Digital recreations of dead people are on the cusp of reality and urgently need regulation, AI ethicists have argued, warning "deadbots" could cause psychological harm to, and even "haunt", their creators and users. Such services, which are already technically possible to create and legally permissible, could let users upload their conversations with dead relatives to "bring grandma back to life" in the form of a chatbot, researchers from the University of Cambridge suggest. They may be marketed at parents with terminal diseases who want to leave something behind for their child to interact with, or simply sold to still-healthy people who want to catalogue their entire life and create an interactive legacy. But in each case, unscrupulous companies and thoughtless business practices could cause lasting psychological harm and fundamentally disrespect the rights of the deceased, the paper argues. "Rapid advancements in generative AI mean that nearly anyone with internet access and some basic knowhow can revive a deceased loved one," said Dr Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, one of the study's co-authors at Cambridge's Leverhulme centre for the future of intelligence (LCFI).

The idea of using artificial intelligence (AI) to digitally resurrect a dead loved one might sound like a plot from the latest episode of Black Mirror. But these so-called'griefbots', 'deadbots' or'deathbots' have slowly but surely become a reality, with several firms now offering the service. Now, researchers from the University of Cambridge have warned that these bots could cause psychological harm and even digitally'haunt' those left behind. 'These services run the risk of causing huge distress to people if they are subjected to unwanted digital hauntings from alarmingly accurate AI recreations of those they have lost,' said co-author Dr Tomasz Hollanek. 'The potential psychological effect, particularly at an already difficult time, could be devastating.'

However, the ethics of machine learning remains blurry for many.