Is it the right thing to do to bring Queen Elizabeth back from the dead?

In recent years, technology has been employed to resurrect the dead, mostly in the form of departed celebrities. Carrie Fisher was digitally rendered to reprise her role as Princess Leia in the latest "Star Wars" film. Kanye West famously gifted Kim Kardashian a hologram of her late father for her birthday last year. Most recently and controversially artificial intelligence was used to deepfake chef Anthony Bourdain's voice to provide narration in the documentary film "Roadrunner."

Now, as the world mourns over the death of Britain's Queen Elizabeth, it makes one wonder if she can be brought back to life with the help of artificial intelligence. In what seems eerily like a "Black Mirror" episode, Microsoft announced earlier this year it had secured a patent for software that could reincarnate people as a chatbot, opening the door to even wider use of AI to bring the dead back to life. We asked our faculty experts about AI technology in use today, the future of digital reincarnation, and the ethical implications of artificial immortality.

All artificial intelligence uses algorithms that need to be trained on large datasets. If you have lots of text or voice recordings from a person to train the algorithms, creating a chatbot that responds similarly to the real person is very doable. The challenges arise in unstructured environments, where the program has to respond to situations it hasn't encountered before. When we learn about some very sophisticated use of AI to copy a real person, such as in the documentary about Anthony Bourdain, we tend to extrapolate from that situation that AI is much better than it is. They were only able to do that with Bourdain because there are so many recordings of him in various situations. If you can record data, you can use it to train an AI, and it will behave along the parameters it has learned. But it can't respond to more occasional or unique occurrences. Humans have an understanding of the broader semantics and can produce entirely new responses and reactions. We know the semantic machinery is messy.

Is it Ethical?

The more important question than the chaotic nature of the AI machinery is if this method is ethical. If it is the right thing to do to resurrect dead people. Well, the relatives of these dead people will definitely, but the impact of this situation will not always be bounded within the family circle. Once AI-based software like this becomes available to people, it does not do not only stop bringing people back alive.  These debates are happening now in the AI community. Some think it will take 50-plus years for this to happen, and others think we are closer.  AI has been very successful in the last few years in problems relating to changing the tone or style of images, videos, or text. For example, we can replace the face of a person in a picture or a video, change the words of a person in a video, or change the voice of an audio recording. AI has also been somewhat successful in modifying the words in a sentence to change the tone or style of a sentence, for example, to make it more serious or funnier or use the vocabulary of a specific person, alive or dead.