Legal scholar Victoria Haneman is arguing that dead people’s estates should have the right to digital deletion—to protect against ‘digital resurrection’ and give them ‘the right to be dead.’
Recreating a dead family member using AI might have seemed like something from a sci‑fi horror movie just a few years ago, but it’s becoming an increasingly real issue. We’ve seen one programmer use OpenAI’s GPT‑3 to recreate the voice and personality of their deceased fiancée. Meanwhile, mainstream tools like the AI companion app Replika have been used to create chatbots based on the personalities of dead friends.
We’re also seeing the likeness of dead celebrities appear in commercially released movies, including the AI-generated voice of TV chef Anthony Bourdain in a documentary about his own life.
Now, legal scholar Victoria Haneman is arguing that dead people’s estates should have the right to digital deletion—to protect against “digital resurrection” and give them “the right to be dead.
