Episode
The Rev Lucy Winkett
- Podcast
- Thought for the Day
- Published
- May 28, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 203
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0nnqqmw
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Summary
Good morning. The late rock singer Ozzy Osbourne’s son, Jack, spoke recently about the fact that the family have worked with an AI provider to make a digital version of his father a year after his death. Digital Ozzy, an AI generated life-sized avatar, will be able, from beyond the grave, to talk, laugh, answer questions from and tease whoever wants to speak with him; just as Ozzy Osborne did when he was alive. The CEO of the AI company making this, commented that the avatar’s created from ‘authenticated source material, consented and controlled by those who love him most’. His choice of language is striking. Love and control. Living and consent. There is a growing market – estimated at more than £100 billion worldwide for the ‘grief tech’ industry, including what are called griefbots: an AI tool that recreates the dead as a comfort for the living. Organised religion, until recent decades, exercising a near-monopoly on the rituals and processes around death, might reasonably be supposed to be against this. But as evidenced by Pope Leo’s first encyclical released on Monday, which addresses humanity’s relationship with AI, the need for public debate about the ethics and morality of the use of AI is urgent, given the speed of change in its capabilities. The starting point for the consideration of a grief bot is that the inalienable dignity of a human being who’s lived, according to Christian teaching, as someone created in the image of God, continues after death. But we know too that at the point of death, we no longer have any control over how we’re spoken about, how our past actions are interpreted. We’re no longer able to explain ourselves or surprise even the ones who love us best and miss us most. We are, in a curious way, at our most vulnerable, to exploitation or m…