"Devastated and (she's just discovered) pregnant, the woman decides to try out a service that uses AI software to re-create lost loved ones by culling their likeness and personality from their digital footprint. At first, it's just (a word that now comes with a shiver attached) a chatbot. Then its parent company launches a new beta program: They send the woman a synthetic body that, once activated, will essentially replace her dead husband with more and more accuracy as it (another shiver) learns."
"Two years and change later, Jordan Harrison's Marjorie Prime had its New York premiere at Playwrights Horizons. To say something must have been in the water would be disingenuous - we know exactly what that something was, and in the past decade it has only metastasized. Or is that Meta™-stasized? In Marjorie Prime, set somewhere in the middle of the 21st century, an 85-year-old woman named Marjorie talks to an AI reconstitution of her late husband, Walter, helping it to become more Walter-like by feeding"
Black Mirror's 2013 episode "Be Right Back" follows a woman who uses AI compiled from a deceased husband's digital footprint to recreate him, first as a chatbot and later as a synthetic body delivered by the company. In one eerie scene she dumps a dormant flesh droid in the bathtub and waits for it to be "filled." Jordan Harrison's Marjorie Prime premiered in New York at Playwrights Horizons and imagines a mid-21st-century world where Primes—AI reconstitutions of the dead—converse with survivors. An 85-year-old Marjorie trains a Walter Prime with reminiscences, and later a daughter interacts with a Marjorie Prime, suggesting such companions become normalized amid rising real-world examples.
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