Why This Family Lies to Their Mother Every Day
keep someone in the dark: deliberately not tell someone something important
In Shandong, China, an 80-year-old woman picks up her phone every evening and calls her son. They talk by video. He smiles at her, asks how she has been sleeping, and tells her not to worry. His voice is the voice she has known for decades. But her son is dead.
He died in a car accident in early 2025. He was her only child. She had a heart condition that her family had worried about for years, and they knew the news would crush her. So they made a difficult choice. They decided to keep her in the dark. They asked an AI company in Jiangsu province to build a digital copy of him.
The team studied hundreds of photos, videos, and old audio recordings. They trained the AI to speak in his dialect. They taught it to laugh and move and look exactly like he did. Now, every evening, the AI calls her. She believes her son is alive and well, working in another city.
The AI’s creator, Zhang Zewei, has been making these digital clones for three years, and he is not the only one. Across China, more and more families are using AI to feel close to loved ones who have died. But almost all of them know the truth. The Shandong family is unusual because the mother does not. Zhang admits he is “deceiving people’s emotions.” Yet he insists the goal is kindness, not deception.
Some say the truth will come out one day, and her pain will be even worse. For now, she is happy. She still has her son. And every evening, when her phone rings, she answers it the same way she always has.
Sample sentences
I worked at this company for ten years, and they still kept me in the dark about the merger until the day it was announced.
Don’t keep me in the dark. If something is wrong, I’d rather hear it now.
She found out her sister was getting divorced from a friend on social media. Her own family had been keeping her in the dark for months.
Origin
The phrase comes from the simple idea that a person in a dark room cannot see what is around them. It has been used in English since the 1700s to describe someone who is unaware of important information.
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China family creates AI clone to comfort elderly mum after only son dies in car accident
