TALKING TO LOST LOVED ONES Six Days After Giving birth to twin

Boys in 2020,Melissa Gowin asda stroke. Doctors he discovered he

had a congenital heart defect;she is currently on transplant list. Shortly

After, her husband,Jason,w a s diagnosed with stage 3 stomach

Cancer." In just a Short Amount of time,my wife and I were faced with a very real possibility that we weren't going to be alive to raise our three boys. "Jason tells TIME.

But the couple from Athens,Pa., wanted to make sure they'd always be in their children's lives. After watching Man Of Steel with their 7-year-old son,Jayce,Jason had an idea: "Superman talks to his dad in the Fortress of Solitude. To me, it was an Al of Superman's dad.

I thought, somebody must have already built this thing. Somebody is building Al people."

Somebody had . L A nativeJustin Harrison came up with the idea to create his Al company YOV, acronym for You ,Only Virtual , after a motorcycle accident nearly killed him in 2019. He built a system to create a "Versona"-a virtual persona that will exist after a loved one dies. "We

use our Al program to decipher the essence of the person, "Harrison tellsTIME." We input whatever text, videos,recordings that somebody Has. We calibrate it to be talking to one specific person. "Userscan uploadcommunicationst o YOV's website to update their Versona.

Melissa is grateful her children will always have Also father and her husband--Jayce has nicknamed his dad'sVersona Robodad. "It's Nice To know that my kids have a version of Jason or me Anything happens to us," she tellsTIME."Just knowing that will be there for them is very fulfilling."

VICE NEWS TONIGHT / S7 EP11

THURSDAY, MARCH 16, 2023