Meta was lately granted a patent in Dec, 2025 that might primarily enable the social media platform to publish on a dormant person’s behalf—whether or not they took a break from social media or lengthy after they’ve handed away. The patent, first filed in 2023, describes a big language mannequin that “simulates” a person’s social media exercise, utilizing a person’s feedback, likes, or content material to reply to different customers and in addition references expertise that might simulate video or audio calls with customers.
Utilizing AI to revive the lifeless, via textual content, speech, or video is nothing new, however the expertise described within the patent has the added dynamic of utilizing a deceased person’s present account chock filled with posts and pictures amongst different content material to proceed to work together with different customers, in the end driving engagement on Meta’s platforms. Meta’s Chief Expertise Officer Andrew Bosworth famous within the patent that account inactivity (say that of a deceased particular person’s) can have an effect on different customers’ experiences, and the impression of inactivity is “much more severe and permanent” when a person is deceased, he wrote. Specialists say this rationale is a brand new manner of justifying bringing customers’ content material again to life.
“That’s a really interesting shift because that suggests that user death is like an engagement problem.” Elaine Kasket, a cyberpsychologist, advised Fortune, describing how she interpreted the patent. She has studied digital afterlives for 21 years—lengthy earlier than social media or AI grew to become part of on a regular basis life—and what occurs to our knowledge after we’re gone.
“We have no plans to move forward with this example,” a Meta spokesperson advised Fortune in a press release. Whereas a patent doesn’t imply the corporate is actively pursuing the expertise, Meta and the patent’s main writer, Bosworth, will proceed to discover functions for giant language fashions, the spokesperson wrote.
Presently, Fb and Instagram enable customers to take away or “memorialize” their family members’ accounts, which designates the profile of a deceased person with the “Remembering” label and blocks anybody from logging in.
Interrupting grief
Meta isn’t the primary Huge Tech firm to patent a mannequin to maintain the previously alive nonetheless kicking on-line. Properly earlier than the AI period started, Microsoft filed a patent in 2017 for a way to create a chatbot primarily based on an individual’s “social data,” together with pictures, social media posts, messages, voice knowledge and written letters.
Microsoft’s Tim O’Brien, who beforehand managed the corporate’s AI applications, known as the expertise “disturbing” after the corporate introduced that they had no plans to develop the expertise.
Within the years since Microsoft was granted the patent, merchandise providing to recreate the likeness of the lifeless have shifted from a novelty to providers folks use day by day.
“It’s a very uncomfortable and not very psychologically-helpful turn towards [a] technologically solving for all sorts of difficult human emotions,” Kasket stated. “You’ll hear some founders saying, ‘Oh, we’d like to solve for grief in 10 years,’ which I think is a really ridiculous notion.”
Grief is “extremely idiosyncratic,” she defined, including completely different grievers may have very completely different reactions to the identical profile developed from digital stays.
Kasket stated applied sciences just like the one described in a patent undermine closure. Sherry Turkle, a sociologist, psychologist, and founding director of the MIT Initiative on Expertise, agrees, including that whereas this may seem to be a small-scale proposal, large-scale efforts are on the horizon.
“Now, in Meta’s plan, we deny death to participate in a perpetual fantasy life. The seance never has to end,” she wrote.
