to explain how AI-mediated posthumous interaction reshapes bereavement, relational privacy, and family boundaries. This study theorizes AI grief-tech as a socio-technical mechanism through which the dead are reinserted into family life as communicatively accessible presences. Through systematic coding, five convergent dimensions are identified-Affective Continuity, Proxy Governance, Relational Exposure, Ritual Commercialization, and Kinship Reordering-which jointly produce a new regime of digitally mediated mourning. In this regime, remembrance becomes interactive, privacy becomes relationally negotiated, and kinship is reorganized through proxy authority, emotional governance, and platformized memorial practices. The study offers a mechanism-centered framework linking digital afterlife technologies, relational privacy, and Chinese kinship, demonstrating how AI grief-tech simultaneously extends attachment and reconfigures family order.
Jinling Zhang (Tue,) studied this question.