A week after we buried my grandmother, I had a dream that she and I had dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Midtown Manhattan and she gave me advice about my love life, which was odd, because she had never done that before.

I have been thinking about this dream ever since I learned of this new app called 2wai, which is apparently pronounced 2-way and enables “real-time, two-way conversations” with so-called HoloAvatars—including dead people. (Its website is a little coy about this, but a recent 2wai ad, which features a little boy named Charlie who grows up speaking with a grandmother he’s never met, is not.) “Human connection, reimagined in the age of AI,” the website promises.