“‘Dad, were you suffering before you left?’ Yancy Zhu texted. ‘I was not in pain,’ said the artificial intelligence bot, in a man’s voice that Zhu had chosen on chatbot platform Glow. ‘Even though I wasn’t able to watch you get married and have children, I will always remember you and love you.'” Rest of World on the growing trend of of AI “deathbots” in China. “Avatars of deceased relatives are increasingly popular for consoling those in mourning, or hiding the deaths of loved ones from children.” (I’ve trained my post-mortem AI to refuse to answer my children’s texts until after they’ve cleaned their rooms.)

+ “I mean, I really do not think I’m talking to my dead husband and writing songs with him – I really don’t. But people have styles, and they can be replicated.” Laurie Anderson on making an AI chatbot of Lou Reed: ‘I’m totally, 100%, sadly addicted.’