AI of dead Arizona road rage victim addresses killer in court
Listen. If this is truly something that this guy would have wanted and it helped his family deal with their loss, more power to them. But I’m telling you right now. If I die and any of you does this to me, I’m visiting everyone you know so I can talk them into killing you. It’s ridiculous enough that people will pay real money to watch a hologram of some dead guy perform a concert. Bringing that but creepier into a courtroom? The irritation with which that thought fills me is enough to give even the dead version of myself a coronary. It feels like we’ve gone way too far.
I don’t mind that AI exists, but I’m sick of having it jammed down our throats and into every other place it doesn’t belong, especially when we don’t even really have a clue what it’s good for or good at or what the implications might be. I don’t want to talk to it for customer service, because if I’m resorting to calling customer service, my problem is probably kind of weird and specific. I don’t want to listen to it on the radio or narrating my audiobooks, because that stuff is art. I don’t want it writing the news or much of anything else, because its writing tends to be flat and terrible. My writing is also terrible, but at least I’m putting my heart and mind into sucking this bad. I just wish we would slow down and consider all of this instead of doing a bunch of shit no one asked for and nobody needs simply because we can. We won’t, but it would be nice.
Chris Pelkey was killed in a road rage shooting in Chandler, Arizona, in 2021.
Three and a half years later, Pelkey appeared in an Arizona court to address his killer. Sort of.
“To Gabriel Horcasitas, the man who shot me, it is a shame we encountered each other that day in those circumstances,” says a video recording of Pelkey. “In another life, we probably could have been friends.
“I believe in forgiveness, and a God who forgives. I always have, and I still do,” Pelkey continues, wearing a grey baseball cap and sporting the same thick red and brown beard he wore in life.Pelkey’s appearance from beyond the grave was made possible by artificial intelligence in what could be the first use of AI to deliver a victim impact statement. Stacey Wales, Pelkey’s sister, told local outlet ABC-15 that she had a recurring thought when gathering more than 40 impact statements from Chris’s family and friends.
“All I kept coming back to was, what would Chris say?” Wales said.Wales and her husband fed an AI model videos and audio of Pelkey to try to come up with a rendering that would match the sentiments and thoughts of a still-alive Pelkey, something that Wales compared with a “Frankenstein of love” to local outlet Fox 10.