‘I created my mom and talk to her’: AI ghosts and deathslop are changing the way we mourn
‘Is AI keeping us from getting the social support that we need?’ asks Dr Dan Wolfson. Kesha sang Old Flames (Can’t Hold a Candle to You), a single her mother wrote for the country music titan. Even Pitbull stopped his Madison Square Garden show to memorialize Parton and all the other “powerful women” in the crowd.
- ▪‘Is AI keeping us from getting the social support that we need?’ asks Dr Dan Wolfson.
- ▪Kesha sang Old Flames (Can’t Hold a Candle to You), a single her mother wrote for the country music titan.
- ▪Even Pitbull stopped his Madison Square Garden show to memorialize Parton and all the other “powerful women” in the crowd.
The Guardian — Tech publishes from United Kingdom and files mainly under tech. We currently carry 111 of its stories.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | The Guardian — Tech |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/15/ai-grief-bot-death-isolation |
| Publication time | Tue, 15 Sep 2026 12:30:43 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-15T12:51:53.622Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-15T12:51:53.622Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | SVAvHCFhYG1J · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
‘Is AI keeping us from getting the social support that we need?’ asks Dr Dan Wolfson. Illustration: Guardian DesignThe rise of AI-generated tributes and bots for ‘talking’ to the dead has experts concerned more people will grieve in isolationBy Alaina DemopoulosTue 15 Sep 2026 08.30 EDTLast modified on Tue 15 Sep 2026 08.31 EDTSharePrefer the Guardian on GoogleTributes rolled in after the death of Dolly Parton last month. Jack White performed Jolene at a London gig. Kesha sang Old Flames (Can’t Hold a Candle to You), a single her mother wrote for the country music titan. Even Pitbull stopped his Madison Square Garden show to memorialize Parton and all the other “powerful women” in the crowd. But one of the strangest – and most viral – eulogies did not come from a celebrity.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Guardian — Tech.
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