Can Algorithms Recreate A Personality?

Microsoft's has obtained a patent for a "conversational chatbot of a specific person" created from images, recordings, participation in social networks, emails, letters, etc., coupled with the possible generation of a 2D or 3D model of the person, and for some reason, it has largely been interpreted by the media as an attempt to find a way to talk to the dead. For Microsoft, the reference to a specific person is appreciably broader, and as the patent notes, can also apply to "a past or present entity (or a version thereof), such as a friend, a relative, an acquaintance, a celebrity, a fictional character, a historical figure, a random entity, etc." We've been here before: in 2016, a Russian technologist, Eugenia Kuyda, co-founder of the artificial intelligence startup Replika and a chatbot specialist, tried to "reconstruct" her friend, the entrepreneur Roman Mazurenko, who had been killed in a hit-and-run accident, from the huge history of instant messaging conversations she had with him. Before that, a well-known episode of Black Mirror, "Be right back", speculated on the possibility of creating robots using all the digital data that the people they were intended to replace had generated and stored throughout their lives. The idea of a "digital ghost" of a loved one gives us the possibility of being able to'be' with someone we have lost, and confronts our awareness of the loss with our desire to deny it. A chatbot of this type, capable of recreating idioms, writing styles, specific terms or even gestures, can, as in the experiment carried out by Kuyda, help with progressive acceptance of a loss that, on many occasions, comes without a warning, and can be considered as an aid to the mourning process, to the need for a gradual closure of the emptiness created, thanks to a digital avatar.