Be Right Back—The Promise and Perils of AI Resurrection: Ghosts, Hauntings, and Digital Necromancy as Speculative Automedia

This article develops the concept of digital necromancy to describe the use of artificial intelligence to animate the dead and extend the scope of life narrative. It also introduces the term speculative automediality to name the projection of autobiographical identity into possible futures through generative systems. Speculative automediality moves beyond preservation: posthumous entities do not simply store a life, they co-author it, adapting voice, memory, and presence in relation to the living. Through case studies of historical reenactment, interactive virtual assistants, cultural preservation projects, and AI-generated clones, we trace how these practices reconfigure authorship, agency, and memory, producing a paradox of presence without fidelity. In some contexts, they safeguard cultural memory and sustain access to voices that might otherwise be lost, while in others they raise questions of consent, posthumous privacy, dignity, commodification, provenance, and governance. By distinguishing between death tech concerned with legacy and cultural uses, and grief tech oriented to mourning and continuing bonds, we show how digital necromancy unsettles the boundaries of life writing, carrying both radical possibilities and significant risks.