When someone dies, photographs remain. Videos remain. Their voice may remain. And now, with generative AI, something else can remain too: a version of the dead that answers back.
On July 21, 2026, at an event connected to TechChicago Week in Chicago, an unusual “father” made an appearance. Brian Dema, a Chicago marketing executive, had spent months building an AI version of his father, J. Richard Dema, who had died about four years earlier. He called it RichieBot.
The project cost about $150,000, involved 19 people over roughly six months, and used 17,500 pages of his father’s documents, along with audio and video material. This was not a science-fiction pitch. It was an actual attempt, in 2026, to reconstruct a dead person through data.