Avatar

...that a new avatar of Mrs. Siddons has appeared at Covent Garden, in the shape of her niece Fanny Kemble...

And honest Alan, who was a grim fire-eater in his day, has in this new avatar no more desperate purpose than to steal some young gentleman's attention from his Ovid, […] [Contrasting the historical Alan Breac with his incarnation in the novel.]

The people are pieces of software called avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse.

A virtual intelligence is an advanced form of user interface software. VIs use a variety of methods to simulate natural conversation, including an audio interface and an avatar personality to interact with.

Devices now track and record our every move and, whether we like it or not, each one of us will bequeath to posterity a virtual avatar, a digital being whose calls, messages, transactions, loves and losses will live on in a vast, unregulated cyberspace. The afterlife has arrived, at least for our cyberbeings.

Last year, a 14-year-old boy died by suicide after falling in love with a chatbot from Character.AI. The last thing he did was have a conversation with an AI avatar that, possibly failing to recognize the severity of the situation, reportedly encouraged him to go through with his plan to “join her”.