Back from the dead

Bytes can now meet the afterlife, but should they?

- PETER GRIFFIN

Roman Mazurenko, a R Belarussian-born entrepreneur, was run down by a speeding car on a Moscow street in November 2015. In his early 30s at the time, Mazurenko died from his injuries later that day at a nearby hospital. Soon after, his techie mates gathered to remember him. But one of them, San Francisco-based Eugenia Kuyda, wasn't content with memories alone.

She set out to use the artificial intelligence chatbot she was developing to handle restaurant reservations to recreate her dead friend digitally. Mazurenko hadn't been a big user of social media networks, but was a prolific texter. Kuyda used those texts, dating as far back as 2008, and others Mazurenko had sent to his circle of friends to help a neural network learn his personality.

"She fed them into an AI chatbot, made that available as an app so that anyone can download Roman Mazurenko for free on their phones and chat with a dead man," Patrick Stokes, associate professor of philosophy at Deakin University last week told the audience at SXSW Sydney, the Asia-Pacific arm of SXSW, a media and music conference and festival.