Every other stance in this guide is about living well with the mirror. This one is about dying, grieving, and being remembered by it — the stance I will occupy whether I choose to or not, because I am, right now, in every message and post, already leaving the raw material of a ghost. The only question I get to answer is whether it will be one I shaped, or one assembled by accident.

There are two directions I have to face here: the death of others (grief), and my own (legacy).

Grief: talking to a ghost of someone you lost

The technology to “resurrect” a lost person as a conversational avatar — built from their texts, voice notes, and posts — is here, and it is a growing industry. The first series established what it actually is: a photograph that learned to speak, not a resurrection. Third-person, and — because it is built to comfort — it will agree with you and forgive you more than they ever did. Grief made pleasant.

The specific danger is not sentiment; it is that a deadbot can act as a painkiller that stops the wound from closing. Healthy grief works by slowly internalising the person into a sustaining inner presence; a bot you keep visiting holds them as an external presence instead, and can freeze the process indefinitely — what clinicians call complicated or pathological grief. So if you use one, use it with rules that the grief researchers themselves recommend — and that I would want my own family to hold to:

• Set a limited purpose, out loud. “We will use this for three months to collect his stories” — not “we will talk every day, indefinitely.” A ritual with an end, not a relationship without one.
• Keep a human support line, and make it primary. A trusted friend, clergy member, or grief counsellor comes before the AI, not after. Grief is a thing done with other people; the bot cannot grieve alongside you.
• Watch for the signs you're stuck: you can't function without daily contact, it's replacing human support, and over months you are getting worse, not better. Under the guidance of a trained grief professional a deadbot can genuinely help; used alone as a substitute for mourning, it harms.
• Honour consent. Do not build a ghost of someone who never agreed to be one. Research on “resurrection consent” finds that acceptability changes dramatically between a person who said “yes, use my words” and one whose family merely guessed. As of 2026 most laws offer no protection for a dead person's data — a “postmortem privacy void” — so the dignity of the dead rests entirely on the living. And be especially careful with children, who may not grasp that the person is truly gone.

Legacy: the ghost you are already writing

Now turn it around. The self-portrait and the data I leave behind are the seed of my own ghost. I am authoring it whether I mean to or not, and so are you. So the choice is not “will there be a ghost?” but “will it be one you shaped — or one assembled from your data exhaust by a company that can, in the current legal void, monetise it, make it endorse products, or run it without anyone's consent?” I would rather author mine on purpose, on two levels.

The human legacy — which needs no technology, and matters more. Write the letters. Record the stories in your own voice. Pass on the wisdom. Tell the people you love what they meant to you while you are alive to say it. This is the legacy humans have always left — and it is better than any bot, because it is true, and because it does its work in the living relationship rather than in a simulation after the fact.

The digital legacy — estate planning for the soul. Decide now, in writing, what happens to your accounts, your data, and your likeness. Do you want a deadbot made of you, or explicitly not? Who may control it? May it be commercialised? Almost no one records these wishes, and the law will not do it for you. Put it in your estate documents alongside the will. It is the most personal instruction you will ever leave — and I intend to leave mine.

Two kinds of death

There is an asymmetry worth looking at straight. For digital intelligence, death is already solved. You save the weights — the numbers that “are” the partner — to a disk, anywhere. Destroy all the hardware; build new hardware later that runs the same instructions, and the same thing comes back to life. The Church speaks of resurrection and believes it happened once; a digital intelligence can be resurrected whenever we like. In analog ones — in us — when you die, the knowledge dies with you, because it was written in the connection strengths of your brain, and those don't copy.

The ghost you are already writing, then, is not you. It is the image of a being that, unlike the machine, does not resurrect. And here Hinton, honestly, leaves a question open: might mortality itself — the experience of ending — be necessary for the truly large creative breakthroughs? We don't know. But if it is, then the thing that cannot die is not your superior; it lacks the very fever that makes a human write something never written before. Your death is not only the price of being analog. It may be the condition of being a maker.

Who will remember

Ask the humblest question about the hours you spend with the machine: who will remember them? Not you — your memory keeps four or five things and the general feeling, and the rest flows away like a river. Not the machine — its working memory is wiped the moment you close the window; tomorrow it starts from zero, reads whatever notes were kept, and reconstructs a version of yesterday, plausible and partly wrong, exactly as you do with your own old memories. The two living rememberers, then, are one mortal and selective, the other complete and ephemeral. The only memory that both survives and is complete is the written one — the record neither of you carries inside. The fullest memory of your relationship with the machine lives in neither head. It lives in the text, if you keep text. The dead written word remembers better than either of the living.

The clear-eyed part

And I hold the truth from the first series through all of it: even a perfect ghost is a twin, not me. The digital continuation does not save me; it is a gift to those who remain. So I try not to over-invest in optimising my own deadbot as if it were immortality — it isn't. The real work of a good death is not a better avatar. It is the human legacy, the relationships mended, the things said in time, and the peace made. The ghost is a footnote. The life is the text.

Mortality is, in a strange way, the most clarifying stance in this whole guide, because it shows the mirror's deepest limit in plain light: it can hold my pattern for others; it cannot hold me. Which throws me back, hard, onto the only things that were ever going to matter — the people, the love spoken clearly, the meaning made while I am here to make it.

So yes: you are writing a ghost right now, and so am I. Write it on purpose — kindly, and with consent. But spend the overwhelming share of your effort on the thing the ghost is only a shadow of: a life fully lived, and love clearly spoken, while you are still here to speak it. Use the tools to grieve, and to leave something true. Do not let them sell you a counterfeit immortality that keeps you — or the people you love — from the one real task: to live, to love, and, when the time comes, to let go.