Son uses AI to ‘resurrect’ late father for moving Christmas gift: ‘I got chills’
NY Post
It allowed her to speak to the ghost of loved ones past.
A Missouri man moved the internet to tears after using artificial intelligence to resurrect his dead father’s voice as a special Christmas card for his mom.
“I decided to do something special for my mom this year for Christmas,” Philip Willett, 27, explained in the caption of the video, which has amassed over 5.6 million views on the platform.
The St. Louis native, who creates content for The Content Guy, explained in the caption that his father John Willett passed away in 2022 after a battle with pancreatic cancer. He wanted to do something unique to honor his “hero” so he decided to digitally resurrect him with AI — specifically with a technology he frequently uses for work.
Willett initially had reservations as he found using his father’s verbal likeness “weird,” he told “Good Morning America.” However, the digital whiz eventually came around to the idea after finding a community of people who used the tech to digitally commune with dead loved ones.
The Missourian specifically used ElevenLabs’ text-to-speech software to match his deceased dad’s exact voice — something he found paramount to making the project a reality.
