Joaquin Oliver was 17 years old when he was shot in the hallway of his high school. An older teenager, expelled some months previously, had opened fire with a high-powered rifle on Valentine's Day in what became America's deadliest high school shooting. Seven years on, Joaquin says he thinks it's important to talk about what happened on that day in Parkland, Florida, "so that we can create a safer future for everyone". But sadly, what happened to Joaquin that day is that he died. The oddly metallic voice speaking to the ex-CNN journalist Jim Acosta in an interview on Substack this week was actually that of a digital ghost: an AI, trained on the teenager's old social media posts at the request of his parents, who are using it to bolster their campaign for tougher gun controls.

The Final Exam, a recently released video game in which you play as a student caught amid a school shooting, lasts for around ten minutes, about the length of a real shooting event in a U.S. school. The game opens in an empty locker room. You hear distant gunfire, screams, harried footsteps, and the thudding of heavy furniture being overturned. The sense of disharmony is immediate: a familiar scene of youth and learning is grimly debased into one of peril. As the lockers surround you, their doors gaping, you feel caged: get me out of here. Moments later, as you enter the gymnasium, a two-minute countdown flashes on screen.

Families of gun violence victims are using artificial intelligence to recreate their loved ones' voices and taunt lawmakers who oppose gun control on the sixth anniversary of the Parkland massacre. The robocall messages are being sent to senators and House members who support the National Rifle Association and Second Amendment rights in a campaign that launched on Valentine's Day, Wednesday, according to the Associated Press. Manuel and Patricia Oliver, whose son Joaquin "Guac" Oliver died in the 2018 high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, said the campaign run through The Shotline website is intended to spur Congress to ban the sale of guns like the AR-15 rifle. "We come from a place where gun violence is a problem, but you will never see a 19-year-old with an AR-15 getting into a school and shooting people," Manuel Oliver told the Associated Press in an interview. The Olivers, immigrants from Venezuela, became activists after Joaquin and 13 other students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School were murdered by a 19-year-old killer with a rifle.

Six years ago today, Joaquin Oliver was killed in a hallway outside his Florida classroom, one of 17 students and staff murdered in the worst high school shooting in the US. On Wednesday, lawmakers in Washington DC will hear his voice, recreated by artificial intelligence, in phone calls demanding to know why they've done nothing to tackle the plague of gun violence. "It's been six years and you've done nothing. Not a thing to stop all the shootings that have happened since," the message from Oliver, who was 17 when he died in the 2018 Valentine's Day's tragedy at Parkland's Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school, says. "I'm back today because my parents used AI to recreate my voice to call you. Other victims like me will be calling too, again and again, to demand action. How many calls will it take for you to care? How many dead voices will you hear before you finally listen?"

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- Wearing his signature hoodie and beanie, an earbud casually hanging from one ear, passionate Parkland teen Joaquin Oliver urges his peers to vote for lawmakers who will end gun violence in a new video released Friday. Next month's election would have been his first chance to vote. The 17-year-old's mannerisms and vernacular "yo, it's me" are shockingly life like, but it is just a mirage -- a realistic, almost eerie artificial intelligence re-creation of the teen who was among the 17 killed in the 2018 Valentine's Day massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, the worst school shooting in history. From the grave, the teen is now begging his peers to cast the vote that he will never cast. "I've been gone for two years and nothing's changed, bro. People are still getting killed by guns," he implores in the video created by his parents' charity to end gun violence.