The AI that (almost) lets you speak to the dead

It's odd holding a minute's silence for a dead person who you never knew anything about, especially at a tech show where you can see messages from their AI reincarnation flashing up on a massive screen behind the very-much-alive man who has made this whole strange scene possible. Is this what a 21st-century Dr Frankenstein looks like? Except now, instead of stitching body parts together to recreate life, what we're seeing is found fragments of the deceased's personality put through a form of machine learning to create a semblance of their life after death. Very recently however, Luka was adapted in a brand new way, to include a chatbot based on a real human being--one who just so happens to be dead. It's this ghost-in-the-machine that has the audience spellbound, as Luka's cofounder Eugenia Kuyda explains how text messages, social media conversations, and other sources of information on the deceased were grafted onto an existing AI platform.