Artificial Intelligence and the Medicalization of Grief: Historical, Literary, and Ethical Perspectives

Abstract: This interdisciplinary panel examines the intersection of artificial intelligence and grief through historical, literary, and ethical lenses. AI increasingly mediates human emotional experiences, fundamentally transforming our relationship with mortality, memory, and mourning. As grief technologies proliferate, critical analysis from multiple perspectives becomes essential to understanding their profound societal implications.
The first presenter, an historian, situates early efforts to use AI in psychiatry during the twentieth century within shifting understandings of normal versus pathological mourning. This presentation explores how the first generation of chatbots aimed not only to mediate human experiences of grief but to generate theories about its very nature. An historical analysis reveals how technological and social changes have shaped contemporary understandings of human affective experience.
Building on this foundation, the second presenter, a literary critic, explores recent literary representations of AI-mediated grief, focusing on Kazuo Ishiguro's "Klara and the Sun," Gerard Johnstone’s film M3GAN, and the Black Mirror episode "Be Right Back." These narratives reflect deep cultural anxieties about new models of empathy, grief, and the increasing use of robots for therapeutic purposes, offering crucial insights into how fiction anticipates and processes technological disruption of traditional mourning practices.
Finally, a philosopher examines the ethical implications of emerging "grief tech" - AI systems designed to simulate conversation with the deceased. Such technologies raise crucial questions about autonomy, authenticity, and the role of technology in emotional processing - as a support for or impediment to healthy mourning. This presentation will evaluate emerging frameworks for ethical governance of grief technologies

Keywords: Artificial intelligence, grief, medicalization