WHEN AI RESURRECTS THE DEAD

Families and startups are using Al and deepfake tech to bring loved ones 'back to life' for special occasions, offering closure to some and ethical dilemmas to others

- Viren Naidu

(GETTY IMAGES)

The one person Ajmer-based garment businessman Jaideep Sharma missed deeply at his wedding in August was his father, who had died two years ago. But he had a solution. When the priest asked the couple to seek blessings from their elders, a video began to play, showing Sharma's father speaking in his own voice. It was an apparition of a different kind—one made using AI.

"You know it is AI, but it still moves you," says Sharma, 32, who commissioned the video after coming across a photo from a wedding where deceased grandparents were digitally resurrected to attend their grandchild's ceremony. "I thought, if technology can enable me to seek my father's blessingsthat would be the most meaningful wedding gift. AI allowed me to feel a very personal, intimate connection with my late father on my wedding day-when his absence was strongly felt," says Sharma.

Sharma had reached out to tech entrepreneur Divyendra Singh Jadoun, founder of The Indian Deepfaker, a Pushkar-based synthetic media company that makes hyper-realistic content using deepfake tech, to bring his father "back to life".