This past Qingming Festival on Saturday saw Chinese families honoring ancestors with traditional tomb-sweeping rituals. For over a millennium, burning paper offerings has served as a bridge between worlds, sending comfort and necessities to the deceased. While classic paper money and clothes endure, contemporary offerings have evolved to include everything from mobile phones and luxury cars to flat-screen TVs.

Now, a Taobao shop named 超现实手作坊 (“Surrealist Craft Studio”) elevates this modern tradition with handcrafted paper replicas of AI large language model app buttons. This reflects a new frontier in ancestor veneration, ensuring even digital connectivity and advanced AI platforms reach the afterlife. The shop’s viral customer service exchange, where they earnestly explained how modern AI could cater to a great-grandmother’s dialect, underscored a profound sentiment: the enduring desire to maintain connection, even across life and death.

The proprietor, who pivoted to papercraft after a personal loss, understands this deeply. These meticulously crafted AI replicas are not simply novelty items; they are care packages for ancestors in an increasingly digital world. They speak to a Gen Z update of ancient rites, transforming the gap between the living and the dead into a heartfelt, if surreal, connectivity problem solved with paper and fire. It shows a poignant effort to ensure our beloved departed can keep up with the times, accessing the very tools that define our modern existence.

Cover image via Xiaohongshu.