A Dead Man’s AI Doppelgänger Spoke in Court. It Went About as Well as You’d Expect. |
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A Dead Man’s AI Doppelgänger Spoke in Court. It Went About as Well as You’d Expect.
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In May 2025, I wrote about a woman in Arizona who used AI to resurrect her brother (in a sense) to speak on his own behalf (in a weird, cryptic way) in a courtroom in front of the man who killed him. Back then, the judge on the case absolutely flipped for this grim display of AI use. Now, that judge’s love of the creepy AI video has led an appeals court to vacate a 10½-year sentence for Gabriel Paul Horcasitas, calling the decision to allow the video to be shown in the first place a “fundamental error.”
It all started when Stacey Wales made a digital ghost of her brother, Christopher Pelkey, who Horcasitas fatally shot........