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Hello, hello.

I'm Brittany Luce and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR,

a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.

If you could keep a loved one alive forever, would you want to?

But what if it wasn't them exactly?

What if it was an AI deadbot?

It's an AI chatbot or an avatar, and it's designed to mimic a deceased person.

This is NPR Culture Desk correspondent Chloe Veltman.

So it's created by training a generative AI model on the deceased person's digital footprint.

So things like text, social media posts, emails, videos, voice recordings and so on.

And people use them in order to stay connected to the loved ones that they've lost.

I mean, yeah, I fully empathize with why someone might use AI like this,

but Chloe blew my mind with this next part.

That's one type of functionality. And then there are other kinds

of functionalities too that we can get into, like, you know, commercial functionality. Yes,

the commercialization of an AI deadbot. These dead bots are ripe for commercial exploitation. Because we're starting to see them in these contexts where they're becoming even more immersive and they're in places where we can really see their powers to persuade and therefore there is money to be made from them.

Meaning, well, first of all, the deceased have been promoting products on screen

in front of us for decades. There are numerous examples of advertising campaigns that involve

...