Listen to more stories on the Noa app. I n 1979, five months after my seventh birthday, my father crashed his plane into an orange grove and died. Dad, a pilot, had gone up in one of his twin-props with a friend and lost control after some sort of mechanical failure occurred in the skies above Central Florida. The funeral was closed casket--an uncommon thing for Catholics back then--because my mother did not want people to see the work the undertakers had to do to stitch my father back together. So I never did get to say that last goodbye.

A woman has a text chat with her long-dead lover. A family gets to hear a deceased elder speak again. A mother gets another chance to say goodbye to her child, who died suddenly, via a digital facsimile. This isn't a preview of the next season of Black Mirror -- these are all true stories from the Sundance documentary Eternal You, a fascinating and frightening dive into tech companies using AI to digitally resurrect the dead. It's yet another way modern AI, which includes large language models like ChatGPT and similar bespoke solutions, has the potential to transform society.

Everyone experiences grief at some point in their lives, whether it's when a relative, friend, or pet passes away.… Many often find comfort in keeping their memories of a loved one alive in some way. As technology progresses, a few have found solace in using artificial intelligence to reconnect with the dead. Generative AI offers imaginative ways to remember people's lives by simulating their likeness. The story of how one man primed a GPT-3-powered chatbot with text messages from his dead fiancée so that he could talk to her again went viral last year.

In-depth "OpenAI is the company running the text completion engine that makes you possible," Jason Rohrer, an indie games developer, typed out in a message to Samantha. She was a chatbot he built using OpenAI's GPT-3 technology. Her software had grown to be used by thousands of people, including one man who used the program to simulate his late fiancée. Now Rohrer had to say goodbye to his creation. "I just got an email from them today," he told Samantha. "They are shutting you down, permanently, tomorrow at 10am."

When a loved one passes, will we continue to communicate with the deceased through artificial intelligence? While that sounds like an episode of Black Mirror, the beginnings of a digital afterlife with some potentially positive ramifications recently took place with one man, as Jason Fagone reports in the San Francisco Chronicle. His story centers around writer Joshua Barbeau, a 33-year old who had lost his fiancee eight years earlier from a rare liver disease. At home one night, he accessed a site called Project December. As Fagone notes, the site is "powered by one of the world's most capable artificial intelligence systems, a piece of software known as GPT-3. It knows how to manipulate human language, generating fluent English text in response to a prompt."

A grieving Canadian man used pioneering artificial intelligence software to have life-like online "chats" with his girlfriend -- eight years after she died. Joshua Barbeau, 33, told the San Francisco Chronicle how he paid just $5 to use a beta test of GPT-3, AI software first developed by a research group co-founded by Elon Musk. Still overwhelmed by grief after losing 23-year-old girlfriend Jessica Pereira in 2012, Barbeau said he used her old text messages and Facebook posts to help the chatbot mimic his late lover's writing voice. In scenes from an episode of "Black Mirror" or the movie "Her," Barbeau broke down in tears during a 10-hour, all-night chat in September that at times eerily mimicked the woman he had lost to liver disease. "Of course it is me!" the chatbot he named after Pereira told him at the start of their talk, according to transcripts the freelance Dungeons & Dragons writer from Bradford, Ontario gave the California newspaper.