Soon you can immortalize yourself as an A.I. chatbot. But should you? Digital Trends

Until technology allows us to upload our consciousness to a computer when our physical bodies start irreparably failing, death is going to remain a real thing. But what if you could continue communicating with loved ones -- or, at least, a reasonable facsimile of them -- long after they've shuffled off this mortal coil? It might sound like an episode of Black Mirror (it is!), but it's also the basis for a recently announced research project being carried out at India's Shree Devi Institute of Technology. Researchers Shriya Devadiga and Bhakthi Shetty have been investigating how a chatbot could be made to duplicate a person's personality digitally, granting users the ability to chat with an A.I. approximation of an individual, such as a family member, who is no longer around. For their study, the researchers used Replika A.I., an app created by Russian coder Euginia Kuyda.