Ever since people buried their dead, they’ve dreamed of keeping them with them. The old Fayum portraits – these breathtakingly lifelike images wrapped in Egyptian mummies – captured faces designed to stay present even after life has left the body.
Images in all cultures served the identical purpose: to make the absent present, to maintain the dead with them in some form.
However, these attempts had a fundamental limitation. They were animated but unable to reply. The dead stayed dead.
Over time, one other idea emerged: the lively dead. Ghosts that slipped back into the world to handle unfinished business, like ghosts tied to old houses. However, every time they spoke, they needed a human medium – a living body to offer them voice and presence.
The media has evolved to bolster this ancient eager for the evocation of the absent. Photography, film, sound recordings, holograms. Each technique added latest levels of detail and latest ways of evoking the past into the current.
Now, generative AI guarantees something unprecedented: interactive resurrection.
It provides a unity that communicates, responds and adapts. A dead celebrity who was digitally forced into it perform Songs that were never theirs. A lady murdered in a domestic violence case was revived to “speak“about their very own deaths. Online profiles that bring victims of tragedy back to life,”relive” their trauma through a narrative framed as a warning or education.
We Are Researcher who’ve spent a few years studying the intersection of memory, nostalgia and technology. We focus particularly on how people create and remember meaning and the way accessible technologies influence these processes.
In one Current paperwe examined how generative AI is used to resurrect the dead in on a regular basis contexts. The easy proliferation of those digital ghosts raises pressing questions: who authorizes these afterlives, who speaks through them, and who decides how the dead are used?
What gives these audiovisual ghosts their power will not be just the technical spectacle but in addition the sadness they reveal. The dead are made into performers for purposes they never consented to, be it entertainment, comfort, or political messages.
This demonstration of the facility of AI also shows how easily loss, memory and absence will be adjusted to realize different goals.
And that is where a calmer feeling comes into play: melancholy. By this we mean the discomfort that arises when something appears alive and responsive, but lacks the flexibility to act by itself.
These AI characters move and speak, but they continue to be puppets animated by another person's will. They remind us that what looks like presence is ultimately a fastidiously orchestrated performance.
They are brought back to life to serve, to not live. These resurrected figures don’t comfort. They make us aware and invite a deeper reflection on what it means to live within the shadow of mortality.
What “resurrection” looks like
In our studyWe have collected greater than 70 cases of AI-assisted resurrections. They are particularly common on video-heavy platforms corresponding to TikTok, YouTube and Instagram.
Given their current prevalence, we first compared all cases and searched for similarities of their purposes and application. We also noted the information and AI tools used and the people or institutions using them.
A outstanding use of generative AI is the digital resurrection of iconic figures, whose industrial, cultural and symbolic value often increases after death. This includes:
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Whitney Houston – risen performing each their very own songs and people of others that flow into online as a malleable relic of the past.
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Queen Elizabeth II – brought back as a neighborhood rap sister to perform with a swagger from black urban culture. This transformation illustrates how nationally vital figures, once kept at a distance from the ivory tower, develop into a type of public property after their death.
These algorithmic afterlives reduce the dead to entertainment objects, summoned on command, taken out of context, and recreated based on contemporary whims. But the AI resurrection can be moving in a darker direction.
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A lady who was raped and murdered in Tanzania did this reappeared in AI-generated videos warning others to not travel alone, turning her death right into a cautionary message.
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A lady is known as to achieve this by AI experience again The most tragic day of her life, digitally revived to inform the story of how her husband killed her, with a warning about domestic violence.
Here, AI ghosts act as reminders – reminders of injustice, war and unresolved collective wounds. In this process, grief becomes the content and trauma becomes the teaching tool. AI doesn't just revive the dead. It rewrites them and distributes them based on the needs of the living.
While such interventions may at first seem surprising, their ethical weight lies within the asymmetry they expose – where those unable to refuse are asked to meet ends to which they never consented. And it’s at all times marked by a triangle of sadness: the tragedy itself, its resurrection and the haunting reliving of the tragedy.
The melancholy
We propose considering in two different registers of melancholy to find where our discomfort lies and to point out how easily this sense can disarm us.
The first register concerns the melancholy that adheres to the dead. In this mode, resurrected celebrities or victims are recalled to entertain, instruct, or re-enact the traumas that marked their deaths. The fascination of watching them perform on demand weakens our ability to perceive the exploitation involved and the discomfort, chills and sadness inherent in these performances.
The second register is the melancholy that resides in us, the living revivalists. Here the discomfort arises not from exploitation, but from confrontation. When we take a look at these digital ghosts, we’re reminded of the inevitability of death, at the same time as life appears prolonged on our screens. No matter how sophisticated these systems could also be, they can’t reflect the fullness of an individual. Instead, they quietly rewrite the divide between the living and the dead.
Death is inevitable. AI resurrections won't save us from grief; Instead, they deepen our encounter with the inescapable reality of a world shaped by those that are not any longer here.
Even more troubling is the spectacular power of the technology itself. As with any latest medium, the magic of technological “performance” fascinates us and distracts attention from tougher structural questions on data, labor, property and profit, and who gets returned, how and for whose profit.
Discomfort, no compassion
The closer a resurrection involves looking and sounding human, the more we notice what’s missing. This effect is captured by the concept first introduced by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970. It describes how almost-but-not-quite human figures evoke discomfort relatively than sympathy within the viewer.
This will not be only a matter of technical flaws in resurrections, imperfections will be reduced with higher models and better resolution data. What stays is a deeper threshold, an anthropological constant that separates the living from the dead. It is similar boundary that cultures and spiritual traditions have grappled with for millennia. The technology, in its boldness, is trying again. And like its predecessors, it fails.
The melancholy of AI lies precisely here: in its desire to scale back the space between presence and absence, and in its inability to achieve this.
The dead don't return. They only shimmer through our machines, appearing briefly as flickers that register our longing and just as clearly the bounds of what technology cannot repair.
