Speaking for the Dead: Ancient Pseudepigraphal Afterlives and Public AI Griefbots

This paper examines communal forms of AI griefbots. While most scholarship treats AI griefbots as private technologies of mourning, it focuses on cases in which reconstructed voices address gathered audiences in public, institutional, or ritualized settings. Comparing these practices with ancient pseudepigraphal writings, the paper argues that both involve communities generating meaningful postmortem speech from traces left behind and receiving that speech as significant after death. Nineteenth-century Spiritualism provides a more recent analogue, making visible the social expectations and interpretive habits that surround communal postmortem voice. Read together, these cases illuminate a recurring religious logic in which communities authorize speech for the dead as guidance, consolation, witness, or public address. By situating communal AI grief practices within this longer history, the paper expands current discussion beyond private bereavement and opens the way for more careful evaluation of the promises and dangers of emerging digital afterlives.