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AI Is No Way to Revive the Dead
A controversial new company promises to let us speak to dead loved ones. It cheapens our relationships with the living.
By Peter Savodnik
11.20.25 — Culture and Ideas
“We need loss and will regret losing it.” (George Karger via Getty Images)
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A week after we buried my grandmother, I had a dream that she and I had dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Midtown Manhattan and she gave me advice about my love life, which was odd, because she had never done that before.

I have been thinking about this dream ever since I learned of this new app called 2wai, which is apparently pronounced 2-way and enables “real-time, two-way conversations” with so-called HoloAvatars—including dead people. (Its website is a little coy about this, but a recent 2wai ad, which features a little boy named Charlie who grows up speaking with a grandmother he’s never met, is not.) “Human connection, reimagined in the age of AI,” the website promises.

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Peter Savodnik
Peter Savodnik is senior editor at The Free Press. Previously, he wrote for Vanity Fair as well as GQ, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Wired, and other publications, reporting from the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, South Asia, and across the United States. His book, The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union, was published in 2013.
Tags:
Ideas
Grief
Family
Artificial Intelligence
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