When Brian Dema wants business advice, he still turns to his father. Richard Dema died four years ago. What his son consults now is an AI version, built from 17,500 pages of files the elder Dema left behind, plus saved voicemails. Julie Jargon tells their story in her Family & Tech column in Tuesday’s Personal Journal. The account is tender and a little dizzying, and it poses a question more families may soon face.
How RichieBot came together
The elder Dema, a Chicago marketer and entertainment producer, left five filing cabinets of client notes, work documents and an unfinished book. His son, who owns a Chicago marketing firm, fed every page into Anthropic’s Claude chatbot. Nineteen people spent six months on it, including a Stanford psychologist who helped design its personality.
A 3-D-printed head, a TV screen and an angled mirror gave RichieBot the look of a hologram. Dema unveiled it at a Chicago tech event in July, and people lined up to ask it questions. The $150,000 project was partly a storytelling showcase for prospective clients.
It isn’t a perfect likeness. Tested against a profile drawn from the 11 people closest to Richard, the bot came across as more extroverted and short on his humor, and it lacks his distinctive laugh. One cousin found it emotionally difficult. Still, Dema says, “It’s not my dad but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t feel good when he gives me advice.” He thinks his father would have approved.
Put your wishes in writing
Experts expect likenesses like this to get cheaper and easier within years, and some urge caution. Jed Brubaker, an associate professor of information science at the University of Colorado-Boulder, says grief involves adapting to a new normal, and a bot used to avoid a loss carries some risk. Messages from a loved one could also reveal things a family never wanted to know.
Lilian Edwards, a law and technology professor at Newcastle University in England, says people should spell out how they want their digital information handled after they die. She also recommends adding legacy contacts — people you name ahead of time to handle an account after your death — to online and social-media accounts.
Our take: the digital part of an estate plan deserves the same care as the house. List the accounts, note where the photos and voice recordings live, and write down whether you’d welcome, limit or refuse an AI likeness. Families rarely get to choose when they’ll need that list, so it’s kinder to write it while everyone’s still here to help.