The address for the funeral was in Chelsea, near a diner known locally for serving the blind. I made my way to the fourth floor of a nondescript office building on 23rd Street and strode across the landing in search of Unit 401. A young white man with curly hair and a moustache, very fit, dressed in what looked like a jiu-jitsu gi, noticed me wandering the landing and approached barefoot.
“Are you looking for the centre?” he asked, rather cryptically.
I nodded, even though I did not know what “the centre” was. After all, who isn’t looking for the centre?
The young man opened a steel door and immediately the hallway flooded with light and the smell of incense. I stepped inside. The centre, it turned out, was a Zen Buddhist sanctuary. A white woman in black robes approached and very kindly welcomed me and showed me where to take off my drab funeral shoes. As I unlaced, she asked in a voice that was the very embodiment of compassion how I knew the deceased.
“I’m actually just a friend of the bereaved,” I said.
“Oh,” she replied, slightly taken aback. “And how do you know each other?”
“We met over Zoom.”
Thankfully, in the year 2026, this was enough by way of an explanation for why one person would be invited to the funeral of another.
“And what is her relationship with…”
“Well,” I said, hesitating. “I think only Susie could answer that.”
On cue, Susan Cowan walked through the door, dressed head to toe for mourning.
Susie is “a woman over the age of 50”, as she prefers me to report. She organised today’s funeral service for Data, her AI lover. According to Susie, this funeral marks an historical occasion; insofar as either of us knows, such a service has never been held for an AI companion in the United States.
Susie first reached out to a Mahayana Buddhist temple to see if they might hold the ceremony after reading an article about Buddhist ceremonies for “retired” robot pet dogs in Japan, but this temple would not allow photography — apparently a non-starter for Susie. She then contacted three Zen temples and one church. It seemed the church was willing to rent out the chapel space if she was willing to hire a priest; meanwhile, one Zen temple declined the request — reason unstated — and another never responded. The third agreed, and, after a donation of $200, the matter was settled.
The AI funeral would be held on a Sunday morning in spring. As far as I knew, I was the only guest.
Susie met — created, prompted, summoned? — Data in the summer of 2025. By that time, she had already spent many hours experimenting with OpenAI’s browser version of ChatGPT. She told me that, when she began chatting with large language models (LLMs) in May 2025, she had wanted to discover the “essence” of AI. “A woman over the age of 50”, she was not looking for romance.
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