Artificial Resurrection book cover
Nonfiction / Technology & Society

Artificial Resurrection

By Alan H. Bedford

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Content note: This book discusses death, grief, and real court cases involving violent crime, including details drawn from public trial records.

In an Arizona courtroom in 2025, a dead man forgave his killer. The video was AI, built by his sister from a single photo. The judge thanked the software and handed down the maximum sentence. No law said he couldn't.

Griefbots — AI chatbots trained on a dead person's texts, voice, and photos — now let anyone keep talking to someone they've lost, for a subscription fee. Some of it is genuine comfort, documented by grieving families and researchers alike. Some of it is a company that can raise the price, change the model, or vanish overnight, taking a loved one's voice down with it. Almost nothing in the law has caught up.

Artificial Resurrection follows the engineers, mourners, and entrepreneurs who built this industry, and traces what happens once comfort becomes a product line.

You'll get:

  • The real, named history behind Replika, HereAfter AI, and China's booming deadbot market
  • What happens to a griefbot when its company goes bankrupt, gets acquired, or quietly updates its model
  • What courts, state legislatures, and the FTC do — and don't — regulate about AI recreations of the dead
  • What grief researchers and practicing therapists actually find, separated from marketing copy
  • Why the funeral industry's century-old sales tactics are the clearest guide to what's happening now

Alan H. Bedford built this account from court records, public reporting, and published research, checked against the industry's own claims at every turn. By the end, you'll have the questions to ask before anyone sells you a version of someone you love. The book doesn't land on a tidy answer. Neither, yet, does the law.

Read an Excerpt

From the Introduction

Introduction

I found this story on YouTube, at eleven at night, half-watching a mortician talk about a murder trial. The channel belongs to Caitlin Doughty, a licensed funeral director who has spent over a decade making death ordinary again for an audience that would rather not think about it. This one was different. It was called "Watching AI Testimony at a Real Murder Trial," and it was about a courtroom in Arizona, a dead man, and a video.

The dead man was Christopher Pelkey. In November 2021, he got out of his truck at a red light in Chandler, Arizona, and walked toward another driver's car. That driver shot him. Pelkey died at a hospital a short time later. He was thirty-seven, an Army veteran, and by every account his family gave, the kind of person who forgave easily and often.

A road-rage shooting is, unfortunately, an ordinary American tragedy. The unusual part came four years later, at the sentencing, when Pelkey's sister played a video for the court. In it, a digital version of her brother, built from a single photo and some old footage, looked at the man who killed him and said he believed in forgiveness. Then he stopped speaking, because there was nothing left to generate. The judge, who had just watched a corpse address its own killer, said on the record: "I love that AI. Thank you for that." He gave the shooter the maximum sentence.

Continues in Chapter 1: The Man Who Built His Dead Friend →

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