The awkward problem with living forever online is that the company keeping you alive might die first.
There is now a small but growing collection of companies offering to preserve us after death and not in the embalming or cryogenic way!
Not just photographs, old videos and unfortunate Christmas footage. I mean us.
Our voices. Our stories. Our opinions. In some cases, an AI version of us that our family can actually talk to after we’ve gone. All taken from texts, posts, emails wherever you happen to have left bits of “you” lying around in the clouds.
Scary when you’ve posted after several cocktails.
I can’t decide whether it’s extraordinary, slightly creepy or both. Probably both. But there is a practical problem these companies aren’t at all keen to mention. What happens if the company promising to keep you digitally alive forever goes bankrupt next Thursday? The answer is: it depends and it has already started happening.
Can AI really preserve someone after they die?
Yes. To varying degrees, it already can.
Some services record you while you’re alive, collecting your stories, memories and voice so your family can ask questions later. Others go further, using AI to create something resembling a continuing version of you and some companies are now offering to recreate people who have already died, using photographs, recordings and other material left behind. So we’ve moved quite a long way beyond those old family photo albums. Now it seems Great Grandma may shortly be available for a chat. Whether she would have approved is another matter entirely.
What happens when the company disappears?
In 2026, a company called HereAfter shut down. Customers were told to retrieve their material. Which rather exposes the central difficulty with selling immortality for a monthly subscription. The memories may be priceless. The company holding them is still a startup.
Other companies haven’t disappeared but they have changed
StoryFile, another well-known company in this area, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the US in 2024. It was later acquired and survived. So bankruptcy doesn’t necessarily mean your digital Great Grandma immediately meets oblivion but it does raise an interesting question.
If a company holds something as personal as your voice, stories and digital likeness, what happens when that company is sold? Who has bought Great Grandma? And was she included in the assets?
Then there is Eternos. Eternos attracted attention by helping people create detailed AI versions of themselves while alive so something of them could remain for their families after death. Then it became Uare.ai and shifted towards personal AI for the living. Which may make perfect commercial sense. Living customers are notoriously better at renewing subscriptions. But it also demonstrates another problem. Your digital-afterlife company doesn’t have to fail. It might simply decide there is more money to be made elsewhere.
Why does any of this matter?
Because this isn’t the same as your favourite app disappearing. If a photo-editing app closes, you find another one. If the company holding the voice of your dead husband or the memories of your mother closes, you can’t simply start again with somebody else. The original person isn’t available for another recording session. That makes this kind of technology very different from ordinary subscription software.
Should your digital self be downloadable?
The answer must be yes. If a company genuinely intends to preserve somebody for decades, families should be asking:
- Can I download the recordings?
- Can I export the transcripts and memories?
- Can the digital version be moved elsewhere?
- What happens if the company is sold?
- Who actually owns the result?
And, perhaps most importantly: What happens if the servers are switched off?
“We’ll preserve you for future generations” sounds lovely.
“We’ve secured another funding round” and the warm, fuzzy feeling just went AWOL.
That’s where Ghost Grandad comes in
This is one of the ideas sitting underneath the book Ghost Grandad. Marcus Whitfield knows he’s dying. Instead of leaving his family to reconstruct him afterwards from photographs, social media and whatever unfortunate videos he has left lying around, he builds the technology himself. Deliberately. While he’s alive. He decides what goes into it, what it knows and why it exists. Marcus isn’t really trying to become immortal. He’s trying to stay around long enough to educate and help his five-year-old granddaughter.
Whether that’s touching, interfering or an absolutely terrible idea is another matter.
Being a scientist with his own private laboratory does at least give Marcus an advantage over the rest of us. He has thought about keeping his creation running. He isn’t relying entirely on somebody else’s cloud subscription and he has even found rather ingenious ways of keeping the power flowing — including renewable energy and his granddaughter’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of kinetic energy.
But there’s an interesting question the book doesn’t really answer. Where, exactly, does Ghost Grandad live? On Marcus’s own hardware? Distributed between different systems? Somewhere in the cloud with enough redundancy to survive practically anything?
I’d like to think Marcus had thought of that. Knowing Marcus, there’s probably a server humming away somewhere nobody has found yet. Because however clever the technology becomes, the question remains exactly the same:
Who’s hosting the thing — and will it last?
Would you want to talk to an AI version of someone you’d lost?
Or would the whole idea make you want to unplug the router and hide it in the garage?
I’d love to know 😊