Talking with AI ghosts of loved ones

There's a growing market for AI models that promise to recreate the experience of interacting with a lost loved one. They're sometimes called generative ghosts, and they're the topic for today's “Uncanny AI,” our series about sometimes-unsettling experiences with this technology.

Jack Manning, a Ph.D. candidate studying information science at the University of Colorado Boulder, has been looking into this. He recently published a study on how people experience talking to generative ghosts.

More on this:

“Designing Conversations with the Dead: How People Engage with Generative Ghosts” from Association for Computing Machinery

“When AI is used to immortalize the dead, what are the ethical implications?” from Marketplace Tech