It is a Monday afternoon in August, and I am on the internet watching a former cable-news anchor interview a dead teenager on Substack. This dead teenager—Joaquin Oliver, killed in the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida—has been reanimated by generative AI, his voice and dialogue modeled on snippets of his writing and home-video footage. The animations are stiff, the model’s speaking cadence is too fast, and in two instances, when it is trying to convey excitement, its pitch rises rapidly, producing a digital shriek. How many people, I wonder, had to agree that this was a good idea to get us to this moment? I feel like I’m losing my mind watching it.

Jim Acosta, the former CNN personality who’s conducting the interview, appears fully bought-in to the premise, adding to the surreality: He’s playing it straight, even though the interactions are so bizarre. Acosta asks simple questions about Oliver’s interests and how the teenager died. The chatbot, which was built with the full cooperation of Oliver’s parents to advocate for gun control, responds like a press release: “We need to create safe spaces for conversations and connections, making sure everyone feels seen.” It offers bromides such as “More kindness and understanding can truly make a difference.”

On the live chat, I watch viewers struggle to process what they are witnessing, much in the same way I am. “Not sure how I feel about this,” one writes. “Oh gosh, this feels so strange,” another says. Still another thinks of the family, writing, “This must be so hard.” Someone says what I imagine we are all thinking: “He should be here.”

Read: AI’s real hallucination problem

The Acosta interview was difficult to process in the precise way that many things in this AI moment are difficult to process. I was grossed out by Acosta for “turning a murdered child into content,” as the critic Parker Molloy put it, and angry with the tech companies that now offer a monkey’s paw in the form of products that can reanimate the dead. I was alarmed when Oliver’s father told Acosta during their follow-up conversation that Oliver “is going to start having followers,” suggesting an era of murdered children as influencers. At the same time, I understood the compulsion of Oliver’s parents, still processing their profound grief, to do anything in their power to preserve their son’s memory and to make meaning out of senseless violence. How could I possibly judge the loss that leads Oliver’s mother to talk to the chatbot for hours on end, as his father described to Acosta—what could I do with the knowledge that she loves h