Chatting with your late gran may be OK, but engineering your kids?

It's not often that a news story unsettles me in the way that one I spotted in this very newspaper last week has done.

- Susan Dalgety

Apparently, artificial intelligence (AI) can now be used to 'resurrect' our dead friends and relatives. Not as in bringing granny back to life in the real sense, but by using the digital traces people leave behind to make a chatbot that you can have a conversation with as and when you like.

The technology is very straightforward. You simply upload granny's social media posts, WhatsApp messages and voice notes, and AI builds a profile of how she spoke and wrote. Before long your granny chatbot will be telling you off for wearing too much makeup and demanding another cup of tea (or gin and tonic), just as she did when she was alive and kicking.