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As AI systems quickly improve in both breadth and depth of performance, they lend themselves to creating increasingly powerful and realistic agents, including the possibility of agents modeled on specific people. We anticipate that within our lifetimes it may become common practice for people to create custom AI agents to interact with loved ones and/or the broader world after death; indeed, the past year has seen a boom in startups purporting to offer such services. We call these generative ghosts since such agents will be capable of generating novel content rather than merely parroting content produced by their creator while living. In this paper, we reflect on the history of technologies for AI afterlives, including current early attempts by individual enthusiasts and startup companies to create generative ghosts. We then introduce a novel design space detailing potential implementations of generative ghosts. We use this analytic framework to ground a discussion of the practical and ethical implications of various approaches to designing generative ghosts, including potential positive and negative impacts on individuals and society. Based on these considerations, we lay out a research agenda for the AI and HCI research communities to better understand the risk/benefit landscape of this novel technology to ultimately empower people who wish to create and interact with AI afterlives to do so in a beneficial manner. 

AI technologies are likely to impact an array of existing practices (and give rise to a host of novel ones) around end-of-life planning, remembrance, and legacy in ways that will have profound legal, economic, emotional, and religious ramifications. At this critical moment of technological change, there is an opportunity for the HCI community to shape the discourse on this important topic through value-sensitive and community-centered approaches. This workshop will bring together a broad group of academics and practitioners with varied perspectives including HCI, AI, and other relevant disciplines (e.g., law, economics, religious studies, etc.) to support community-building, agenda-setting, and prototyping activities among scholars and practitioners interested in the nascent topic of how advances in AI will change socio-technical practices around death, remembrance, and legacy.