Some may fear the liberties AI will take with the legacies of the dead. To this we emphasise that these liberties are ours to authorise. Chatbots of the dead are creative representations that users should take an active role in shaping. Imagination is integral to all creative representations of the past because imagination is inextricable from... See more

This shift from chatbotsas companions to tools of artistic remembrance deflates many common concerns. From this vantage point, we can see that chatbot ‘actors’ do not necessarily aim at realism. They cannot and will not capture a deceased person fully. They do not delude users into behaving as if the dead are still alive or believing that they are... See more

It is also why we should be suspicious of technology companies that offer us easy, prefabricated, supposedly complete chatbots. We should instead seek technology that enables us to create and fine-tune our own chatbots – without requiring extensive technical expertise. There are no shortcuts to thoughtful representations.

Practitioners should look to the arts and other cultural resources that help people deal with loss and memorialise history. For example, a chatbot could be designed to speak as a spiritual medium channelling the deceased from a spiritual realm in order to emphasise the separation of death and impart a sense of mysticism to the imaginative... See more

And so, the builder of this chatbot is forced to ask difficult questions about the deceased that call for care and attention: how do I want to remember them? How should a person be remembered? The deliberative effort that goes into building a chatbot highlights that the end product is a representation, inflected with the creator’s choices and... See more

There is no one way to design a chatbot ‘actor’ because there is no best or definitive perspective on a person, no best or definitive fictional world in which to encounter someone’s legacy. There are countless useful, informative, intriguing, funny, strange, beautiful perspectives that a chatbot ‘actor’ might stage, just as there are countless ways... See more

The assumption that a chatbot delivers – or seeks to deliver – an authoritative replication of a deceased person makes as much sense as the assumption that an actor’s portrayal of a historical figure in a drama represents the sole faithful depiction of that figure.

This theatre analogy is not perfect. Unlike human actors, chatbots are not physically present. They do not make conscious choices about how to portray characters or co-construct meaning with their audience. Nevertheless, this framework is useful because it clarifies and accentuates the relation between chatbots and the deceased. Actors are neither... See more

Chatbots of the dead, like participatory theatre, allow the audience to directly participate in these fictional worlds, thereby becoming imaginatively acquainted with the real person to whom the character corresponds.