New Microsoft Patent Aims to Revive Dead People as an AI Chat Bot

Digital tech behemoth Microsoft has been granted a patent that aims to revive the deceased as an artificial intelligence chat bot.

The concept sounds like it was ripped straight from a science fiction story, largely in part because an episode of Netflix's original program Black Mirror has an episode —"Be Right Back" ( season 2, episode 1) — and the Amazon Prime Video show Upload are based around this exact premise of uploading digital information about a person in order to continue communicate with them post-mortem.

Ostensibly, the larger someone's carbon footprint is, the more accurately their persona will be portrayed by artificial intelligence.

Images, voice data, social media posts and electronic messages of all sorts are factored into recreating a digital afterlife render of the deceased and Microsoft has even begun to plot multidimensional (2D and 3D) models of those who are no longer among the living. Communication between living people and these new digital variants is expected to be activated through both voice and chat command services.

The patent states, per The Independent, "The specific person [who the chat bot represents] may correspond to a past or present entity (or a version thereof), such as a friend, a relative, an acquaintance, a celebrity, a fictional character, a historical figure, a random entity etc. The specific person may also correspond to oneself (e.g., the user creating/training the chat bot."

Would you ever consider using technology such as this or is this something you would rather remain a construct of science fiction?