Postmortem avatars in grief therapy: Prospects, ethics, and governance

Postmortem avatars (PMAs) -- AI systems that simulate a deceased person by being fine-tuned on data they generated or that was generated about them -- have attracted growing scholarly attention, yet their potential role in clinical settings remains largely unexplored. This paper examines the ethics of deploying PMAs as therapeutic tools in grief therapy. Drawing on the dual-process model of grief, the theory of continuing bonds, and the philosophical framework of fictionalism, we propose two pot

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ethics.ai (13 April 2026), “Postmortem avatars in grief therapy: Prospects, ethics, and governance,” evidence record 5937, https://ethics.ai/record/5937 (originally published by arXiv).

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