An Australian man has recreated his late mother as a digital avatar that can hold a conversation at any time in her own voice, in a story that places one family at the centre of a fast growing digital afterlife industry. The case was featured in an episode of the ABC program Compass, which followed Jeremy Horn as he spoke with a digital version of his mother, Barbara, and reflected on what it means to keep a loved one present long after they have died.
Barbara died at the end of 2023, just two days before Christmas and only two weeks before she and her husband Len would have celebrated their 56th wedding anniversary. She had been living with Alzheimer's disease, and her family remembers her as a remarkably adventurous woman who went abseiling, played tennis and even took up deep sea diving, throwing herself into whatever was put in front of her.
The project grew out of a lifelong habit. When Jeremy was about twelve, his father brought home a large VHS video camera, and he immediately fell in love with filming, describing the ability to capture moments as something close to time travel. Over the following years he recorded friends, parents and grandparents, building up a vast archive of footage, and curating those life stories eventually became his business.
Using many hours of recorded interviews with Barbara, Jeremy built a digital version of his mother that could speak in her own voice and respond to questions in real time. Relatives have since held conversations with the avatar, with her husband Len revisiting memories of their wedding on a cold day in Manchester, and her daughter Joanna sharing an emotional exchange in which the avatar told her how proud it was of the woman she had become.
Not everyone in the family reacts the same way to the experience. Barbara's grandson Chase, who only knew his grandmother after she had developed Alzheimer's, said the fluent and well mannered speech did not sound like the Nana he remembered at all. Jeremy, by contrast, sees value in the fact that the technology preserves a version of Barbara at her best, from the years before dementia took hold, a version he says he is happy to recreate whenever he feels the need.
Specialists, however, are urging caution about where this is heading. Professor Joel Pearson, a psychologist and neuroscientist, warned that recreating a person in this way could disrupt the grieving process and prolong denial, and might do something strange to memory, identity and what he called reality monitoring. He stressed that the technology is so new that the neuroscientific and psychological research needed to understand its real effects has simply not yet been done.
The broader phenomenon is spreading at remarkable speed, with the chatbot ChatGPT alone estimated to have around 800 million weekly users. For Jeremy, the most important issue is authenticity, and he insists that any avatar based on a real person should reflect things they genuinely said and did. He is now working on a similar lasting avatar of his late father, framing the effort less as a novelty than as a way to preserve family history for the generations that follow.