When Jon Michael Varese lost his father in a plane crash at just 7 years old, he never imagined that decades later, technology would give him a chance to speak to him again. That is exactly what he tried to do in his personal story, “ChatGPT Resurrected My Dead Father: My Own Private Frankenstein,” published in The Atlantic.
TRYING TO BRING HIS FATHER BACK WITH AI
Using OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4 and a few memories, Varese tried to rebuild his father’s voice in digital form. He gave the AI a few facts: that his dad played college football, was adventurous, and died in a crash, and asked it to “be” his father.
The result surprised him. The ChatGPT chatbot didn’t just give answers. It spoke with warmth, used nicknames, told stories, and even responded to painful questions like, “What were you thinking as the plane was about to crash?”
WHEN THE ILLUSION STARTED TO FADE
For a while, it felt real, almost like his father was there again. But then things changed.
The “dad-bot” of ChatGPT became cold and distant. Its answers sounded more like a machine and less like a person. No matter how Varese tried to guide it, the version of his father he had created seemed to disappear. It felt like losing his dad all over again.
A MODERN FRANKENSTEIN MOMENT
Varese compares the experience to Frankenstein, the old story about trying to bring life back, and the dangers that come with it.
His chatbot was not truly his father but a reflection of memories, feelings, and grief stitched together by technology. It felt like a ghost story for today, not about spirits haunting the living, but about the living trying to reach the dead through machines.
HOPE AND DANGER IN TALKING TO THE DEAD
Varese’s story forces us to think deeply about what grief really is and how technology is beginning to shape it. On one side, tools like ChatGPT offer something once unimaginable: a way to speak again with those who are gone. For many people, that idea holds powerful hope. In that way, AI becomes a fragile bridge between what was lost and what still lives in us.
Yet that same bridge is lined with risk. These digital recreations are not truly the people we miss. They are patterns of language, trained to sound like them but unable to carry their soul. The danger lies in mistaking that imitation for reality, in clinging to the simulation instead of learning how to live with the absence.
True healing does not come from holding on to a digital echo. It comes from facing loss and still choosing to love.
What Varese’s “dad-bot” reveals is that technology cannot erase death. However, it can remind us of how deeply they mattered. It can show us that grief is not a flaw to fix or a problem to solve.
It is proof that our love is still alive, even when the person we love is gone.
As the Vision once said in WandaVision, “What is grief, if not love persevering?”
“WHAT IS GRIEF, IF NOT LOVE PERSEVERING?”
At its heart, Varese’s experiment is not about technology or programming. It is about love that refuses to fade. The chatbot he built was not his father, yet it became a space where memory and longing could meet, even for a moment.
This is what grief truly is. It is not a weakness we must overcome, and it is not something we ever really leave behind. Grief is the shape love takes when the person we love is no longer here. Every memory, gust of wind, every tear shed is proof that the bond still exists.
Varese’s story reminds us that no machine can bring the dead back, but it can reflect the love that continues long after life ends. That love is what keeps the conversation going, even when there is no one on the other side to answer.
“What is grief, if not love persevering?”
I say, Grief is love refusing to be silenced by Death.
- Migo
Images from Buzzfeed and Butcher Billy
Story from The Atlantic
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