Seeking the Witch of Endor: Ghostbots and the Presence of Absence in Jewish Thought

ABSTRACT: The longing to speak to the beloved beyond death is humanity’s oldest yearning. I describe a modern phenomenon, the ghostbot, an artificial intelligence reconstruction of a human person, “created” by using text and images left behind after a person has died. Often this data is generated by a willing participant, who, knowing they are dying, wishes to memorialize themself. Most common, however, are postmortem ghostbots, also called “grief-bots,” which are sold as commodities to mourners by companies that then cobble together a semblance of an existent being from left-behind texts, social media posts, and images, and which are capable of interactive “speech” with the living. This article turns to the rabbinic medieval and modern philosophic texts to consider a normative response to the phenomenon.