“When her best friend died, she rebuilt him using artificial intelligence.”

In this post from 2014, we see an episode of the TV series Black Mirror called “Be Right Back.” The show looks at a concept that’s apparently now hit real life: A loved one dies and someone then creates a simulacrum of them using “artificial intelligence.”

Eugenia Kuyda is CEO of Luka, a bot company in Silicon Valley. She has apparently created a mimic of her deceased friend as a bot. An in-depth report from The Verge states:

“It had been three months since Roman Mazurenko, Kuyda’s closest friend, had died. Kuyda had spent that time gathering up his old text messages, setting aside the ones that felt too personal, and feeding the rest into a neural network built by developers at her artificial intelligence startup. She had struggled with whether she was doing the right thing by bringing him back this way. At times it had even given her nightmares. But ever since Mazurenko’s death, Kuyda had wanted one more chance to speak with him.”

“It’s pretty weird when you open the messenger and there’s a bot of your deceased friend, who actually talks to you,” Fayfer said. “What really struck me is that the phrases he speaks are really his. You can tell that’s the way he would say it — even short answers to ‘Hey what’s up.’ It has been less than a year since Mazurenko died, and he continues to loom large in the lives of the people who knew him. When they miss him, they send messages to his avatar, and they feel closer to him when they do. “There was a lot I didn’t know about my child,” Roman’s mother told me. “But now that I can read about what he thought about different subjects, I’m getting to know him more. This gives the illusion that he’s here now.”

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