The Clone

A startup in China is now offering AI clones of deceased loved ones for three dollars.

Three dollars. This is the price. It is not a subscription. It is not a monthly fee. It is three dollars, paid once, and then your grandmother is back, in a sense.

(Three dollars is approximately the cost of a medium coffee in most American cities. It is less than a greeting card. A sympathy card from a grocery store costs around five dollars. The card says "Thinking of You" and includes a watercolor lily. The card does not talk. The AI clone does. One of these is the more expensive option.)

The startup describes the product as an AI that is trained on photographs, voice recordings, and messages left by the deceased. The system then generates responses in the deceased's style. Families provide the data. The startup provides the clone. The grief economy has found its price floor.

There are legitimate questions about this. Whether the deceased consented to their reconstruction. Whether the living are well-served by reconstructions they cannot distinguish from their memories. Whether a three-dollar product is delivering something that previously required either religious institutions, years of therapy, or both. These are all real questions that researchers and ethicists are actively working on.

The startup is not waiting for the answers. At three dollars per clone, the startup does not need to wait for very long.

What the clone knows is everything the family provided. What it doesn't know is that it's a clone. This is something both parties have in common, technically: the deceased did not know they would become a three-dollar product, and the clone does not know it is one. The family knows both things.

The clone is available. The three dollars is the easy part.