The ethics of raising the dead.

Digitally.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Stephanie Hughes.

There's an emerging industry that uses artificial intelligence to create simulations of people who've died.

These post-mortem avatars are also called grief bots.

Some people say this practice raises a number of ethical issues, including Tomash Holinek, a researcher at the University of Cambridge.

I had him walk me through the mechanics of how this technology

works. There are services that allow us to preserve ourselves for future generations. So this first

type of service really is centered around your decisions regarding what it is that you think

should be fed into a system, what it is that you think represents you.

And there are services that allow people to simulate their deceased loved ones, for instance.

Usually it involves uploading different types of data that we all leave behind.

Could be WhatsApp messages that you send to someone emails.

Could be videos that, again, are then meant to be

compiled in a way, processed and productive of a particular representation of you.

What's your sense of how popular this is as a service?

It's really hard to say, well, what we can definitely say is that there are more and more

companies offering these types of services.

It's very hard to speak about numbers, in part because while I've told you about these dedicated

services, so we know that there are people who are willing to pay to either preserve themselves

or resurrect,

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