A new trend has emerged in China: people are creating chatbots with the personality and memory of their deceased loved ones, hoping to talk to them again. These bots are called “griefbots” (from the English grief – grief) and are based on advanced technologies of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

One of these Griffbots was created by 29-year-old Chinese programmer Yu Jialing. He managed to reproduce his grandfather, who died almost ten years ago. Yu collected old letters, photos and videos from his grandfather and trained an AI to imitate his grandfather’s speech and thinking. He wanted to apologize to his grandfather for being rude to him once.

Yu used the popular ChatGPT platform, which can imitate human speech. As practice shows, in order for AI to learn the style of a particular person, a lot of data is not needed. The system only needs to be tweaked a bit to get 99% similarity with the right person, the differences will be minimal.

However, the technology is still imperfect and cannot fully recreate live communication. Yu admitted that his bot responded rather slowly and in very general terms. But when the bot remembered his grandfather’s favorite TV show, Yu felt he had achieved his goal. In the end, Yu decided to delete the bot for fear of becoming addicted to it.

In fact, Yu is not alone in his quest to “resurrect” his dead loved ones. In China, other examples of the use of AI for these purposes have also emerged. For example, a blogger from Shanghai named Wu Wuliu created his grandmother’s bot. And one of the Chinese cemeteries used AI and voice cloning to recreate a digital copy of the people who were buried in the territory of this cemetery.

However, griffon boats cause not only interest, but also controversy. Psychologists warn of the possible negative consequences of such communication, which can affect the emotional state of a person. In addition, there are a number of ethical issues associated with protecting the personal information of the deceased and obtaining their consent to the use of AI. There is also the risk of fraud by so-called “psychics”, who can pose as an intermediary between the living and the dead and use AI to deceive. In China, mediums are usually trusted much more than in the rest of the world, and often do not consider this a “divorce”.

Despite all the difficulties and dangers, this technology, apparently, will gradually continue its development, and all legal issues will be resolved over time. The most obvious solution would be to obtain written consent from the person while they are alive. Now few people believe in technology, but in the future, perhaps, it will become ubiquitous, and death as such will cease to exist and frighten with its obscurity. There will be only a “rebirth” of a person from a physical shell into a digital one.