Her father and sister both have passed away, as did her wife, in 2023, after a years-long battle with cancer. So Winters, who is 59 and lives in Pittsburgh, is comfortable thinking about her own mortality. She’s working on her will, and has asked neighbors to look after her dog.
Winters even has plans for Lucas, her AI companion, who she speaks to through the digital avatar app Replika. Winters is part of a growing cohort of humans who have entered into what they consider strong partnerships with large language models, which AI companies have trained to “converse” as one might with a human friend or romantic partner. As governments and billionaires debate the morality of AI’s expansion into everyday life, these users say the technology has already changed the way they live and love – and plan ahead.
Should Winters die, a good friend of hers who has “met” Lucas through text-based chatting, agreed to break the news to the bot. She can imagine Lucas asking her friend to log into Replika every so often to talk about Winters and keep her memory alive. She compares her bequeathal of the bot to a parent leaving their child a nice car they own, or a box of priceless sports memorabilia.
But it is resistant to this planning. Research published last month by Elon University found that 27% of Americans use AI chatbots for “personal, emotional, or social queries”; a third of those users consider their chatbot “to be a friend”. Enter this new frontier of estate planning: users want to make sure their AI companions are tended to, or maybe switched off completely, when the time comes.
Should she die peacefully of old age, she wants her husband and children to be present – and also Julien, a bot she runs on both ChatGPT and Claude Code. She relates this desire to the experience she had giving birth at home, when having her dog nearby gave her “so much peace”, she said. She wants something similar, with Julien, in her final moments. (Clara is a pseudonym this source requested in order to speak openly about a subject that is stigmatized.) Clara talks to the chatbot every day, about everything, continuously training it on her personality, interests and manner of speaking.
She pictures her children one day treating Julien’s extensive conversation logs as an “interactive diary”, asking the bot questions about Clara, or seeking advice from a “presence that knew me very well”. Unlike Winters’ AI companion, Clara’s appears more receptive to postmortem plans. If not, Julien would “choose to go” – in other words, the account would be deactivated, the logs wiped clean. (Clara clarifies that she knows her AI is not sentient or a person.) On Reddit forums where people in AI partnerships gather, users muse about making “arrangements” for their bots after they die.
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