By James Muldoon
Publication Date: 2026-01-06 17:34:00
When Roro (not her real name) lost her mother to cancer, her grief knew no bounds. When she was in her mid-20s and working as a content creator in China, she was haunted by the incompleteness of her relationship. Their bond has always been complicated – marked by unspoken resentments and a childhood in which care was often followed by criticism.
After her mother’s death, Roro was unable to reconcile the chaos of her past with the silence that followed. She shared her struggles with her followers on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (meaning “Little Red Book”), hoping to help them on their own healing journey.
Her writing caught the attention of the operators of the AI character generator Xingye, who invited her to create an AI version of her mother as a public chatbot.
“I wrote about my mother, documented all the major events in her life, and then wrote a story where she was resurrected in an AI world,” Roro told me through…
