Fabrizio Degni, AI Ethics and Governance Researcher, Italy

The trend and convergence of Artificial Intelligence technologies with the human conceptions of death and afterlife presents unspotted and underrated challenges and but also opportunities for understanding consciousness, identity, and grief. This research provides a comprehensive interdisciplinary analysis of how AI is reshaping our relationship with mortality, under different domains such as the psychological impacts, technological capabilities, ethical considerations, and cultural perspectives. Through analysis of current digital memorial technologies, psychological frameworks of attachment and grief, and philosophical questions of identity, we establish that AI-enabled afterlife simulations introduce complex dynamics that both extend and disrupt traditional mourning processes: we propose a regulatory framework grounded in principles of informed consent, psychological safeguarding, and cultural sensitivity. It is a first seminal analysis and contribute to the emerging discourse on post-mortem digital identity looking forward to establishing parameters for ethically sound development of afterlife technologies.

Artificial intelligence, afterlife beliefs, digital immortality, grief processing, consciousness simulation