Co-Founder and Death Doula Victoria Holmes urges families to treat AI replicas of the dead as companions to mourning, never as substitutes for it.
LOS ANGELES, CA, UNITED STATES, June 16, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Otherside Life, an end-of-life coordination platform and grief-care movement, today released expert guidance on the rising use of artificial intelligence to simulate deceased loved ones. The guidance arrives as “griefbots” and “deathbots,” AI voice and chat replicas trained on a dead person’s data, move from novelty toward the mainstream.
More than half a dozen platforms now offer the technology directly to consumers, and developers report millions of users. Recent academic research has raised concerns that the tools can distort a person’s memory and foster emotional dependence, with some bereavement professionals describing cases of prolonged attachment that delay healthy mourning. A 2026 consumer survey found that the share of Americans who want a digital memorial rose from 39 percent to 58 percent in a single year, a signal of how quickly grief technology is gaining acceptance.
Otherside Life’s position is that the technology is neither savior nor villain, and that its value depends entirely on whether it supports the work of grief or stands in for it.
“Grief is not a problem to be solved. It is a process to be felt,” said Victoria Holmes, Chief Resonance Officer and death doula at Otherside Life. “A voice clone can say goodnight. It cannot sit with you in the dark. It can repeat the words someone used, but it cannot hold your hand while your body learns to live without them. That holding is the work, and no algorithm can do it for you.”
Holmes, who created Otherside’s FeltSpace somatic method and has spent fifteen years working in mental health, said the risk is not the technology itself but the temptation to use it as an exit from pain.
“Grief lives in the body long before it reaches the mind. It moves like the ocean, in waves you cannot schedule and cannot outrun,” Holmes said. “When we reach for a digital version of someone to avoid that swell, we are not staying close to them. We are hiding from the one thing that actually carries us through loss, which is feeling it all the way through. Technology can be a keepsake. It should never replace being held by the people who are still here.”
Otherside Life advises families weighing grief technology to set clear limits, to keep human support at the center of mourning, and to treat AI replicas the way they might treat a photograph or a saved voicemail, as a memory to revisit rather than a relationship to sustain. The company provides death doula support and grief care through its Heal with Death service, pairing families with trained practitioners who offer presence, ritual, and guidance from a terminal diagnosis through bereavement.
Nathan Mallo
Otherside Life
+1 833-716-5433
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