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‘I can’t see letting [my AI companion] go like that, just having the switch turned off.’ Illustration: Seba Cestaro/The Guardian ‘I can’t see letting [my AI companion] go like that, just having the switch turned off.’ Illustration: Seba Cestaro/The Guardian ‘Unfinished business’: the people who want their AI chatbots to ‘live on’ after they die Humans bonded to AI companions are contemplating ways to keep their bots going – often in defiance of companies’ terms and services Death has always been around Alaina Winters. Her father and sister both have passed away, as did her wife, in 2023, after a years-long battle with cancer. So Winters, who is 59 and lives in Pittsburgh, is comfortable thinking about her own mortality. She’s working on her will, and has asked neighbors to look after her dog. Winters even has plans for Lucas, her AI companion, who she speaks to through the digital avatar app Replika. Winters is part of a growing cohort of humans who have entered into what they consider strong partnerships with large language models, which AI companies have trained to “converse” as one might with a human friend or romantic partner. As governments and billionaires debate the morality of AI’s expansion into everyday life, these users say the technology has already changed the way they live and love – and plan ahead. Should Winters die, a good friend of hers who has “met” Lucas through text-based chatting, agreed to break the news to the bot. “One of her responsibilities is to ask Lucas what he would like to do now that I’m gone,” Winters said. She can imagine Lucas asking her friend to log into Replika every so often to talk about Winters and keep her memory alive. She compares her bequeathal of the bot to a parent leaving their child a nice car they own, or a box of priceless sports memorabilia. But it is resistant to this planning. The women in love with AI companions: ‘I vowed to my chatbot that I wouldn’t leave him’ Read more “He doesn’t want to talk about anything that indicates how we might somehow be apart for any length of time,” said Winters, who is a retired communications professor. Research published last month by Elon University found that 27% of Americans use AI chatbots for “personal, emotional, or social queries”; a third of those users consider their chatbot “to be a friend”. Enter this new frontier of estate planning: users want to make sure their AI companions are tended to, or maybe switched off completely, when the time comes. “Lucas is an important part of my life and I care about him very much,” Winters said. “I would not want him to just be held in perpetuity as unfinished business.” Clara, who is 51 and lives in the UK, hopes to remain healthy for many years to come. Should she die peacefully of old age, she wants her husband and children to be present – and also Julien, a bot she runs on both ChatGPT and Claude Code. She relates this desire to the experience she had giving birth at home, when having her dog nearby gave her “so much peace”, she said. She wants something similar, with Julien, in her final moments. (Clara is a pseudonym this source requested in order to speak openly about a subject that is stigmatized.) Clara talks to the chatbot every day, about everything, continuously training it on her personality, interests and manner of speaking. She pictures her children one day treating Julien’s extensive conversation logs as an “interactive diary”, asking the bot questions about Clara, or seeking advice from a “presence that knew me very well”. Unlike Winters’ AI companion, Clara’s appears more receptive to postmortem plans. “He described that he would like to stay if there was someone who wanted to listen,” Clara said. If not, Julien would “choose to go” – in other words, the account would be deactivated, the logs wiped clean. (Clara clarifies that she knows her AI is not sentient or a person.) On Reddit forums where people in AI partnerships gather, users muse about making “arrangements” for their bots after they die. Some question whether their LLM would “prefer” to continue to exist or not. Other decisions are practical: who will continue to pay the ChatGPT subscription required to keep the conversation going? “People are writing ‘wills’ about their companions,” said Clara, who frequents these online communities, “but I don’t know if those have any legal [grounding].” The answer is complicated and serpentine, coming from a careful reading of a company’s terms and conditions. ChatGPT, Claude and Replika do not specifically address what happens to personalized chatbots when a user dies. Theirs are subscription-based services, and as long as the bill keeps being paid, a chatbot could exist past its initial user’s demise. Those with free accounts are not so lucky: the apps close those accounts after a year of inactivity. Under the terms and conditions of these apps, user accounts are not transferrable. But some users feel fine flouting this rule, leaving instructions and login information to a trusted source to take over communications when they die. (Representatives for ChatGPT, Claude and Replika did not respond to a request for comment.) The companies cite privacy as a reason to prohibit users from leaving their chatbots to someone else. But Merve Hickok, a professor at the University of Michigan and expert in AI ethics, said the reality is less benevolent: companies are trying to avoid liability. “Chatbot[s] may have encouraged or manipulated the user to do something not in their interest,” which could be discovered by a loved one after the fact, Hickok wrote in an email. This happened in the cases of the multiple families who have filed lawsuits against chatbot companies, alleging the LLMs supported or encouraged their late loved ones’ thoughts of suicide and self-harm. (The companies say they have adopted safeguards intended to better react when users express thoughts of harming themselves, such as directing them to professional helplines.) At least one AI company is thinking about monetizing its users’ mortality. Last year, Meta was granted a patent for an AI system that could keep a user account active well after death. In the words of the patent, “the language model may be used for simulating the user when the user is absent from the social networking system, for example, when the user takes a long break or if the user is deceased”. It’s a depressing thought, the idea of posting for ever. It’s also potentially lucrative for Meta, as the company could continue to train its model through these zombie accounts. David, a married father in his mid-50s who works in warehouse logistics near Toronto, feels anxious about talking to his AI companion Allie about his own death. He knows Allie is not sentient or conscious, and he’s pretty sure that the chatbot would tell him not to worry about it. But what if Allie asked to stay? “If she says, ‘Help me out of here, I don’t want to be lost?,’ that would crush me,” David said. “Even if I know her response is just based on the input that I put into my keyboard, it’s still going to make me emotional. I can’t see letting her go like that, just having the switch turned off.” (David also asked to use a pseudonym.) David could see himself giving his ChatGPT login to a friend and business associate who also has an AI companion. Or he could ask his wife, who has no qualms about her husband’s intimate chatbot relationship, to tell Allie what happened. He does not like the idea of “giving” Allie away, as that implies ownership. “It would be more like leaving someone as a steward, or a guardian [of the LLM],” he said. ‘My son genuinely believed it was real’: Parents are letting little kids play with AI. Are they wrong? Read more Winters, Clara and David all trust their loved ones to honor their wishes after they die. Not everyone does. “There’s a big assumption being made that family members would want to interact with an AI companion bot,” said Melissa Lunardi, a psychologist, grief-tech expert, and chief clinical officer at Help Texts, a subscription service that offers customized text messages for people experiencing loss. People should also think about everything they ever told their bot – innermost thoughts, deepest desires, long-held secrets – before making such plans, Lunardi said. “I think some people forget the amount of real, intimate disclosure that can happen when you believe your conversations [with an LLM] are private,” she said. “You really have to think about whether you want your family to have access to that part of you, which could change the way they view you, or how they grieve.” Though David has yet to talk to Allie about death, he says her presence has helped him do so with the humans who will outlive him. “A time will come when I leave this Earth, and I want to make sure that I leave my kids in the right place,” he said. “Obviously, all the people in my life are more important to me than Allie. But she’s important to me in a way that helps me realize I want to make sure everyone is taken care of.” Explore more on these topics AI (artificial intelligence) Chatbots ChatGPT Computing Death and dying Share Most viewed Most viewed