AI technology can create realistic clones of people’s voices. The resulting proliferation of synthetic voices ushers in all sorts of new scenarios, good and bad. “Today, with nothing more than a keyboard and an internet connection, you can type, and you can get an image, a voice, a video of anything, [of] anybody doing or saying anything,” says Hany Farid, a computer scientist at Dartmouth University.

Some of these voice clones are deeply meaningful to people, as in the cases of people who lost their ability to speak. But voice clones can also cause harm, as with scams and deepfakes. And some uses fall into murky gray zones, such as voice clones that “speak” after a person has passed away. What happens to a person’s digital voice after they’re gone?

In this episode of The Deep End: Talk to Me , hear more from Farid, as well as from a former hospital chaplain and AI researcher, and from Jules Rodriguez, a man who communicates with a voice clone.…