The emerging possibility of AI-preserved personalities — chatbots trained on a person's writing and speech to simulate their continued presence after death — raises questions that outrun our ethical frameworks. Is a simulation of the beloved a comfort or a distortion? Does it serve the grieving or does it postpone what grief is for? And what does the dead person owe the living — and what do the living owe the dead — in how they are represented when they can no longer speak for themselves?
Each step builds on the last.