A California man loved his father so much that he kept him alive with the help of artificial intelligence.
In 2016, James Vlahos learned his father was diagnosed with terminal cancer and his time in this world was numbered.
“I loved my dad. I was about to lose him,” James said, according to the BBC.
Shocked by this news, James decides to immortalize the time he spent with his father. “I did an oral history project with him where we spent hours and hours and hours just making audio recordings of his life story,” he said.
This was at a time when James was exploring a career in AI.
“I thought, “What if I could use this to make something interactive?'' he thought to himself. “As a way to preserve his memory in a richer way and preserve a part of his personality that was so great.”
Just one year later, in 2017, my father passed away. But on the other hand, James was developing his AI-powered chatbot that could respond to questions in his father's voice.
James is happy with the chatbot, saying it gives him “more than he could have gotten any other way.” “It's not like he's retreating into this very vague memory. I have this wonderful interactive compendium that I can refer to,” he said.
What was just science fiction, James made possible in the real world.
In late 2019, he developed the chatbot into an app called HereafterAI. He enabled users to do the same for their loved ones.
