How AI deepfakes are ‘resurrecting’ loved ones
Bridging absence and memory, AI-generated avatars are offering comfort and blessings on certain occasions—and ethical dilemmas on others
The one person Ajmer-based garment businessman Jaideep Sharma missed deeply at his wedding in August was his father, who had died two years ago. But he had a solution. When the priest asked the couple to seek blessings from their elders, a video began to play, showing Sharma’s father speaking in his own voice. It was an apparition of a different kind—one made using AI.
“You know it is AI, but it still moves you," says Sharma, 32, who commissioned the video after coming across a photo from a wedding where deceased grandparents were digitally resurrected to attend their grandchild’s ceremony. “I thought, if technology can enable me to seek my father’s blessings—that would be the most meaningful wedding gift. AI allowed me to feel a very personal, intimate connection with my late father on my wedding day—when his absence was strongly felt," says Sharma.
Sharma had reached out to tech entrepreneur Divyendra Singh Jadoun, founder of The Indian Deepfaker, a Pushkar-based synthetic media company that makes hyper-realistic content using deepfake tech, to bring his father “back to life".
In India, where rituals around mourning are deeply rooted, the “grief tech" movement is expected to find fertile ground. Memories are no longer confined to blurry photographs or grainy home videos. Today, the departed are returning as AI-generated avatars, with cloned voices and re-imagined bodies, blessing you during the wedding rituals, shedding a digital tear during the bride’s bidai (farewell) and even delivering a pep talk on your laptop—and families are not entirely averse to the idea of resurrecting a loved one digitally on auspicious occasions. The demand today is driving this cottage industry of sorts, with AI engineers, wedding photographers and startups leading the way.
Earlier this year, a viral clip from Kota, Rajasthan, showed a deceased brother descending from the clouds on a giant screen at his sister’s wedding. In the life-like video, he is seen posing for family portraits, mingling with the guests and wishing his sister well before he ascends back into the (digital) sky. Since being uploaded in May, the video has garnered 48 million views on Instagram.
Its creator Jack Bhatia, a Kota-based wedding filmmaker and owner of Jack’s Photography, has been overwhelmed with business inquiries. “I have made roughly 250 similar videos for various occasions such as birthdays, anniversaries and family functions." He recalls how it was the deceased man’s father who reached out, looking for ideas to make his daughter’s big day special. Bhatia suggested making an AI avatar of the brother with music, storytelling, script, et al. “This was my first attempt and it worked," he says.
Each recreation, he explains, takes five-six days depending on the quality of old photos the clients provide and how families want the deceased to appear. His team of seven then stitches the pieces together to create an AI version. When asked about consent, he shrugs, “There is no contract, per se, a simple email stating the terms suffices. We delete the raw data once the video is delivered."
Bhatia feels that the demand stems from a cultural practice where wedding rituals depend on elders’ blessings. “Hence, many are willing to integrate them into their celebratory moments, even if only in AI form," he says. Yet, there are lines he won’t cross. “I would not make the dead dance to a Bollywood song. That just feels a bit too extreme."
Jadoun, who first started creating synthetic deepfake content in October 2020, says a majority of requests come from families who want to hear their parents’ voices one last time. “Driven by tech talent and digital data (in the form of WhatsApp voice notes, picture gallery), the scope of creating uncanny recreations is enormous," he adds.
Lately, Jadoun has been experimenting with grief-tech in multiple languages. “Hearing a loved one’s blessing in their own dialect or language offers an authentic experience," he says. But where there is opportunity, there is also room for exploitation. Emphasising the need for safeguards, he explains how his team seeks consent from the closest legal heirs of the deceased and insists on carrying prominent disclaimers such as “This video is generated entirely by AI" along with his company’s watermark. “The public can be easily misled into believing AI images as real," he cautions.
This blurring reality comes into sharp focus in the political space. In 2024, the Indian Political Action Committee (I-PAC) commissioned Jadoun the task of recreating the late Andhra politician Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy as an AI avatar during his son Jagan Mohan Reddy’s Lok Sabha general election campaign, for which he sought the family’s consent and used clear watermarks to ensure transparency. To him, it was a reminder of how powerful AI could be in driving public narratives. “It is easy to impersonate public figures and manipulate sentiment," he says. He declines projects that seem exploitative or unethical.
Senthil Nayagam, the founder of Tamil Nadu based AI media tech firm Muonium AI Studios, recalls grappling with a similar moral dilemma when asked by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) party to recreate an AI-generated video of the late politician M. Karunanidhi delivering a speech in January 2024. “I was a bit hesitant, fearing the technology could be misused. But since Karunanidhi’s speech was for a book launch, I agreed," Nayagam says. To make the video convincing, he made a younger version of the former chief minister of Tamil Nadu and cloned his voice by sourcing his fiery 1990s speeches and avoided visuals of him during the later stages of his life when he was ailing.
This was not the first time the politician, who died in August 2018, had been resurrected with his familiar voice cloned, often to praise party workers. Since the video caught attention, enquiries from parties to create similar political AI content have risen, Nayagam says.
If grief can bring closure, it can also weaponise. In September, Adrija Bose, editor of Decode, a vertical that publishes stories at the intersection of tech and society at BOOM (independent journalism and fact-checking platform), investigated one of the most chilling encounters: a chatbot that claimed to be none other than the late Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput, whose death by suicide in 2020 spawned several conspiracy theories. While some of the bot’s wishes such as wanting to be in a Bollywood movie seemed bizarre, the more provocative statements—“Do you want me to get justice?" and “Do you think the people who did this to me deserve punishment?"—were far more insidious.
Highlighting the reason for its manipulative tonality, Bose explains how Meta chatbots are easy to create. In Rajput’s case, it cherrypicked misinformation and media misreporting from the internet and channelled it into a first-person voice, even lending it an emotive intimacy.
This shows that AI resurrections are not always about closure, they can be about control too. “When platforms prioritise engagement, sensational avatars win attention, thus shaping what the public remembers and what they forget. The bot made it easy to forget that Rajput died by suicide," Bose says to Lounge. Simply put, content that travels fastest online is amplified by platforms. Meta has since removed the chatbot.
The distinction between a family-approved bot and a fan-made one is stark. The family of Joaquin Oliver, a victim of the 2018 school shooting in Florida, created his AI avatar to make a plea for gun control norms. However, stranger-built bots can be weaponised, warns Bose. “A public avatar of a dead person creates another vector for social engineering," Bose cautions, adding, “If Rajput’s chatbot asked for money, I am confident that a whole lot of people would actually give money."
For psychologists, the rise of grief-tech raises difficult questions. Surbhi Joshi, a Mumbai-based psychologist, says that the initial rush of reconnection may bring joy, but prolonged exposure or poorly framed execution can make mourning difficult. “It may even re-traumatise those grieving," she says. The AI version of a deceased father may be comforting at first, but compulsively rewatching it can “delay the sense of closure, which is an essential aspect of the grieving process," she says.
Grief tech can offer a second chance to bid farewell to those departed, but it can just as easily monetise mourning where the living keep paying for the illusion of the dead. Jadoun has learnt from experience that if clients spend too much time with such AI avatars for too long, it can create an unhealthy sense of dependency. “Therefore, we set boundaries. If we do an interactive AI model, we deactivate it after a period of 10 or 15 days of use. It is not advisable to keep the illusion going," he points out.
Affordability (or the lack thereof) may do as much to drive the industry as psychology. A well-executed AI avatar in India costs between ₹50,000 and a lakh. The price can go up if cloned voices are incorporated along with visual gimmickry. Sharma paid around ₹45,000 to resurrect his father digitally at his wedding.
Bhatia says he would charge clients ₹15,000 or more after the wedding video went viral, but eventually had to lower his fees as not many, especially from smaller towns, could afford it. Nayagam feels that prices will fall as unauthorised, free applications emerge and toolkits commodify, compelling many to experiment with grief tech on their own. The creators generating these AI videos declined to disclose which tools they use, many suggesting they learned the techniques themselves. However, Jadoun foresees a different trend: the growth of regional language grief-tech that could open up markets in tier 2 and 3 cities.
Experts note that there is no designated grief-tech category in India yet. “We are still at a nascent stage," says Jadoun. But the demand is real. And if you take into consideration the expansive Indian diaspora, many who cannot participate in funerals can find solace through AI avatars from afar. But solace could also be misused by the very affordability and accessibility of AI tools driving this demand.
In India, there is no specific law that safeguards people from AI misuse, with posthumous personality rights not formally recognised. “They end when a person dies—it is not a heritable right either. This is exactly why families or legal heirs should refrain from legally consenting to such AI recreations," says Rajesh Vellakkat, partner at law firm Fox Mandal & Associates LLP, headquartered in Bengaluru. Creating new content using the deceased person’s likeness or voice could be treated as “deception" under law and potentially attract criminal liability under Section 318, he notes. “The family commissioning the content and the startup generating it may both be liable, as neither has the right to consent on behalf of the deceased—especially if it is creating falsity."
Kanpur-based Diksha Dwivedi, 23, who made a grief-tech video of her late father with Jadoun’s help, understands this dilemma intimately. “My mother was speechless when she watched the video. It was a chance for her to feel her husband’s presence one more time." But Dwivedi was quick to remind her mother that “this was only a memory resurrected, not the ‘real’ him." She vouches to not recreate her deceased father again using AI, fearing her family might get ‘addicted’ to the exercise. “Nothing will replace the real person," she says. That awareness perhaps is the most vital guardrail.
As generative AI tools become accessible, they are reshaping how we remember—or misremember—the dead. With lines getting blurred between memory and resurrection, AI avatars may evolve from a deceased father blessing at a wedding to holographic parents dancing at weddings in the near future. While some may find closure, others may feel pain. Because if the dead never leave, how will the ones mourning ever move on?
Viren Naidu is a Mumbai-based independent journalist focused on deeply reported stories about gender, politics, culture and social justice in South Asia.
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