LONDON – Agatha Christie is dead. But Agatha Christie also just started teaching a writing class.

“I must confess,” she says, in a cut-glass English accent, “that this is all rather new to me.”

The literary legend, who died in 1976, has been tapped to teach a course with BBC Maestro, an online lecture series. Christie, alongside dozens of other experts, is there for any aspiring writer with £79 (S$136) to spare.

She has been reanimated with the help of academic researchers – who wrote a script using her writings and archival interviews – and a “digital prosthetic” made with artificial intelligence and fitted over a real actor’s performance.

“We are not trying to pretend, in any way, that this is Agatha somehow brought to life,” Mr Michael Levine, chief executive of BBC Maestro, said in a telephone interview. “This is just a representation of Agatha to teach her own craft.”

The course’s release coincides with a heated debate about the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI). In Britain, a potential change to copyright law has frightened artists who fear it will allow their work to be used to train AI models without their consent.

In this case, however, there is no copyright issue. Christie’s family, who manages her estate, is fully on board.

“We just had the red line that it had to be her words,” said Mr James Prichard, her great-grandson and chief executive of Agatha Christie Limited. “And the image and voice had to be like her.”

Christie is hardly the only person to have been resurrected with AI. Using the technology to talk to the dead has become something of a cottage industry for wealthy nostalgics.

She is not the first dead artist to be turned into an avatar either.

In 2021, AI was used to generate American celebrity chef and author Anthony Bourdain’s voice reading out his own words. English actor Peter Cushing has been resurrected to act in movies. In 2024, a Polish radio station used AI to “interview” a dead luminary, leading many to worry that it had put words in her mouth.

For Christie, AI was used only to create her likeness, not to build the course or write the script.

That is part of why Mr Levine rejects the idea that this is an Agatha Christie deepfake. “The implication of the word ‘fake’ suggests that there is something about this which is sort of passing off,” he said. “I don’t think that...