Great Stuff: Synthetic Undead or Hi, Grandma
February 24, 2026
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
One of my team sent me a patent to look at. The document is US12513102B2.pdf, “Simulation of a User of a Social Networking System Using a Language Model.” The USPTO patent server was dead on February 17, 2026. But I had a couple of urls, one official and one unofficial. You can, however, look at what appears to be the full text of the patent using Google’s patent service. View the Google version of the patent using this hot link: US12513102B2. If you want a copy, it may be findable online when you poke around.
(By the way, Google Patents did not display a download PDF option in either Opera or Edge for me on February 17, 2026. To be candid, locating US government information is quite an adventure. If anyone reading this post wants to be part of an informal group focused on finding US government information, please, write kentmaxwell @ proton dot me.)
If you don’t want to fool around with the techno-legal lingo of a real US patent, you can read “Meta Patents AI That Takes Over a Fead Person’s Account to Keep Posting and Chatting” yourself.
I am not going to pass judgment on the novelty of the Meta patent. The USPTO okayed the uniqueness of the Meta innovation. Syfarth Shaw LLP did its job.
In a nutshell, a dead person posts online. Meta ingests the info and crafts a large language model representing the deceased’s utterances. Then the LLM allows a person who wishes to converse with the departed spouse, friend, colleague, etc. to enter a prompt and then the system outputs what the LLM predicts the unalive entity would say.
Will the system allow the presentation of audio in the unalike’s voice? Will the system allow synthetic video of the unalive? I think so. Here’s the relevant passage from the patent document:
“According to an embodiment, the bot 150 performs direct interactions with specific users, for example, a chat or direct messaging. According to an embodiment, the responses generated by the language model are converted to audio signal to perform an audio call with a user. According to an embodiment, a video generation model generates a video of the target user combined with audio signal generated from text generated by the language model to simulate a video call with the target user.”
Will an implementation of this make money and permit advertising? My view is that this will be a winner, assuming the deceased left behind sufficient digital dust, artifacts, and Facebook posts.
Who will pay to talk to a representation of a formerly living person? Here’s a rundown my team and I worked up at lunch:
- Grieving family members
- Co-dependent colleagues
- Abandoned lovers
- Clients of an expert who want the deceased person’s point of view
- Funeral homes offering this as a “day of the visitation” service.
The advertising would slot into the stateful user’s online profile.
What could go wrong? My hunch is that careful filtering of the synthetic unalive will not be included in Version 1.0 of the system. What if the formerly living had a bit of a sporty life in Meta’s online properties? Yeah, well, that might be interesting.
Meta is fresh in my mind. One of its professionals suggested that a young person spending 16 hours of a 24 hour day exploring Instagram is not addicted. Interesting idea just like this nifty idea.
Stephen E Arnold, February 24, 2026
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