I turned myself into an AI-generated deathbot - here's what I found If a loved-one died tomorrow, would you want to keep talking to them? Not through memories or saved messages, but through artificial intelligence - a chatbot that uses their texts, emails and voice notes, to reply in their tone and style. A growing number of technology companies now offer such services as part of the digital afterlife industry, which is worth more than £100bn, with some people using it as a way to deal with their grief. Cardiff University's Dr Jenny Kidd has led research on so-called deathbots, published in the Cambridge University Press journal Memory, Mind and Media, and described the results as both fascinating and unsettling. Attempts to communicate with the dead are not new.

Rod Stewart had a few surprise guests at a recent concert in Charlotte, North Carolina. His old friend Ozzy Osbourne, the lead singer of Black Sabbath who died last month, was apparently beamed in from some kind of rock heaven, where he was reunited with other departed stars including Michael Jackson, Tina Turner and Bob Marley. The AI-generated images divided Stewart's fans. Some denounced them as disrespectful and distasteful; others found the tribute beautiful. At about the same time, another AI controversy erupted when Jim Acosta, a former CNN White House correspondent, interviewed a digital recreation of Joaquin Oliver, who was killed at the age of 17 in a 2018 high school shooting in Florida.

Every few years, Hany Farid and his wife have the grim but necessary conversation about their end-of-life plans. They hope to have many more decades together--Farid is 58, and his wife is 38--but they want to make sure they have their affairs in order when the time comes. In addition to discussing burial requests and financial decisions, Farid has recently broached an eerier topic: If he dies first, would his wife want to digitally resurrect him as an AI clone? Farid, an AI expert at UC Berkeley, knows better than most that physical death and digital death are two different things. "My wife has my voice, my likeness, and a lot of my writings," he told me. "She could very easily train a large language model to be an interactive version of me."