For about the cost of a nice pair of shoes, a Seoul startup will make an AI video of someone you've lost.
The company is Vaice, and it charges 600,000 won (roughly $390) for a three-to-five minute clip of a deceased person, generated from a handful of photos and short voice recordings. About 300 families a month are paying for one, according to reporting from the AP and the LA Times. Most customers are in their 40s and 50s, and most are commissioning videos of parents.
Vaice CEO Jeongu Won says the system needs only a few photographs and short audio clips to reconstruct someone's face and speech patterns closely enough that families recognize their relative. That's the part that has changed.
The output isn't a chatbot or an interactive avatar. It's a short, one-way message from the dead. Families play them at memorial ceremonies and on traditional holidays. Some use them to say things they never got to say when the person was alive, or to hear something they wished they had heard.
One recent customer, a 28-year-old office worker named Lee Geon Hui, commissioned a video of his late grandfather as a gift for his father, a single parent. The virtual grandfather called his father "my son." His father cried through the whole thing.
None of this is brand new in Korea. Back in 2020, the MBC documentary "Meeting You" used VR to reunite a grieving mother with her seven-year-old daughter, who had died of an illness. Almost two-thirds of the country watched it, and the YouTube clip has racked up close to 36 million views since. What used to require a documentary crew and a team of VR animators now costs less than a decent dinner in Seoul.
Which raises the obvious question: is any of this actually good?
Valorie Jones, CTO of StoryFile, a company that has built AI twins for public figures including journalist Kara Swisher, argues that the weakness in the tech is what it's trained on. "Modern AI is incredibly good at producing plausible language," she wrote about Swisher's twin. "But plausibility is different from experience." A generic model can guess what someone might say. It can't tell you what they actually would have said. Swisher's own two complaints about her digital double, according to Jones: it smiled too much, and it was too compliant.
That's what customers get when the subject is alive to push back. The Vaice version, built from a few photos of someone who can't correct anything, is unavoidably softer and more agreeable. That may be what people are paying for. It's also what worries researchers.
A 2026 preprint from Gonçalves and colleagues put the concern about as sharply as anyone has: "What happens when emotional pain is directed towards an entity that cannot be responsible, cannot act in the world and cannot be held morally to account?" Grief, historically, has been shared with other people. An AI recreation absorbs it without carrying any of the weight.
Yong Man Ro, an AI expert at KAIST, called the sector "a double-edged sword" in comments to the AP, and warned that as the technology gets more emotionally convincing, the guardrails around it become more important, not less.
China has already started drawing some. In April, the Cyberspace Administration published rules for AI services that "simulate natural person personality characteristics," taking effect July 15. Sessions running longer than two hours have to remind users how long they've been talking. Outputs have to be labeled as AI-generated. Fines climb if the service causes harm to someone's life or health. South Korea has no equivalent framework yet.
The unsettling part of grief tech isn't the quality of the videos. It's that they're becoming good enough, cheap enough, and fast enough that using one is now a decision a normal family can make on a normal afternoon. Vaice's $390 price tag turns a philosophical question into a consumer purchase, and consumer purchases tend to get made long before the philosophy catches up. The real fight over the next few years won't be whether this should exist. It'll be over who gets to decide what a dead person is allowed to say.
