My mother is sitting across from me at our kitchen table. There's a towel covering something in front of her, and she's not sure she wants to lift it.

"Nothing's going to jump out at you," I reassure her.

She pulls the cloth off and finds a Big Mouth Billy Bass.

Immediately, she recognizes it as a gift given to me by grandfather years ago. What she doesn't know yet is that it's been gutted and fitted with a new brain, trained on several hours of recorded phone calls with her father.

Before she can press the button, the fish comes to life, glitching and flopping.. (Apparently some wires came loose during the road trip home.)

A few hours of fish surgery later, and we’re ready to try again.

This time she asks, "How was your weekend, Billy?"

The fish pauses. Then, in a voice surprisingly similar to her father's, it responds.

"Didn't do much. Hung on the wall, listened to folks carry on, and I thought about dancing a little. I miss dancing more than fishing, if you can believe it."

I waited nervously for her reaction...

She began to laugh.

Why build this project?

This trope has been done several times already. There are tons of projects showing how to “hack” and “upgrade” a Big Mouth Billy Bass. Even I had built something like this years ago. (I got Alexa running on it so I could play Skyrim). For lack of a better malaphor, it seems this Instructable is beating a dead fish.

So why is it different?

This time, we’re broaching the sensitive topic of digital immortality.

We’re already a few years into a world where you can resurrect the likeness of a dead person for 20$/month, and almost no one is talking about it. Mostly because it’s taboo, and taboo things don’t get talked about. But I've found that comedy can help shift the Overton window, so I decided to build this silly contraption for that purpose.

Hopefully I can make you laugh before the existential dread sets in.

And with that, it’s time to resurrect Grandpa!

Check out the rest of the build tutorial on Instructables:

https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Put-ChatGPT-Into-a-Big-Mouth-Billy-Bass-Sin