How I Cried for Jessica Radcliffe, Who Never Lived

I must confess. I cried for Jessica Radcliffe. I pictured her in a wetsuit, smiling at her dolphin, performing her last trick before tragedy struck.

I imagined the dolphin’s mournful cries as her lifeless body floated beside it.

For hours, I carried the weight of a stranger’s death as though I had lost a friend.

Then I learned the truth. Jessica Radcliffe never existed. There was no obituary, no family statement, no official record. AI conjured her.

A story so neatly packaged that it preyed on my emotions and pulled me into a sea of fiction disguised as news.

The clever part was how it echoed real tragedies.

Dawn Brancheau, killed in 2010 at SeaWorld, and Alexis Martinez, killed in 2009 by an orca in Spain, were both trainers whose deaths shocked the world.

AI stitched these echoes into a tale of Jessica, a woman who never drew breath, and it worked. It fooled me.

The trick was not just in the story but in the details. The dolphin is crying. The floating body. The helpless audience. It mimicked the style of novels I had loved, where setting and weather pull you deeper into the scene.

Only this time it was not literature. It was code, engineered to capture attention and convert grief into clicks.

That is the sinister beauty of AI. It can summon ghosts with the precision of a playwright and the efficiency of a machine.

It can make you feel something for someone who never existed.

It can make death a spectacle, not to honor the dead, but to keep you scrolling.

I walked away from Jessica Radcliffe wiser and angrier. Wiser because I now look twice before investing my emotions, angrier because someone somewhere decided my empathy was a currency to be exploited.

The story was not about a drowned trainer at all. It was about how AI can prey on shock, harvest views, and make commercial sense out of human sorrow.

So here I am, less naive than before.

Jessica Radcliffe never lived, yet she took up space in my heart for a moment. And that is the unsettling power of AI. It can convince you to mourn a ghost.