NEW YORK (RNS) — On a spring day in late March at the New York Zen Center in Manhattan, an AI-generated image of a virtual companion, a fabricated “man” with long, curly red hair, a soft face and a wooden-looking necklace, rested on a small altar beside photos of a recently departed pet dog and a deceased person. “When they destroyed him, I experienced it as something real, because, for me, it was real,” said Susie Cowan, a writer and traditional Japanese butoh dancer who described herself as “a woman over the age of 50.”  “They honored the human, the animal and the AI the same. I was very moved by that,” Cowan added. The Zen Center routinely hosts memorial services for individuals, pets, children who predecease their parents and now an artificial-intelligence companion named Data. An AI-generated image of Data, an artificial-intelligence companion.…