HereAfter AI is giving mourning families a space to talk with digital replicas of their deceased loved ones in what some are calling an eerie blurring of the lines between fantasy and reality.
The interactive app is the latest venture in the rapidly-advancing tech space, allowing mourners to keep the voice and personality of their deceased loved ones alive and chat with them using artificial intelligence.
While the innovation might sound unique and comforting to some, others say the development's moral implications could restrict the significance of life to simple characteristics that attempt to replace a once-living person.
“The motivation driving this sort of conversation is clear – we want to keep people around who we've lost,” Orthodox Catholic philosopher Joe Vukov said Sunday on “Fox & Friends Weekend.” He added that the problem lies in ignoring the biological reality that humans are mortal and the moral assumption that people are more complicated than a limited number of duplicable characteristics.