Journalist Jim Acosta hosted one of the oddest interviews in modern media history. He spoke with an AI avatar, but not just some ethereal bot based on no one in particular. The AI was a stand-in for a young man who died years ago.

Acosta interviewed the AI avatar of Joaquin Oliver, a young man who was tragically killed in the Parkland High School shooting in 2018. The boy’s parents gave Acosta permission to interview the simulacrum of their deceased son. The 2018 shooting represented something of a turning point in an already politically charged topic.

Acosta asked the avatar about its favorite movies, pastimes, and most significantly, its opinion about gun violence and its potential solutions. The interview takes place in the first segment of the video below.

A multitude of media figures were quick to denounce Acosta’s choice to interview an AI system as if it were some kind of genuine embodiment of the young Oliver, who would be 25 today were he still living. Robby Soave of The Hill was just one of many to struggle with the mere idea of a journalist conducting this kind of faux interview. Co-hosts of America This Week, Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi, broadened out from the Acosta interview to warn against normalizing this kind of behavior in general.

There’s sadly no way to find out what Oliver would say if he were still alive, and it seems manipulative to interact with a computer as if it’s a person. I personally never thought we’d live to see the day where something like this happens, but in the age of AI avatars, and our cultural tendency to anthropomorphize them, it’s becoming more pervasive.