How AI chatbots are resurrecting the dead

• CU Boulder professor Jed Brubaker and Meredith Morris, the director for human-AI interaction research at Google, recently secured $75,000 from Google to investigate how AI could train machines on deceased people's digital data, the Denver Post reports.
• They could offer family and friends comfort, advice or even personalized messages at future events, plus preserve religious or cultural heritage for generations to come.

Why it matters: AI "ghosts" could give people a sense of "agency over the posthumous future," Morris and Brubaker penned in a research paper published last month.

How it works: These "generative ghosts" would function like AI chatbots, trained on a person's archived emails, text messages, social media posts and other data to mimic their unique communication style.

• AI could access data of the deceased that hasn't been erased.

What they're saying: "We anticipate that within our lifetimes it may become common practice for people to create a custom AI agent to interact with loved ones and/or the broader world after death," Morris and Brubaker wrote.

The intrigue: There are numerous AI programs that already help people commune with the dead, including HereAfter AI, SeanceAI and StoryFile.

• As interest in genealogy and ancestry proliferates, these tools let relatives preserve memories and personal connections for decades — even giving children a sense of the physical presence of a relative who died before they were born, Axios' Jennifer Kingston writes.

Threat level: While AI-generated replicas of the deceased offer intriguing possibilities, they raise serious concerns, the researchers note.

• Beyond data privacy risks, these "digital ghosts" could complicate healthy grieving and be vulnerable to misuse through identity theft or manipulation.

Go deeper: New AI tools let you chat with your dead relatives