After You Die, You Could Be Resurrected as a Chatbot. That's a Problem

No one knows where we go when we die. Or for that matter, what happens to our most intimate thoughts, dreams, and desires when the nerve cells in our brains fire for the very last time. But it looks as though Microsoft may have some ideas.

- By Courtney Linder

In December 2020, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) granted a patent to Microsoft that outlines a process to create a conversational chatbot of a specific person using their social data. Specifically, Microsoft could use images, voice data, social media posts, text messages, and written letters to 'create or modify a special index in the theme of the specific person's personality'.

That sounds pretty benign, but in an eerie twist, the patent states that the chatbot could potentially be inspired by friends or family members who are already dead. And the system could even generate a 2D or 3D simulacrum of the person.

Naturally, this opens a whole can of worms, explains Irina Raicu, the director of the internet ethics programme at Santa Clara University's Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. If you try to create a very good chatbot for someone who died ... you could put words into people's mouths that they never said,' she notes.

Taking a person's tweets and Facebook posts, then creating an index - or a sort of catalogue for the data to help a computer search for the right answers to a query does not always lead to organic or honest responses.