The Ship of Theseus is a philosophical thought experiment in which one has to consider whether or not a ship, with every single plank replaced over time, is the same ship or not. It's a way of discussing identity over time. Are we the same person because, like the Ship of Theseus, our cells end up being completely replaced? Or does identity go deeper than our physical form?
I was thinking about the Ship of Theseus, among other things, when I saw this ad for an AI app created by 2wai. The ad is only about 90 seconds long, but it's a horrifying glimpse into AI.
This AI app, created by 2wai, allows you to speak to your deceased loved ones for as long as you want. You simply upload their information into an AI avatar so it can pick up their personality traits and stay as realistic as possible. Good product or not?
— The AI Colony R&D (@TheAIColonyRD) Nov 17, 2025
The short answer to the question posed above is: no.
This is not a good product. In fact, this is the exact opposite of a good product. Why? Because it attempts to do away with death which, unfortunately, is a part of life.
A week ago, my family gathered to bury my aunt. She died at 93, a little over nine years after my uncle and her husband of 60-plus years passed away. While we celebrated a long life well lived, there was still grief. Her daughters (my cousins), grandchildren, and great-grandchildren will now face a world without her, including the upcoming holidays she loved to host at her house.
She's not the first loved one I've lost, and she won't be the last. In January of last year, my ex-husband and the father of my three boys died after a sudden, brief illness. My dad died in 2020, preceded in death by his twin brother and the uncle I mentioned earlier. In 2023, his last surviving brother died. That generation of my family is now gone. My maternal grandmother died in 2012 when I was pregnant with my youngest. My maternal grandfather, whom I was extremely close to, died in 1993. I never knew my maternal grandparents; grandpa died in 1967, and grandma followed him in 1978.
I mourned them all and, to various degrees, that grief pops up now and again. Especially my dad, whom I take after, and my ex-husband, as our boys grow up. Would I love to speak to them or my grandfather again? Yes. But I can't, because they're dead.
And that's okay.
After all, grief is just love persevering.
It's okay to grieve and to mourn. In fact, it's healthy and normal to do so, and we all do it in our own ways. Thanks to COVID, we couldn't have a funeral for my dad, so I grieved by getting a massive full-color tattoo on my left arm, because my governor considered tattoo parlors essential but not a funeral for a Vietnam-era veteran, I guess. I've also had some of the hardest laughs of my life after someone died or at the funeral of a loved one. When we finally had a memorial service for my dad two years after his passing, my mom had her sweater on backwards. When I pointed this out, we laughed until we were wheezing.
These AI-recreations of deceased loved ones seek to whitewash death and its permanence. It's almost indescribably dangerous and dystopian. Much in the same way the trans movement seeks to deny the biological reality of gender (thus inflicting psychological damage on "trans" people), these AI apps seek to deny the biological reality of death. It follows, therefore, that it would also inflict psychological damage on the surviving loved ones who talk to a digital recreation of Nana on their iPhone. If we want to get theological, it's also a byproduct of a culture that doesn't believe in an afterlife. Whether you call it Heaven or something else, the thought that human beings continue to exist in a plane beyond this world brings tremendous comfort to many. This app tells people there is no life beyond this one, unless you preserve yourself in digital form. It never gives people an opportunity to grieve and process death. Instead, it delays and suppresses that process. Such a thing can only have catastrophic results.
Paradoxically, it also tells people they don't have to spend the precious, fleeting time we do have on this Earth with the people they love the most. That time is finite; some of us get 80 years. Others, like my ex-husband, only had 54. Some don't even get that lucky. For years, I worked in hospice, and I can tell you that the one thing families wished they had was more time together. An AI version of your loved one sends a message, even subliminally, that time is not precious because Nana is always in your pocket.
This is where we come back to the Ship of Theseus. Even if we use technology to record our loved one in life — their mannerisms, speech patterns, voice, physical appearance — what we end up with when we feed that data into an AI app is a humanoid version of the Ship of Theseus. Nana looks and sounds the same, but her body and her soul have been replaced by lines of binary code. It's not Nana, just as I'd argue the Ship of Theseus isn't the original ship. On top of that, the spirit and soul of the person, those things that make us uniquely us, aren't there because AI can't capture them. AI could never, for example, recreate the twinkle in my grandfather's eye when he called me his sweetheart. Not in a million years. That twinkle was born of an irreplaceable love and affection.
And technology can never recreate that.