Serious question.

With the data that companies have already sucked up on lots of people, there's technically little in the way of them creating such "mimics". Is there anything legally preventing them from doing so without a family's consent once the person is deceased? Given they've already got legal access to the deceased's data (presumably e.g. through their social media subscriptions), who (if anyone) "owns" the person's "tone of voice", "style of speaking", "visual likeness", and "bundle of personality traits"? If such things are somehow copyrightable, then surely every comedian doing an impersonation routine is in breach.

I can imagine someone salivating at the thought of all those rich veins of personalities you could harvest on the internet e.g. your uncle that did that cringeworthy tik-tok that went viral (god rest his soul), who has now been turned in an immortal AI "bumbling fool" for e.g. advertising purposes.

I don't like this timeline.

I also can’t imagine speaking to my Grandma/pa the way I speak to Alexa either, so that’s food for thought.

Jests aside, this is already possible with ML and a large enough data set. There’s nothing state of the art to see here, right? Just implementing existing tech at Enterprise scale/telling the masses?

For examples, see 15.ai or https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice-Cloning. There’s another commercialized service similar to the latter example here I saw recently but I can’t recall the name. I wish the article had some more technical details.