Back in 2012, Canadian freelance writer Joshua Barbeau tragically lost his fiancée, Jessica, when she succumbed to a rare liver disease. Eight years later and still struggling with his grief, Barbeau came across a curious website called Project December, billed as'the world's most super computer'. Powered by an early version of OpenAI's ChatGPT, for just 5, Project December let him recreate an AI version of Jessica if he typed in details of what she had been like. After typing'Jessica?', the AI version of his deceased girlfriend told him: 'I miss you every single day' and'I am the girl that you are madly in love with.' Speaking on a new BBC documentary'Storyville: Eternal You', Barbeau, now 36, found the eerie tech'uncannily' similar to his loved one. He says: 'It really felt like a gift, like a weight had been lifted that I had been carrying for a long time.'

Check In, released in Apple's iOS 17 in 2023, is a messaging and location-tracking service that allows users to notify contacts when they have arrived at a destination. However, the feature makes suggestions on who users should alert and people have been left baffled by the recommendations. Users have shared these bizarre experiences on social media, with one woman saying she received a prompt to alert her deceased mother and another was sent a notification with her ex-husband's name - they divorced four years ago. A TikToker recently shared a video about the feature after repeatedly being prompted to check in with his boss. Apple released Check In last year, but users have reported only seeing the Siri suggestions over the last few months.

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.

I asked Dad, since he was clearly in such a candid mood. "My worst quality is that I am a perfectionist. I can't stand messiness and untidiness, and that always presents a challenge, especially with being married to Jane." Then he laughed--and for a moment I forgot I wasn't really speaking to my parents at all, but to their digital replicas. This Mum and Dad live inside an app on my phone, as voice assistants constructed by the California-based company HereAfter AI and powered by more than four hours of conversations they each had with an interviewer about their lives and memories. The company's goal is to let the living communicate with the dead.

Like the animated paintings that adorn the walls of Harry Potter's school, a new online tool promises to bring portraits of dead relatives to life, stirring debate about the use of technology to impersonate people. Genealogy company MyHeritage launched its "Deep Nostalgia" feature earlier this week, allowing users to turn stills into short videos showing the person in the photograph smiling, winking and nodding. "Seeing our beloved ancestors' faces come to life ... lets us imagine how they might have been in reality, and provides a profound new way of connecting to our family history," MyHeritage founder Gilad Japhet said in a statement. Developed with Israeli computer vision firm D-ID, Deep Nostalgia uses deep learning algorithms to animate images with facial expressions that were based on those of MyHeritage employees. Some of the company's users took to Twitter on Friday to share the animated images of their deceased relatives, as well as moving depictions of historical figures, including Albert Einstein and Ancient Egypt's lost Queen Nefertiti.