Can artificial intelligence really summon dead relatives back from beyond the grave? A growing number of people are trying to find out, with pioneers such as inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil using artificial intelligence to recreate lost relatives. Kurzweil's attempts to'bring back' his father - who died when Kurzweil was 22 - using AI began more than 10 years ago and are chronicled this year in a comic book by Kurzweil's daughter Amy. Kurzweil created a'replicant' of his father by feeding an artificial intelligence system with his father's letters, essays and musical compositions. He now has even more ambitious plans to bring his father back to life using nanotechnology and DNA from his father's buried bones.

In 2016, James Vlahos discovered that his father was dying from terminal lung cancer. Painfully aware that their time together was running out, Vlahos rushed to gather memories while he still could, recording his father's life story; everything from childhood memories to his favourite sayings, songs and jokes. Once transcribed, these recordings filled 200 single-spaced pages. "It was a great, but inert resource, and I longed for something interactive. So I spent nearly a year programming a chatbot replica of my father: the'Dadbot,'" said Vlahos.

That is, he talks to the version of his father that lives on through Dadbot, an artificially intelligent chatbot he designed to retain his dad's experiences and personality. Vlahos documented his experience creating the chatbot in Wired magazine's August cover story, "Dadbot." The bot operates through Facebook Messenger, and it carries out conversations using John Vlahos's own stories and words. Before John Vlahos died -- at home in his sleep at the age of 81, surrounded by family on Feb. 17 -- he was able to interact with the bot himself.

He wrote about creating a chatbot that allows him to "communicate" with his father who died of cancer.

James Vlahos lost his father John to lung cancer in February, but he still talks to him every week. That is, he talks to the version of his father that lives on through Dadbot, an artificially intelligent chatbot he designed to retain his dad's experiences and personality. "It either brings a smile to my face and a warm feeling sometimes, and at other times it brings a tear to my eye," the journalist from Berkeley, Calif., told As It Happens guest host Helen Mann. "It can make him feel closer sometimes, or I can be painfully aware that I'm talking to a computer program that I created that very clearly is not him." Vlahos documented his experience creating the chatbot in Wired magazine's August cover story, "Dadbot."

The first voice you hear on the recording is mine. "Here we are," I say. My tone is cheerful, but a catch in my throat betrays how nervous I am. "Esquire," a second voice on the recording chimes in, and this one word--delivered as a winking parody of lawyerly pomposity--immediately puts me more at ease. The speaker is my dad. We are sitting across from each other in my parents' bedroom, him in a rose-colored armchair and me in a desk chair. It's the same room where, decades ago, he calmly forgave me after I confessed that I'd driven the family station wagon through a garage door. Now it's May 2016, he is 80 years old, and I am holding a digital audio recorder. Sensing that I don't quite know how to proceed, my dad hands me a piece of notepaper marked with a skeletal outline in his handwriting. It consists of just a few broad headings: "Family History." "So … do you want to take one of these cat egories and dive into it?" "I want to dive in," he says confidently. "Well, in the first place, my mother was born in the village of Kehries--K-e-h-r-i-e-s--on the Greek island of Evia …" With that, the session is under way. We are sitting here, doing this, because my father has recently been diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. The disease has metastasized widely throughout his body, including his bones, liver, and brain. It is going to kill him, probably in a matter of months. So now my father is telling the story of his life. This will be the first of more than a dozen sessions, each lasting an hour or more. As my audio recorder runs, he describes how he used to explore caves when he was growing up; how he took a job during college loading ice blocks into railroad boxcars.