AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
You may have seen this: A news interview with an AI-enabled resurrection of one the Parkland school-shooting victims.
Many people were absolutely horrified by this, and I can understand why. Something About this feels so, so wrong, at an instinctive level. Example: Jim Acosta Should Never Work in Journalism Again - Lawyers, Guns & Money There is some kind of unholy sanctity violation going on. The most basic structures of humanity itself seem to be endangered. If you are suspicious of technology (and you should be) then this feels like a new encroachment of it onto the most intimate and personal of realms.
Death and the sacred are deeply entertwined. According to Religion Explained care of the dead is at the very core of reliugion and predate language and culture (check not sure it actually says that)
But then I put on my tech hat and say, eh, why not. In this case, the parents themselves sponsored this resurrection and promoted it – they are the closest to the dead young man in question, so their feelings outweigh those of randoms on the internet. And keep in mind, it isn't the actual person and nobody thinks it is – it is a representation, and like old photos and videos, they are not the thing itself but something else.
Will this become commonplace? Probably, there's demand.
Why are the dead sacred?
This is the actual interesting question. DeathProtocols.
Would I employ this practice, if I could (that is, create a replica of a departed loved one)? Probably not, seems icky and would only cause further heartbreak, I think. Would I mind if someone did this to me? Not really, if I'm dead I'm dead and this isn't bringing me back, no matter how fluently it might be able to model me, it isn't having my experiences (or really any experience at all), so who cares?
Fictional treatments: Ubik, A Memory Called Empire, Black Mirror must have done something...