Brian Dema routinely turns to his father for business advice. His father died four years ago, but Dema created an AI version of him.

J. Richard Dema, a former marketer and entertainment producer in Chicago, had left behind five filing cabinets of work-related documents including client notes and an unfinished book. Dema fed all 17,500 pages into Anthropic's Claude chatbot in an effort to create his very own "RichieBot."

Then Dema wondered if he could train the bot to sound like his father using voicemail messages he had saved from him. What if he could also create a three-dimensional image of his dad? Dema, who owns a marketing firm in Chicago, put his team to work and solicited help from friends, including a Stanford psychologist who helped design the chatbot's personality. In all, 19 people worked for six months to bring Richard Dema back to life.

Using a 3-D-printed model of his father's head, a TV screen and an angled mirror, he created what looked like a hologram of his father.

"We were very intentional about the uncanny valley nature of this, so we made it intentionally abstract," Dema says. "Initially it had kind of a scary smile, so we went with a more pensive expression."

Dema unveiled RichieBot during a tech event in Chicago in July. People lined up to ask it questions and it enthusiastically provided answers, declining when it didn't know.

His marketing firm filmed the process for a 20-minute documentary it plans to premier in San Francisco later this month, followed by a debut on YouTube.

Dema's project was a complex endeavor. It cost $150,000, and was intended in part to show prospective clients his firm's storytelling capabilities. Yet AI experts say in a matter of years we will all be able to create similar AI likenesses of our loved ones-with less money and effort.

At that point, the real question will be: Should we?

Our bots, our selves

People have been creating basic AI companions for the last two years, and AI experts say the technology is already good enough to create clumsy AI models of real people.

In less than five years, most people will have their own AI agents helping them perform daily tasks, all the while amassing a wealth of personal data, both meaningful and mundane, says Jed Brubaker, an associate professor of information science at the University of Colorado-Boulder, who has published a paper on AI ghosts.

"People are always dying," he says. "That shifts the AI agent from being the thing you use to it being your AI ghost."

But using an AI agent to preserve the legacy of a loved one can be tricky, especially if people use it to help them through their grief, says Brubaker.

"One of the most important things that happens after you lose someone is accommodation, meaning you start to adapt to a new normal," he says. "If people are turning to this technology to avoid the reality of their loss, there is some risk there."

There's also the risk that uploading a loved one's emails, texts and chatlogs to AI could result in learning something you didn't want to know about that person. Among the piles of information might be evidence of an affair, or of beliefs they held that you might find offensive.

Our AI afterlife preferences will also start appearing in more wills. Lilian Edwards, a professor of law and technology at Newcastle University in England, says people should state how they want their digital information to be handled after they die. They should also add legacy contacts to their online and social-media accounts.

"We type so much into Google and ChatGPT now," she says. "Do we want a record of all of that to be kept? Should all of this be wiped by default?"

The existential question

Even if someone creates an AI personality based on all of a person's digital files, how closely can it mimic the actual person?

Dema's psychologist friend used three psychological instruments, including a questionnaire that measures five main personality traits, to determine how well the bot's personality matched a profile of Richard created from a detailed survey of the 11 people closest to him. Those people included cousins, friends and former clients. (Dema's mother and sister are both deceased.) They found that the bot sounded more extroverted than Richard, but that it was lacking in his humor.

"My father had a very distinctive laugh, which the bot didn't have," Dema says. "It's not my dad but it doesn't mean it doesn't feel good when he gives me advice."

Some of the people who knew Dema's father had mixed feelings about the bot, including a cousin who found it emotionally difficult, he says. "It opened up grief again for some people."

He expects his father would have approved of him creating the bot. Still, Dema grapples with the bigger questions it poses for individuals and for society.

"Should we do this?" Dema asks. "My conclusion is I think we should, with the right guardrails. It can be an amazing way to remember someone, but we have to be careful."