This is literally a Black Mirror episode -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back

Synopsis: "The episode tells the story of Martha (Hayley Atwell), a young woman whose boyfriend Ash Starmer (Domhnall Gleeson) is killed in a car accident. As she mourns him, she discovers that technology now allows her to communicate with an artificial intelligence imitating Ash, and reluctantly decides to try it. "Be Right Back" had two sources of inspiration: the question of whether to delete a dead friend's phone number from one's contacts, and the idea that Twitter posts could be made by software mimicking dead people."

I understand the value of providing hypothetical situations, but the constant mention of Black Mirror episodes with very little other substance here is getting tiring. Without having seen Black Mirror, that synopsis doesn't add much to the conversation other than "somebody made a tvshow/movie about that". Other than the fact that a similar situation was explored, what new conclusion did the episode reach that warrants mentioning?

Mainly that it was creepy and the widower realized she didn’t really want a dead boyfriend/android thing.

It's an old idea. The premise of caprica was that you could upload your experiences and that would reconstitute your soul (or would it?).

That's a mass media instantiation of the premise of I am a strange loop, by douglas Hofstadter, which is to be honest a tome lamenting the passing of his wife

This is the story behind Replika.

"Three years ago, Kuyda hadn’t intended to make an emotional chatbot for the public. Instead, she’d created one as a “digital memorial” for her closest friend, Roman Mazurenko, who had died abruptly in a car accident in 2015. At the time, Kuyda had been building a messenger bot that could do things like make restaurant reservations. She used the basic infrastructure from her bot project to create something new, feeding her text messages with Mazurenko into a neural network and creating a bot in his likeness. The exercise was eye-opening. If Kuyda could make something that she could talk to—and that could talk back—almost like her friend then maybe, she realized, she could empower others to build something similar for themselves." https://www.wired.com/story/replika-open-source/

Or a more in depth read: https://www.theverge.com/a/luka-artificial-intelligence-memo...

You can talk with the deceased friend: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/roman-mazurenko/id958946383?...

As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, Be Right Back (black mirror ep with a product that is exactly this)

Lol, I love seeing that no idea is completely unique. I have been thinking about it a lot over the last month. I am honestly wondering what your ethical concerns are with this "digital replication".

With bot-like digital replication of oneself the possibilities of things that can be achieved are huge and a lot of ways on how such tech could be misused.

Along with the other stories suggested here, Alistair Reynolds' Revelation Space features "beta simulations" which are essentially the same thing: reconstructions of people based on recordings of them and their speech/writing/interactions.

(There are also "alpha simulations" referenced which were experimental direct mind uploads. The experiment was never repeated because, due to some deficiency in the process, the uploads went mad.)

Lyrebird (https://lyrebird.ai/) is trying to the voice imitation component.

It's scary that you can't even read their privacy policy or ToS without signing up first!

Great! Seems promising.

Check out MariFlow, a RNN trained to play Mario Kart as the creator would. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ipi40cb_RsI

I'd love that. It'd be like Google Duplex, but save me the effort of having to say "no" to going to things.