Artificially alive: How AI is bringing the dead back and what that means for the living
Peer-Reviewed Publication
This month, we’re focusing on artificial intelligence (AI), a topic that continues to capture attention everywhere. Here, you’ll find the latest research news, insights, and discoveries shaping how AI is being developed and used across the world.
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 13-May-2026 14:15 ET (13-May-2026 18:15 GMT/UTC)
A new study shows that generative AI is already being used to “bring back” the dead, as entertainment icons, as political witnesses, and as everyday companions for grieving families. Tracing cases of AI “resurrections,” the study claims this practice isn’t just emotionally powerful; it’s ethically explosive because it turns a person’s voice, face, and life history into reusable raw material. AI resurrections are important because they can happen with little or no consent, clear ownership rules, or accountability, creating a new kind of exploitation the authors call “spectral labor,” where the dead become an involuntary source of data and profit, while the living are left to navigate blurred lines between memory and manipulation, comfort and coercion, tribute and abuse.
Researchers have developed a wearable, comfortable and washable device called Revoice that could help people regain the ability to communicate naturally and fluently following a stroke, without the need for invasive brain implants.
AI analysis of 20 years of satellite data shows floating macroalgae blooms expanding worldwide, with rapid growth beginning around 2008–2010. While floating algae can support marine life offshore, large blooms threaten coastal ecosystems, tourism and local economies when they reach shore.
Recent survey delivers the first systematic map of LLM tool-learning, dissecting why tools supercharge models and how four-stage workflows (plan→select→call→respond) perform, while cataloging benchmarks and open challenges to jump-start newcomers.
Research team unveils ProSyno, a context-free prompt-learning model that taps Wiktionary descriptions and a dynamic matching encoder to spot synonyms across domains without KGs or corpora, setting new benchmarks on four datasets.
From text generation in academic settings to the ethical challenges of using artificial intelligence in the publishing industry: Professor Christoph Bläsi takes a comprehensive look at AI in book studies – and far beyond. Since 2019, he has been one of three spokespersons for the KI@JGU network.