I don't think it succeeds very well as fiction, but the concept is worth further exploration. I've been very disturbed recently to see AI avatars of dead people participating in TV interviews, funerals, and even court cases. To me this is the technological equivalent of inviting in a necromancer or ouija board operator and treating their pronouncements as facts. This can only result in a social environment hostile to rationality.
I think it'd be well worth performing the experiment of creating some people's digital avatars and then testing them against the original to see how faithful of a model they are.