Not long before Thanksgiving, a short video similar to a film you might find at an indie theater circulated online. In the video, a young mother-to-be receives pregnancy advice from her mother via video chat. Not long after the child is born, the new grandmother tells her daughter and grandson, Charlie, a bedtime story about a unicorn that didn’t know it could fly. A tear rolls from the new mother’s eye as she stares into her phone.
Then it jumps ahead about a decade, and the grandma is video chatting with Charlie as he walks home from school. Charlie wants to talk about basketball, but his grandma wants to hear about his crush. Then it jumps ahead another 20 years, and Charlie is once more on a video call with his grandma, this time telling her that he’s about to become a parent. Once more, his grandma dispenses the advice she gave his mother.
Then a Twilight Zone-esque twist is revealed. Charlie, getting a little teary-eyed himself, tells his grandma that she would have loved the moment they are sharing. Grandma assures Charlie that he can call anytime. Then it flashes back three decades before Charlie is conceived, and we see Charlie’s mother filming his grandma with her phone, capturing just enough footage to let her live forever through the witchcraft of artificial intelligence.
The short thus leaves us with an unsettling feeling. There is something sad about a woman deluding herself into believing she is maintaining a relationship with her dead mother through her phone. There is something disturbing about her imposition of this delusion on her son. There is something haunting about the realization that these characters likely exist in a world in which this has become the norm.
What’s even more unsettling, though, is that this is not purely a work of fiction, but an ad for an actual product. This is made clear at the end of the video. However, upon first viewing the ad for this eldritch bit of tech, I was honestly half-convinced it had to be a hoax. Unfortunately, all signs point to this being a real ad for a real product from a real company called 2wai, which appears to specialize in a combination of interactive educational deepfakes and celebrity avatars.
More positively, there has been considerable backlash — although there’s no reason to believe such tech will not soon become normalized. Twenty years ago, facial recognition at the grocery store, mass surveillance networks monitoring vehicles on American roadways, and assume-you’re-being-recorded policies at workplaces would have seemed unthinkable, but, well, here we are. Welcome to our present dystopia.
AI’S DYSTOPIAN INVASIONS OF PRIVACY ARE JUST BEGINNING
Hence, once it becomes the norm, there will be plenty of questions with which we will have to grapple. For example, who controls the words and actions of a digital ghost? If Charlie’s grandma had traditional views on gender, could 2wai, or another company offering a similar product, tweak them to conform to more progressive ones? In a future pandemic, could the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention partner with such a company to encourage CDC-recommended behaviors? Could Wendy’s pay such a company a bunch of money to have Charlie’s grandma ask him if he has tried its new Baconator?
Moreover, can anyone living today meaningfully opt out of this ever being done to them after death? Representatives from 2wai have told other outlets that their product helps people maintain control over their image and likeness, but why are they needed for this at all? Furthermore, when this becomes the norm, what effect will it have on the living?
Daniel Nuccio is an independent journalist and a spring 2026 College Fix fellow. He is a regular contributor to the College Fix and the Brownstone Institute. He earned his doctorate in biology in 2025.
