Q: Are you really bringing them back to life?
A: Not exactly.
Q: Does this involve test tubes, bubbling beakers and lots of electro-shocks in a laboratory?
A: No.
Q: Are there henchmen wearing white orderly coats?
A: Sorry.
Q: Or is there some portal into another dimension that's routed through lots of strange tubes stretched out across eternity?
A: No.
Q: Maybe it's magic? Does someone in your office wiggle your nose? Or maybe use a wand?
A: Nah.
Q: Okay, how do you do it?
A: We've built some AIs and trained them to think and speak just like some major historical figures.
Q: Trained? Are they interns?
A: No. They're sometimes called "Large Language Models" or LLMs.
Q: How did you train them?
A: We gathered large amounts of historic writing. Letters, speeches, essays, or more. Then we spent hours with high-performance computer hardware to train the models to speak like them. That means extracting their mannerisms, quirks, verbal ticks and the other essences of their style.
Q: Is that it?
A: Then we mixed in as much factual information as we could find about their life and times. We're still adding more.
Q: So what can you do with it?
A: You can ask any question you want and get an intelligent answer in that person's voice. You could ask Frederick Douglass why he went north. Or Teddy Roosevelt how he felt about building the Panama Canal.
Q: Do we have to limit our conversations to the past?
A: Not at all. You can ask the AI what they think about space flight, the Internet or VR headsets. You'll get an answer.
Q: Really? Is it right?
A: Maybe. We can never really know without getting a real time machine. But the AI will come up with a serious answer.
Q: Do the kids like it?
A: Oh, it's always fun to ask questions about modern life, but the real value comes in discussing the past. It's not just some book that might as well be carved in granite. The AIs respond to the questions they're given. They interact.
Q: Do teachers use it in class?
A: Yes. It brings an element of fun and interactivity. The class can come up with their own questions and the teacher can feed them to the AI. It's not a static lesson. The AI will deliver something different for each class or each question.