Of Course GenAI Just Brought Back Miguel de Unamuno
✨ At the University of Salamanca — the very institution where he once served as rector — you can now talk to Miguel de Unamuno. Listen to his voice. Ask him questions. Get answers rooted in the real writings of one of Spain’s most complex thinkers.
Sometimes the best ideas come from the least expected places. Like a scene in Star Trek: Picard, where someone’s reading Unamuno in the year 2399. That little spark was all it took for Ángel Lozano, a retired professor from the University of Salamanca, to wonder: what if we actually brought Miguel de Unamuno back to life?
And now, we kinda have.
Using generative AI and 3D avatar tech, Lozano and a small team have created a digital version of the Spanish philosopher. Not just an image, but a voice, a conversational partner, a presence. It’s like ChatGPT, if ChatGPT had spent a life writing devastating essays about existence.
This isn’t about deepfakes or novelty. It’s about something deeper, and honestly, kind of beautiful. It’s about making history feel alive, touchable. It’s about realizing that creativity often blooms when you mix distant things: like a dusty archive and the wild potential of AI. A diverse team and toolkit.
The project is still in prototype, but it taps into something bigger. We talk a lot about AI disrupting creativity, but maybe it’s more accurate to say AI expands it. The more imaginative uses we’re seeing don’t replace human ingenuity. They channel it in weird, exciting directions.
Unamuno once said, “If you, reader, read me, I live.” With this project, that quote lands a little differently. The reader is now a user. The text is now a voice. And Unamuno? He lives again in all our strange, creative, techno-human glory.
And it’s exactly the kind of thing that makes me believe in the bright future tech + humanity.
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