(Yicai) March 12 -- The latest annual meeting of China's SenseTime Group left many employees of the artificial intelligence company flabbergasted as the deceased founder showed up to deliver a speech -- only as a digital human.

Many employees thought the speech of Tang Xiao'ou, who passed away last December, was recorded by the computer science billionaire before his death but once the digital human mentioned Yolo, a movie released in February, they realized the speech was more recent.

The "resurrection" of Tang is a collective decision of SenseTime, Luan Qing, general manager of a division of the Hong Kong-headquartered company's digital space business group, said to Yicai. The act represents a technological breakthrough in the AI sector and has triggered discussions about life, death, and the ethics of technology, she added.

The move was not unthinkable but practical as all executives of SenseTime use digital persons to show up on some occasions on their behalf, the GM said. The digital human based on Tang used many auxiliary words in the speech, creating an almost realistic impression of details, thanks to breakthroughs in the large language model, she added.

It was not easy to create the model as the team spent a long time finding diverse materials of Tang's voice, using three to four seconds of each tape to train and optimize the model.

Developing digital humans inspired by deceased people is not really a thing yet because people are still exploring how AI can tap into people's unique minds, along with ethical and technological questions, per Luan.

SenseTime's attitude is wait-and-see as it has not yet actively promoted a larger application of avatars of dead people, Luan said, adding that the firm is still trying to understand the demand.

Editor: Emmi Laine