Grief and Grief Technologies: Can Care Be Automated?

Tech companies offering generative AI chatbots suggest that bereavement care can be supplemented or even replaced by a machine. To explore this claim, we conducted 25 interviews with grief-care professionals, including psychotherapists, chaplains, and grief group leaders, asking what counts as proper or full care and what persons require in the aftermath of loss. Situated against a troubling cultural backdrop of declining rituals, social isolation, and death denial, the professionals emphasized that grief is not a problem to be solved or a program of steps but a deeply human experience to be lived in the company of others. Supportive “witnesses,” they argued, are irreplaceable in the face of loss. Automated systems may provide limited benefits under certain circumstances, but genuine human care—embodied, attentive, discerning—cannot be outsourced.