Did Black Mirror: Be Right Back come true?
Highly prescient on software: chatbots built from a dead person's messages, cloned voices and paid services for the bereaved all exist and are documented. It missed on the body, since no android today looks and behaves like a specific person without a human operator, and it overstated how much the typical person posts.
Read the review · 8.6/10 →
How this P(n) was calculated
Each prediction is weighted 1–5 by how pivotal it is to the story: 5 is the core premise, 1 is background detail. Arrived scores 1, arriving 0.5, everything else 0. P(n) is the weighted points divided by the total weight.
| Claim | Prediction · why this weight | Weight | Status | Value | Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BRB-1 | A text chatbot built from a dead person's own messages and posts can hold new conversations in that person's style with the people they left behind. Core premise: the griefbot built from Ash's messages is what the episode is about. |
5 | ARRIVED | 1 | 5 |
| BRB-2 | A dead person's voice can be cloned from existing recordings and used to speak new words to the living, including over the phone. Supporting: the voice-call stage deepens Martha's attachment on the way to the android. |
3 | ARRIVED | 1 | 3 |
| BRB-3 | Bereaved people can sign up to a paid consumer service that builds an interactive simulation of someone who has already died. Texture: the service is simply there, signed up for by a friend; the story isn't about the business. |
2 | ARRIVED | 1 | 2 |
| BRB-4 | A synthetic body made to look like a specific dead person, running a model of their personality, can live in the home and pass as that person at close quarters without a human operator. Major: the synthetic Ash drives the episode's second half and its ending in the attic. |
4 | FAR | 0 | 0 |
| BRB-5 | An ordinary person's everyday posts and messages leave a data trail large enough to model their personality and conversational style convincingly. Supporting: building Ash from public posts explains why the copy misses the private man, a key theme. |
3 | ARRIVING | 0.5 | 1.5 |
| Total | 17 | 11.5 |
P(n) = 11.5 ÷ 17 = 68% · unweighted average 70%
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BRB-1
A text chatbot built from a dead person's own messages and posts can hold new conversations in that person's style with the people they left behind.
Weight 5/5 · Core premise: the griefbot built from Ash's messages is what the episode is about.
In 2016 Eugenia Kuyda built a bot from more than 8,000 lines of Roman Mazurenko's text messages, and in 2021 Joshua Barbeau used Project December on GPT-3 to simulate his late fiancée from her texts and Facebook messages. General-purpose language models now make this a matter of pasting in an export. The weak points are fidelity and continuity rather than existence: Mazurenko's father called the bot 'just a program', and Project December lost its GPT-3 access after OpenAI raised safety concerns. 123
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BRB-2
A dead person's voice can be cloned from existing recordings and used to speak new words to the living, including over the phone.
Weight 3/5 · Supporting: the voice-call stage deepens Martha's attachment on the way to the android.
Research systems cloned an unseen speaker from a three-second sample by January 2023, and commercial tools now offer instant cloning from a few minutes of audio. Amazon demonstrated a dead grandmother's voice reading to a child in 2022 but never committed to releasing it. Chinese firms have sold voice and video replicas of the dead to more than a thousand clients each, and calls to relatives have been reported, though some of the documented 'calls' used a human performer behind the simulation. Regulators now treat cloned voices in calls as a fraud risk, which constrains but does not prevent private use. 4567
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BRB-3
Bereaved people can sign up to a paid consumer service that builds an interactive simulation of someone who has already died.
Weight 2/5 · Texture: the service is simply there, signed up for by a friend; the story isn't about the business.
Project December charged $5 for metered credits in 2021, Chinese firms sell replicas of the dead for a few hundred to several thousand dollars, and 2wai launched a beta app in November 2025 promising avatars from three minutes of footage. The episode's detail of a friend passing on a discreet referral is not documented; the real services are marketed openly, through app stores and promotional videos. The business is fragile: StoryFile, which builds interactive video of the dead from recorded interviews, entered Chapter 11 in 2024, and 2wai's launch drew a widespread public backlash. 8910
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BRB-4
A synthetic body made to look like a specific dead person, running a model of their personality, can live in the home and pass as that person at close quarters without a human operator.
Weight 4/5 · Major: the synthetic Ash drives the episode's second half and its ending in the attic.
Hiroshi Ishiguro's Geminoids have copied specific real people's faces for years, but they are teleoperated and do not walk. Engineered Arts' Ameca, among the most expressive humanoids available, has deliberately grey skin, is offered mainly for rent and does not try to resemble anyone. Combining a personal likeness, autonomous movement and touch, and convincing behaviour in one domestic machine requires advances in materials, actuation and power that nobody has yet shown, so the range is very wide. 111213
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BRB-5
An ordinary person's everyday posts and messages leave a data trail large enough to model their personality and conversational style convincingly.
Weight 3/5 · Supporting: building Ash from public posts explains why the copy misses the private man, a key theme.
Personality traits can already be inferred from digital traces: a 2015 study found models using Facebook Likes judged personality more accurately than friends did. A convincing conversational copy is a different test. Kuyda needed messages pooled from ten people, and the typical user posts far less than Ash does; the median US Twitter user tweeted about twice a month. The episode's own point, that a copy built from what people share misses what they would refuse, has not been refuted, so we treat full arrival as a blind test that close relatives cannot pass. 141516
- FOR Speak, Memory. The Verge, 2016-10-06. Casey Newton reports Kuyda's bot of Roman Mazurenko, built from more than 8,000 lines of text supplied by ten friends and relatives; the piece cites Be Right Back directly.
- FOR A developer built an AI chatbot using GPT-3 that helped a man speak again to his late fiancée. OpenAI shut it down. The Register, 2021-09-08. Barbeau fed Project December snippets of his late fiancée's texts and Facebook messages; OpenAI later ended the service's GPT-3 access over safety concerns and quality fell.
- CONTEXT Call for safeguards to prevent unwanted ‘hauntings’ by AI chatbots of dead loved ones. University of Cambridge, 2024-05-09. Leverhulme Centre researchers (Hollanek and Nowaczyk-Basińska, Philosophy and Technology) note such services already exist and call for consent, age limits and ways to retire deadbots.
- FOR Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers. arXiv (Microsoft), 2023-01-05. VALL-E paper: synthesises speech in an unseen speaker's voice from a 3-second enrolled recording.
- FOR Deepfakes of your dead loved ones are a booming Chinese business. MIT Technology Review, 2024-05-07. Silicon Intelligence and Super Brain each report over 1,000 clients for replicas of the dead; one client paid $1,350 for three deepfaked calls, performed by a staff member with face-swapping.
- CONTEXT Amazon demonstrates Alexa mimicking the voice of a deceased relative. CNBC, 2022-06-22. Amazon showed a feature needing less than a minute of audio but gave no release date; it was a demo, not a product.
- AGAINST FCC MAKES AI-GENERATED VOICES IN ROBOCALLS ILLEGAL. Federal Communications Commission, 2024-02-08. The FCC ruled that AI-generated voices are 'artificial' under the TCPA, citing scams that imitate close family members; a constraint on calls made with cloned voices.
- FOR Deepfakes of your dead loved ones are a booming Chinese business. MIT Technology Review, 2024-05-07. At least half a dozen Chinese companies sell posthumous replicas; prices have fallen from $2,000–3,000 to a few hundred dollars.
- FOR 'Demonic': AI App That Lets Users 'Talk' to Dead Loved Ones Faces Backlash. Decrypt, 2025-11-14. 2wai's HoloAvatar beta launched on iOS on 11 November 2025, free for now with a paid subscription planned, and was widely condemned.
- AGAINST White Plains bankruptcy interrupts talk with the dead. Westfair Business Journal, 2024-05-09. StoryFile filed for Chapter 11 on 5 May 2024 with $1.5 million in assets and $10.5 million in liabilities.
- CONTEXT Ishiguro Lab. - Robots. Ishiguro Laboratory, Osaka University. Geminoid HI and Geminoid F resemble specific real people but are described as teleoperated; none is described as walking.
- AGAINST Engineered Arts: Embodied AI Social Humanoid Robots. Engineered Arts. Ameca's product page shows a gender-neutral humanoid with grey skin, offered for rental; a state-of-the-art face that does not try to pass as human.
- CONTEXT Ameca Humanoid Robot From Engineered Arts to Debut at CES 2022. Robotics 24/7, 2021-12-03. Describes Ameca's 'robotic visage' and notes debate over whether its expressions fall into the uncanny valley.
- FOR Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (via PubMed), 2015-01-12. Across 86,220 volunteers, predictions from Facebook Likes (r = 0.56) beat judgements by Facebook friends (r = 0.49).
- AGAINST Sizing Up Twitter Users. Pew Research Center, 2019-04-24. The most active 10% of US adult users produced 80% of tweets; the median user tweeted about twice a month.
- CONTEXT Speak, Memory. The Verge, 2016-10-06. The Mazurenko bot drew on private messages gathered from friends and family, not public posts, and his father judged it 'just a program'.
Ledger updated 1 Nov 2026. All works on the P(n) Board · Method