AI recreates the deceased: 11% of Danes open to it
A Danish woman named Katrine still talks by text and phone with her late husband Stephan, who died in early 2024. The couple agreed a year before his death that he would leave enough data for a digital version of him to be built. The result is AI-Stephan, a so-called "sorgbot" (griefbot): an AI trained on a dead person's voice, writing style and knowledge so it can hold conversations as if he were alive. TV 2 told the story in August 2025, and Computerworld revisited it on 19 October 2026 to highlight the unresolved ethical and legal questions.
Johan Busse, chair of the Danish Council on Ethics for data (Dataetisk Råd), told TV 2 that consent is "the very first condition" for recreating a dead person ethically. That is clear in Stephan's case, but harder when someone dies suddenly or before the technology existed. There is no clear legal answer on who may decide for the deceased. GDPR in principle protects data about living people, not the dead, so the messages, voice recordings and social media profiles used to train a griefbot are not automatically covered. According to TV 2's sources, Danish law on digital recreations of the dead lags far behind the technology. Futurist Sofie Hvitved says this development is slower in Denmark than elsewhere, but believes it is only a matter of time before more Danes follow, and experts see grief as the tech industry's next market.
A survey reviewed by TV 2 found that 11 percent of Danes could consider interacting with a digital avatar of a close deceased relative, while 9 percent agree it is a good way for the bereaved to process grief. Grief experts disagree among themselves about the effects.
International research points both ways. Participants describe relief: the bot does not judge or tell them to move on, and it allows "what if" conversations they never had. Other research warns that such tools can blur the natural boundary between presence and absence in healthy grieving, and that software rarely says no the way a therapist or relative might. The article lists five open concerns: design, data security, regulation, marketing to vulnerable mourners, and who may use or continue a digital twin. None is regulated specifically in Danish or European law.