In a courtroom first, AI brings a road rage victim back to life to confront his murderer. What happened?

For two years, Stacey Wales kept a running list of everything she would say at the sentencing hearing for the man who killed her brother in a road rage incident in Chandler, Ariz.

But when she finally sat down to write her statement, Wales was stuck. She struggled to find the right words, but one voice was clear: her brother’s.

“I couldn’t help hear his voice in my head of what he would say,” Wales told NPR.

That’s when the idea came to her: to use artificial intelligence to generate a video of how her late brother, Christopher Pelkey, would address the courtroom and specifically the man who fatally shot him at a red light in 2021.

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On Thursday, Wales stood before the court and played the video — in what AI experts say is likely the first time the technology has been used in the U.S. to create an impact statement read by an AI rendering of the deceased victim.

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