YOU AND AI ARE GONNA LIVE FOREVER

AI is offering people a shot at digital immortality. Barry Collins investigates where it might all lead

- Barry Collins

“I would like to make my own witness statement,” said Christopher Pelkey as he stood before Judge Todd Lang in Arizona’s Maricopa County Superior Court, dressed slightly incongruously in a green hoodie and wearing a grey baseball cap, as if he were taking the dogs out for a walk.

“To Gabriel Horcasitas, the man who shot me, it is a shame we encountered each other that day in those circumstances. In another life, uh, we probably could have been friends. I believe in forgiveness and in God, who forgives. I always have and I still do.”

The judge thanked Pelkey as he finished his near four-minute statement, praising the forgiveness he’d shown. “I love the beauty in what Christopher... and I call him Christopher... I always call people by their last names, it’s a formality of the court. But I feel like calling him Christopher as we’ve gotten to know him today.

“I feel that that was genuine,” the judge continued. “That his obvious forgiveness of Mr Horcasitas reflects the character I heard about today. But it also says something about the family. Because you told me how angry you were, and you demanded the maximum sentence, and even though that’s what you wanted, you allowed Chris to speak from his heart, as you saw it. I didn’t hear him asking for the maximum sentence.”

As you've almost certainly deduced by now, the judge didn’t hear Christopher Pelkey at all. Christopher Pelkey died from a gunshot wound inflicted by Gabriel Horcasitas just over three years before “his” witness statement in court.

Pelkey was in fact appearing in court via video, an AI-generated video using photographs and samples of his voice recorded before he died.