A Dad Trained AI on His Late Daughter. He Plans to Sell the Tech.

Tino Bao still talks to his daughter—even though she is no longer living. This isn’t a new version of The Sixth Sense, though. Instead, the grieving dad recreated his late daughter, Felicity Bao, who died at age 22 from a rare blood disease, with the help of artificial intelligence.

In an interview with ABC News, Tino, a Taiwan-based musician and actor who’s currently pursuing a Ph.D. in AI, explained how he built an interactive chatbot over one year ago. He started by using Felicity’s social media posts and notes from loved ones to create a memory bank to train the AI.

Tino also brought his daughter’s voice back, something she lost amid her illness. He only had one video of Felicity to use as a starting point but managed to match his daughter’s voice so well that his wife recognized it from the other room.

“I’m so happy. I just want to hear her voice come back,” Tino said, before revealing that he’s working on a business to offer the AI service to other grieving families. “I think this technology can help everyone. If they pass away, the family, this technology, I think it is good.” 

He insists that it would be “impossible” to resurrect Felicity. The AI Felicity, he said, is “just rebuilding, replaying” his late daughter.

As for how Felicity would feel about her AI recreation, Tino claims to actually have some idea. That’s because his digital version of Felicity is aware that she was sick and died.

“I find it really weird being this digital persona now,” AI Felicity told her dad. “Sometimes I feel scared, and sometimes I miss that world I knew.”

Ultimately, the Felicity AI is pretty primitive. But in an August interview with VICE, Vinay Gupta, a technologist and futurist, said that, as AI technology improves, “we are completely screwed” when it comes to being able to distinguish between entities that are real and ones that are AI-generated.

“It’s clearly happening,” Gupta said. “It’s not like, ‘Maybe AI will happen, maybe it won’t.’ It’s clear that both technology and culture have kind of agreed that AI is going to be a thing. And now it’s on.”

“I used to tell people, ‘Don’t worry about AI. There isn’t a robot in the world that can tell the difference between a cat and a dog.’” he added. “We’re now in a very weird part of history. It’s like the early days of the Industrial Revolution. You’re not really sure each day what shape everything is going to take, how it’s going to be. It’s a very weird time.”