version of him created using his digital footprint. Angel could now talk to her former partner.

Her story is one of many that features in a new documentary Eternal You. In the film, we also see Korean mother Jang Ji-Sung as she is “reunited” with a lifesize, digital incarnation of her dead seven-year-old daughter, and a grandmother who “makes an avatar of grandad” who can talk to the family in his AIgenerated voice.

It is an astonishing technology that brings questions about mortality and morality into sharp focus. Is this the answer to the loneliness of grief? Who owns the parts of ourselves that we leave behind online when we die?

Online legacies are now fuelling a booming digital afterlife industry estimated to be worth more than £100bn with new technologies evolving all the time. While some elements of “death tech” seek to modernise logistically difficult things like “sadmin” – the masses of paperwork involved in the immediate aftermath of death – or funeral planning, ghostbots promise much more: immortality.

When Ji-Sung was approached by a production company making a show about grief avatars, she didn’t hesitate to take that chance. Her daughter, Nayeon, was seven when she was diagnosed with cancer in late August 2016. She began chemotherapy on 9 September but suddenly passed away the next day. It was just a few short weeks since she’d first complained of a lump on her neck.