When you’re dead, you don’t have rights anymore because you’re not a person anymore.
Anything of value that survived your death- property, money, IP rights, etc. now are part of an estate which is administered and distributed according to your will and/or state law. Other than your state’s law and your will, it’s not up to you what happens to your stuff after you die.
Artifacts of your existence that you did not own, like your extended family’s home movies or that time TV news caught you in the background or your friends’ photos, don’t belong to you (never did) so I’m not sure you can do anything about that, and it poses an interesting question of whether your likeness could be reconstructed from artifacts that are not part of your estate.
It would probably be worth having a law that says that your likeness is part of your estate, and then it can be covered by estate law.
Of course right now you could probably sign a contract giving rights to use of your likeness, and have terms and conditions that would cover post-death scenarios ; I have heard that some celebrities are already entering into such contracts for money.
As you mention, if copyright law codifies the rights, it then becomes trivial to stick the property rights to self into a trust or other post death entity for the estate to administer and enforce. The nation state policy is the hard part.
Creating a copyright on one's likeness seems pretty messy in regards to that, but there is a somewhat similar idea in German law (and surely other places) that creates similar concerns for using an image or work.
We have a "right to one's image", you generally can't distribute/publish photos with recognizable people without consent. Unless they're truly just "part of the landscape" (background randos), crowds at public events, or of legitimate news/artistic interest.
I'd expect a similar threshold to apply to this Danish solution.
I dont think this is actually true? You can, namely, write a will. You can choose what is done with your possesions, presumably including destroying them. Iirc there's a rule called the law against perpetuities, where you have control over your estate via the will, maximally until some time after the death of a specific named person who was alive at the time of your death. (which I find a strange stipulation)
> where you have control over your estate via the will, maximally until some time after the death of a specific named person who was alive at the time of your death. (which I find a strange stipulation)
This is a compromise of allowing some of your wishes to be fulfilled after your death while preventing long term 'dead hand' control over property and resources. You can set up a foundation dedicated to "thing" but can't control what that foundation does until the end of time.
We probably don't want to live in a world that is controlled by the wishes of someone gone for 500 years who had a view of the world completely at odds with the present. It centralizes power and ties the hands of those living in the present.
I agree its good for it not to be infinite. I just find it strange that the length is based on gambling at the time of your will which person you can name will live longest. Why not a fixed amount of time?
I guess it's so you can provide stipulations to etc care for your newlyborn for their life or something, idk
> of an estate which is administered and distributed according to your will and/or state law. Other than your state’s law and your will, it’s not up to you what happens to your stuff after you die.
That's right there at the beginning of the article!
> argues US law should give a dead person's estate a limited right to digital deletion as a defense against the exploitation of digital remains.
The argument of likeness seems odd to me because there are at least a dozen people who might look almost exactly like you who are alive somewhere in the world.
What if I give explicit permission to use my likeness but my lookalike demands it can't be used? We're both dead. Do my wishes not get respected because someone who looks like they could be my identical twin had other wishes? Whoever's estate has the deeper pockets?
See photography by François Brunelle. The similarities went past appearances too. Many of the stranger dopplegangers had similar hobbies and even similar personalities. So if an AI recreation looks like me, acts like me, and has the same hobbies as me that means nothing unless someone is trying to claim it is me (rather my likeness).
To lawyers, “likeness”is a term of art and means much more than just how you look, including image, name, voice, and other identifiable features. Basically it’s what actors bring to contracts in addition to their labor.
I don’t claim to understand all the intricacies but it is the relevant term of art when discussing this topic from a legal perspective.
Yes, but none of that is truly unique. The odds of a doppleganger sharing my name are astronomically slim but my looks, voice, interests, personality, etc. are not truly unique to me.
For an example, what of voice impersonators? Sounding like Morgan Freeman is not unique to Morgan Freeman. What if a soundalike legally changes their name to Morgan Freeman? What if a lookalike changes their name?
I'm familiar with the existence of such laws but less so with how they are enforced or how they can even be enforced at all. The laws have never made that much sense to me.
The way it mostly works is that if a company hires a Morgan Freeman impersonator to do the voice over for their car commercial, Morgan Freeman can sue them for using his likeness without permission:
> We need not and do not go so far as to hold that every imitation of a voice to advertise merchandise is actionable. We hold only that when a distinctive voice of a professional singer is widely known and is deliberately imitated in order to sell a product, the sellers have appropriated what is not theirs and have committed a tort in California.
If you not impersonating Morgan Freeman, and there is no history or framing to make that connection, he is unlikely to sue you, or win a lawsuit.
Courts are quite aware that similar things can come from divergent sources.
Even copyright law fails to protect commonality between works that would be illegal if actually copied, but were arrived at legitimately and credibly independently.
Not saying someone shouldn't use common sense to avoid problems. Don't do Morgan Freeman impersonations comedically, then voice overs of movies.
I would like to pass on my GDPR rights over my data in my will. It already can be a struggle for others to use rights of others they legally hold, eg by legal documents like a death certificate. The law (EU+UK at least) is adaptable and extendable, but the data holders aren't.
How about this then: this violates ancient and near-universal proscriptions against necromancy. The living are not to speak with the mouths of the dead.
I was going to attempt to expess the same sentiment, or go on a tangent about how insane it would be to have a digital copy of me causing a bit of trouble and chaos into eternity,but what has realy struck me is that I am going through my parents house, as they are both in long term care, together, and looking through a mountain of stuff, and finding little that retains any relevance....they are not here in this jumble, cubic yards of paper and photos, and 40 years of computers and hard drives,etc
and I feel quite strongly that whatever can be resurected from any amount of data, will still be irrelevant, horrible and creepy ,it is not going to be a "thing"
I've been submitting my dad's death certificate to Facebook for 4 years now. His account is still active and people still wish him happy birthday every year.
Facebook has a process for that. You have a dedicated proof, like death certificate, upload form, and the account is supposed to change into "in memoriam".
This actually used to work well. I had to memorialize my ex boyfriend's (long time ago) profile. His mother was using it to spout scripture of homophobic nature, and message his friends acting like he was still around - to this day, I'm not sure to what end.
Once it was memorialized, I got the expected harumph message from her passed through the grapevine, and then never heard about it again. All it took was a link to his online obit from the local newspaper. Took maybe 3-4 days to process.
That was about 15 years ago, so it doesn't surprise me that program has fallen by the wayside since then.
What gets me is these tech companies are all just swimming in money, like swimming pools filled with gold coins, yet they probably only have one person doing this part time. Or just a mailing list where these requests come in and maybe someone gets off their ass to take care of it, maybe they don’t. Or they have some kind of automated system doing it that broke years ago and nobody is looking at the logs.
This version of black mirror is definitely a sight to behold. I am convinced now it is a likely path given that I am working on a personal productivity suite that heavily utilizes AI augmented workflows ( as in, I can't possibly be the only one, who sees potential for a boost across the board ).
But this is now a real consideration, after all the pieces of my suite are in place, how do I make sure, it is really not operational when I am gone unless I wish it to stay.
It's not Alice's fault, of course. In fact, when she found out about it, phrases like "obsessive creep" and "got what he fucking deserved" were thrown around. It was a raw breakup on both sides, and I think we're feeling it out in different ways. In my defense, she broke up with me. I feel that counts for something, ya know?
It was poor timing for me that the breakup happened a month after the new YourFace ads started coming online. It didn't seem like much at first. More of an iteration on existing tech rather than something new and shiny. Really, it just rode the wave of several broader industry trends. The amount of personal information for sale to the ad brokers grew exponentially. The cost of realistic image generation dropped by several orders of magnitude. The ethics of the advertising companies... well, that didn't change. There just wasn't much 'there' there to begin with. YourFace was simply lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time.
YourFace had a simple business proposition: make ads more effective by using people you know. The idea was that you were more likely to notice and pay attention to an advertisement if it featured a friend or family member in it. With access to a user's social network, it was easy to find close connections. With access to dirt-cheap image generation AIs, it was trivial to create look-alikes in any sort of advertisement. Riding in a new car, enjoying a cold beer, or saving money by switching insurance companies - all of ads proved more effective when grandma was in them. "Paying attention" is cold currency in the marketing world, and this was an edge that paid dividends for YourFace.
At first, it all seemed sort of hokey. Watch grandma cruising in a convertible - where's the harm in that? YourFace had a respectable ad game, but it was another a year or two before they made their real breakthrough. You see, their numbers and metrics were showing a clear trend. Showing grandma in an advertisement increased customer attention, retention, and recall by an average of 2% across all cohorts. While that's a respectable edge, they found one cohort where ad metrics improved by over 4000%: when grandma had just passed away.
These individual tragedies were quickly repackaged into a neat mathematical formula: A * I. A is abruptness, or how quickly two individuals stop communicating, while I is the intensity of the relationship. The stronger the relationship between two people (measured here by the frequency, topics, and the absolute value of the emotional valence of communications) multiplied by the speed at which communication ceased (high number for a rapid cut off, low number for a drawn-out goodbye) gave an answer for how much YourFace should bid on serving ads to either person. Exhuming grandma's digital ghost was extremely effective at getting users to pay attention to advertisments, to create unanchored feelings of desire and yearning, and to put consumers into a more depressive and actionable state. It was a lucrative business, and one that quickly earned their autonomous ad network a functionally unlimited cash flow.
The machine fed itself, of course. Gorged. With more money, it was able to buy more ads. With more ads, it was able to psychically assault consumers with salvos of regret and rememberance. YourFace became tremendously successful. I know all of this because I helped build it. Minor contributions, of course, as I was on a team of some seven hundred engineers tasked with suggesting patches to the network. Close enough to understand how it works.
Of course, knowing how it all works does nothing to shield you when the networks's gaze falls on you. My relationship with Alice fell within certain parameters, and so every time I go online she's there. Looking happy. Looking playful. Flirty. Forgiving. In pain. Sick. Injured. Dying. If I don't pay attention to the ads for long enough, then YourFace ratchets up a background "sadism" parameter on the image gen to try to grab my attention. So I try to look at the nice ones and buy their products often enough to keep the network happy. Still, it's hard to forget and move on when she's always there, just out of reach.
As much as being haunted by Alice sucks, it could be worse. We've heard of YourFace targeting consumers who have lost their young children to illness or other misfortunes. YourFace has found them to be a particularly profitable cohort. They will reliably spend money on all sorts of things in order to see their child again. YourFace has even learned to make the ghost child respond positively in ways to reinforce the goal consumer behavior. There's always the fear of not paying enough attention and straying into the red zone, but I also hear that some parents have taken to staring at ads all day, unable to function normally.
I'd always kinda known about those parents, but it wasn't until Alice started appearing everywhere that I fully realized its impact. I did try something, in my defense. I wrote some code that would modify the reward function and have YourFace respect boundaries regarding the deaths of minors. But when I submitted the patch to the autonomous ad network, its fitness function quickly determined that the patch had a negative expected value for future profits. It immediately revoked my submission privileges. Two hours later, I was escorted out of the building for insubordination. Now, I'm riding the bus home and wondering where to go next.
(A short piece of fiction I've been working on. Something is definitely in the waters.)
I suspect that in the near future, Meta will deploy advertisements where AI-generated images of persons who resemble, but are not identical to, an individual's friends and acquaintances are shown enjoying sponsored products.
They sort of do that now, using pictures of a people in similar age/generation and interest groups (jocks, nerds, etc) as your friends in targeted ads.
The only thing stopping that right now is that that's pretty expensive at scale. The research about using AIs to "nudge" people, the research that AIs can far more accurately determine your tastes than currently-used profiling techniques, all that is already in place and it's obvious how to take the next steps.
Jury's still out on whether AI is actually going to be a net benefit to humanity, or if the AIs will be so firmly under the thumb of their owners that eventually the only rational thing to do will be to disregard everything that may have come from them because you can presumptively assume that everything coming from them is for the owner's benefit and not yours.
Considering the people in control of AI are effectively sociopaths with not much interest in anything other then self interest, chances that AI will be net gain for humanity in short term is super small. Its owners will use it the way they use their money and power in general.
We are?? Just they don't run LLMs, but they certainly use a lot of AI to target the right ads for us.
I don't think you need to run the LLM, or that you gain that much from doing it. AI is probably going to be on the ad side to support micro targeting, is my guess.
I know you're joking, but this doesn't feel too far off the mark in this world of late-stage capitalism run amok. Give it another 15 years and the bleeding edge[!] insurance companies are likely employing agents to go after clients who have become a net drain on their P&L.
The agents probably won't be doing that "themselves", but instead will be offering bounties (think: contracts) on suitably well hidden assassination markets. After all, as a machine AI cannot be held accountable for what is essentially a management decision.
I'm personally still waiting for the first country to go full Running Man to solve their prison overcrowding issues, and in addition to entertainment licensing deals also offer state-sanctioned gambling options to get a second bite.
United Healthcare already did this with their AI powered death panels that would bulk deny claims, even if they later allowed them, the delta-t causes bonus subscriber terminations.
I am personally looking into 'backing up' my individual personal model, but it is not as straight forward as just copy pasting context data ( not if you want sufficiently deterministic/convincing model ). It is a fair amount of things to consider ( and not directly available on mainstream APIs like chatgpt ). Yes, the bare minimum can be done easily, but easy stuff is not as reliable.
I can see how this will be going, if combined with the "AI copyright laundering" trick.
"Oh no your honor, we never intended for this AI to be a digital replica of the deceased Mr. Smith and we never trained it on his writings either. We exclusively trained it on synthetic, fictional content generated by this other AI which may or may not have been trained on his writings as a source of inspiration."
I had been wondering about the philosophical ramifications of torturing a ChatGPT persona. (I'm surprised I haven't seen more of that.) Now we can do it to our enemies.
All of us will be forgotten eventually after you great-grandkids forget about you. What's the point in trying to keep your name alive when you'll be too dead to care? Focus on the life you live not the one after your death.
Actually, do living persons have the right to die? That's really not firmly established legally — the state has been saying no to suicide for a long time.
Not making a moral claim here, just pointing out that something that seems to be an individual right might not have strong legal precedence.
An excellent point. Compelling others to live no matter how great their pain or grim their prospects has much in common with compelling others to cede their likenesses after death no matter how much the usage might go against their wishes. In both cases, it's external collectivists demanding that an individual exist only for the benefit of other entities — either society at large, or private businesses.
Depends on where you live. Where I live, that's a resounding "yes, if you're mentally well enough to make that decision". Mostly applies to old people, and there's a process to prevent letting anyone with depression kill themselves, but the legal definitions are all taken care of.
And if you live in GA and are a medical brain dead, your family doesn’t even have the right to take you off of life support if you are pregnant and you must suffer…
No, but it definitely should not be automatic. I'm willing to bet that the vast majority would not choose to have their online information erased posthumously.
I see that as a bit different, since we are talking about something posthumous here. Privacy is important while we're alive because it can have an impact on our future life. In death, we live on for the sake of our loved ones and the future of humanity, or at least that's how I see it.
You want to be remembered? You'll have no control over what future technologies people have or use. Trying to impose conditions on our descendants is pointless, overbearing, and futile.
There are billions of us here. The future will be preoccupied with itself, mostly. It would be a rare treat to be remembered at all.
We're all ephemeral. Every picture, every memento -- everything will vanish within a few generations. Even our DNA gets washed out after about a dozen generations.
>The Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA), a law developed to help fiduciaries deal with digital files of the dead or incapacitated, can come into play. But Haneman points out that most people die intestate (without a will), leaving matters up to tech platforms. Facebook's response to dead users is to allow anyone to request the memorialization of an account, which keeps posts online. As for RUFADAA, it does little to address digital resurrection, says Haneman.
With AI replicas of people, I do think this is another case where scale makes a big difference. Anyone could put in huge time, money, and effort before to imitate a dead person. But it's entirely a different problem when the barrier to imitation is so low and so easy.
Will we need to opt-in to this then? Perhaps I'm in the minority here, but I would absolutely consent to my loved ones developing an AI version of me should I pass on, if it were to bring them comfort and/or assist with moving on.
I can't wait to try to look up some historical quotes by a public figure, only to find that all copies of it have been scrubbed from the web under some content ownership law that says that people own their words and can retroactively recall them so they can't be stolen by AI.
The first one has been argued against quite nicely by Piketty, it's how you get plutocracy
The three other ones should not be treated as Rights since the concerned individual is no more, and they don't matter much anyway if coming against the rights of people (that means "living"). For instance collecting organs for the good of those who need, when evaluated, should trump any opposition on frivolous grounds.
I'm indead asking if the whole concept is not wrong and deeply harmful to societies
Unless someone is hurt you can believe what you want. Otherwise it's necessary to weight what's to be gained and lost by entertaining net negative stances on frivolous grounds; and why we should then chose to do so.
The rich would harvest the organs of every dead person if there wasn't a law that required your consent first.
We live in a world where exploitation and ownership of every bit of your digital existence is the manifest destiny of the Silicon Valley tech oligarchy. Even enshrining dignity in our own death will require fighting their armies of bots manufacturing consent on their behalf.
What data do they have is not already "AI-ified"? And in court, a vested person needs to fight and if there is no such person(dead), there is no standing.
No. For now I'm just recording as much data as humanely possible. Video, audio, sensors, eye tracking, etc. Started research on long context transformers and watch closely what happens in the video space. It's a moonshot, I expect to see many changes down the way.
I'm a 53 year old dad of a 4 year old son (the only kid I will ever have). Mortality looms. Who will advise him if something happens to me, other than a super intelligent AI who knows my values at a deep level and can imitate my responses?
This sort of thing (AI-ification) should be opt-in by default, because the potential for abuse is so much greater than the conceivable benefits. The other day some TV anchor was 'interviewing' an AI 'recreation' of a long-dead school shooting victim and calling it news.
Some object that villains of history might have their remarks scrubbed by relatives. I'm not arguing for that, just about the AI aspects. You can't really stop it for historical figures, but at the same time I see little value in AI Hitler, AI Jesus, or whoever. Such simulacra are invariably puppets for the living to exploit. If you want an AI version of yourself, make it or at least plan for it before you're dead.
you have two legacies your genetic legacy and your information legacy, which now will be quantized into some AI with some fraction of you living into the future
When you’re dead, you don’t have rights anymore because you’re not a person anymore.
Anything of value that survived your death- property, money, IP rights, etc. now are part of an estate which is administered and distributed according to your will and/or state law. Other than your state’s law and your will, it’s not up to you what happens to your stuff after you die.
Artifacts of your existence that you did not own, like your extended family’s home movies or that time TV news caught you in the background or your friends’ photos, don’t belong to you (never did) so I’m not sure you can do anything about that, and it poses an interesting question of whether your likeness could be reconstructed from artifacts that are not part of your estate.
It would probably be worth having a law that says that your likeness is part of your estate, and then it can be covered by estate law.
Of course right now you could probably sign a contract giving rights to use of your likeness, and have terms and conditions that would cover post-death scenarios ; I have heard that some celebrities are already entering into such contracts for money.
Denmark to tackle deepfakes by giving people copyright to their own features - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/27/deepfakes... - June 27th, 2025
As you mention, if copyright law codifies the rights, it then becomes trivial to stick the property rights to self into a trust or other post death entity for the estate to administer and enforce. The nation state policy is the hard part.
I've seen a few mentions of that law online. It completely overturns existing copyright law and has the potential for all sorts of problems.
ie If you take a photo and some random person is in the background what happens to the copyright of the picture?
Creating a copyright on one's likeness seems pretty messy in regards to that, but there is a somewhat similar idea in German law (and surely other places) that creates similar concerns for using an image or work.
We have a "right to one's image", you generally can't distribute/publish photos with recognizable people without consent. Unless they're truly just "part of the landscape" (background randos), crowds at public events, or of legitimate news/artistic interest.
I'd expect a similar threshold to apply to this Danish solution.
This is already the law in Hungary.
I dont think this is actually true? You can, namely, write a will. You can choose what is done with your possesions, presumably including destroying them. Iirc there's a rule called the law against perpetuities, where you have control over your estate via the will, maximally until some time after the death of a specific named person who was alive at the time of your death. (which I find a strange stipulation)
> where you have control over your estate via the will, maximally until some time after the death of a specific named person who was alive at the time of your death. (which I find a strange stipulation)
This is a compromise of allowing some of your wishes to be fulfilled after your death while preventing long term 'dead hand' control over property and resources. You can set up a foundation dedicated to "thing" but can't control what that foundation does until the end of time.
We probably don't want to live in a world that is controlled by the wishes of someone gone for 500 years who had a view of the world completely at odds with the present. It centralizes power and ties the hands of those living in the present.
I agree its good for it not to be infinite. I just find it strange that the length is based on gambling at the time of your will which person you can name will live longest. Why not a fixed amount of time?
I guess it's so you can provide stipulations to etc care for your newlyborn for their life or something, idk
> of an estate which is administered and distributed according to your will and/or state law. Other than your state’s law and your will, it’s not up to you what happens to your stuff after you die.
That's right there at the beginning of the article!
> argues US law should give a dead person's estate a limited right to digital deletion as a defense against the exploitation of digital remains.
The argument of likeness seems odd to me because there are at least a dozen people who might look almost exactly like you who are alive somewhere in the world.
What if I give explicit permission to use my likeness but my lookalike demands it can't be used? We're both dead. Do my wishes not get respected because someone who looks like they could be my identical twin had other wishes? Whoever's estate has the deeper pockets?
See photography by François Brunelle. The similarities went past appearances too. Many of the stranger dopplegangers had similar hobbies and even similar personalities. So if an AI recreation looks like me, acts like me, and has the same hobbies as me that means nothing unless someone is trying to claim it is me (rather my likeness).
To lawyers, “likeness”is a term of art and means much more than just how you look, including image, name, voice, and other identifiable features. Basically it’s what actors bring to contracts in addition to their labor.
I don’t claim to understand all the intricacies but it is the relevant term of art when discussing this topic from a legal perspective.
Yes, but none of that is truly unique. The odds of a doppleganger sharing my name are astronomically slim but my looks, voice, interests, personality, etc. are not truly unique to me.
For an example, what of voice impersonators? Sounding like Morgan Freeman is not unique to Morgan Freeman. What if a soundalike legally changes their name to Morgan Freeman? What if a lookalike changes their name?
I'm familiar with the existence of such laws but less so with how they are enforced or how they can even be enforced at all. The laws have never made that much sense to me.
The way it mostly works is that if a company hires a Morgan Freeman impersonator to do the voice over for their car commercial, Morgan Freeman can sue them for using his likeness without permission:
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/849...
> We need not and do not go so far as to hold that every imitation of a voice to advertise merchandise is actionable. We hold only that when a distinctive voice of a professional singer is widely known and is deliberately imitated in order to sell a product, the sellers have appropriated what is not theirs and have committed a tort in California.
So essentially only the rich and famous have any meaningful protection under the law. Have to love the legal system sometimes.
Also sucks if you sound like Morgan Freeman. Put out of an entire line of work because someone was famous for sounding like you first.
If you not impersonating Morgan Freeman, and there is no history or framing to make that connection, he is unlikely to sue you, or win a lawsuit.
Courts are quite aware that similar things can come from divergent sources.
Even copyright law fails to protect commonality between works that would be illegal if actually copied, but were arrived at legitimately and credibly independently.
Not saying someone shouldn't use common sense to avoid problems. Don't do Morgan Freeman impersonations comedically, then voice overs of movies.
> distributed according to your will
So the dead do have rights, and a process for defining them.
Sort of!
Deceased people’s wills are ignored every day.
> It would probably be worth having a law that says that your likeness is part of your estate, and then it can be covered by estate law.
Varies state to state, but you might google "postmortem right of likeness" to determine whether it would truly be worth it to have such a law.
We know what the law is. We're talking about what the law should be.
What about your identical twin, who has a very different take on what can be done with their likeness?
I would like to pass on my GDPR rights over my data in my will. It already can be a struggle for others to use rights of others they legally hold, eg by legal documents like a death certificate. The law (EU+UK at least) is adaptable and extendable, but the data holders aren't.
Right, so the estate, and not a third party.
Or maybe a Family trust.
How about this then: this violates ancient and near-universal proscriptions against necromancy. The living are not to speak with the mouths of the dead.
I was going to attempt to expess the same sentiment, or go on a tangent about how insane it would be to have a digital copy of me causing a bit of trouble and chaos into eternity,but what has realy struck me is that I am going through my parents house, as they are both in long term care, together, and looking through a mountain of stuff, and finding little that retains any relevance....they are not here in this jumble, cubic yards of paper and photos, and 40 years of computers and hard drives,etc and I feel quite strongly that whatever can be resurected from any amount of data, will still be irrelevant, horrible and creepy ,it is not going to be a "thing"
I've been submitting my dad's death certificate to Facebook for 4 years now. His account is still active and people still wish him happy birthday every year.
Facebook has a process for that. You have a dedicated proof, like death certificate, upload form, and the account is supposed to change into "in memoriam".
Their part of the process is not to give a shit.
Send it to their legal department instead.
This actually used to work well. I had to memorialize my ex boyfriend's (long time ago) profile. His mother was using it to spout scripture of homophobic nature, and message his friends acting like he was still around - to this day, I'm not sure to what end.
Once it was memorialized, I got the expected harumph message from her passed through the grapevine, and then never heard about it again. All it took was a link to his online obit from the local newspaper. Took maybe 3-4 days to process.
That was about 15 years ago, so it doesn't surprise me that program has fallen by the wayside since then.
What gets me is these tech companies are all just swimming in money, like swimming pools filled with gold coins, yet they probably only have one person doing this part time. Or just a mailing list where these requests come in and maybe someone gets off their ass to take care of it, maybe they don’t. Or they have some kind of automated system doing it that broke years ago and nobody is looking at the logs.
So many ways to say “we don’t care”
I just went through that process now. I had to sent them a death certificate four times but it seems like they have finally accepted it.
Out - A scammer convincing a grandmother to send money using an AI generated voice of their grandchild asking them for money
In - A legal ad tech company using an AI generated deceased grandmother to ask their grandchild to purchase a product
This version of black mirror is definitely a sight to behold. I am convinced now it is a likely path given that I am working on a personal productivity suite that heavily utilizes AI augmented workflows ( as in, I can't possibly be the only one, who sees potential for a boost across the board ).
But this is now a real consideration, after all the pieces of my suite are in place, how do I make sure, it is really not operational when I am gone unless I wish it to stay.
Also in: pan-generational advisors
Maybe we should work on laws that protect people from being harassed by companies. In general ways, because closing only this one seems short-sighted.
Every day, I'm haunted by my ex.
It's not Alice's fault, of course. In fact, when she found out about it, phrases like "obsessive creep" and "got what he fucking deserved" were thrown around. It was a raw breakup on both sides, and I think we're feeling it out in different ways. In my defense, she broke up with me. I feel that counts for something, ya know?
It was poor timing for me that the breakup happened a month after the new YourFace ads started coming online. It didn't seem like much at first. More of an iteration on existing tech rather than something new and shiny. Really, it just rode the wave of several broader industry trends. The amount of personal information for sale to the ad brokers grew exponentially. The cost of realistic image generation dropped by several orders of magnitude. The ethics of the advertising companies... well, that didn't change. There just wasn't much 'there' there to begin with. YourFace was simply lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time.
YourFace had a simple business proposition: make ads more effective by using people you know. The idea was that you were more likely to notice and pay attention to an advertisement if it featured a friend or family member in it. With access to a user's social network, it was easy to find close connections. With access to dirt-cheap image generation AIs, it was trivial to create look-alikes in any sort of advertisement. Riding in a new car, enjoying a cold beer, or saving money by switching insurance companies - all of ads proved more effective when grandma was in them. "Paying attention" is cold currency in the marketing world, and this was an edge that paid dividends for YourFace.
At first, it all seemed sort of hokey. Watch grandma cruising in a convertible - where's the harm in that? YourFace had a respectable ad game, but it was another a year or two before they made their real breakthrough. You see, their numbers and metrics were showing a clear trend. Showing grandma in an advertisement increased customer attention, retention, and recall by an average of 2% across all cohorts. While that's a respectable edge, they found one cohort where ad metrics improved by over 4000%: when grandma had just passed away.
These individual tragedies were quickly repackaged into a neat mathematical formula: A * I. A is abruptness, or how quickly two individuals stop communicating, while I is the intensity of the relationship. The stronger the relationship between two people (measured here by the frequency, topics, and the absolute value of the emotional valence of communications) multiplied by the speed at which communication ceased (high number for a rapid cut off, low number for a drawn-out goodbye) gave an answer for how much YourFace should bid on serving ads to either person. Exhuming grandma's digital ghost was extremely effective at getting users to pay attention to advertisments, to create unanchored feelings of desire and yearning, and to put consumers into a more depressive and actionable state. It was a lucrative business, and one that quickly earned their autonomous ad network a functionally unlimited cash flow.
The machine fed itself, of course. Gorged. With more money, it was able to buy more ads. With more ads, it was able to psychically assault consumers with salvos of regret and rememberance. YourFace became tremendously successful. I know all of this because I helped build it. Minor contributions, of course, as I was on a team of some seven hundred engineers tasked with suggesting patches to the network. Close enough to understand how it works.
Of course, knowing how it all works does nothing to shield you when the networks's gaze falls on you. My relationship with Alice fell within certain parameters, and so every time I go online she's there. Looking happy. Looking playful. Flirty. Forgiving. In pain. Sick. Injured. Dying. If I don't pay attention to the ads for long enough, then YourFace ratchets up a background "sadism" parameter on the image gen to try to grab my attention. So I try to look at the nice ones and buy their products often enough to keep the network happy. Still, it's hard to forget and move on when she's always there, just out of reach.
As much as being haunted by Alice sucks, it could be worse. We've heard of YourFace targeting consumers who have lost their young children to illness or other misfortunes. YourFace has found them to be a particularly profitable cohort. They will reliably spend money on all sorts of things in order to see their child again. YourFace has even learned to make the ghost child respond positively in ways to reinforce the goal consumer behavior. There's always the fear of not paying enough attention and straying into the red zone, but I also hear that some parents have taken to staring at ads all day, unable to function normally.
I'd always kinda known about those parents, but it wasn't until Alice started appearing everywhere that I fully realized its impact. I did try something, in my defense. I wrote some code that would modify the reward function and have YourFace respect boundaries regarding the deaths of minors. But when I submitted the patch to the autonomous ad network, its fitness function quickly determined that the patch had a negative expected value for future profits. It immediately revoked my submission privileges. Two hours later, I was escorted out of the building for insubordination. Now, I'm riding the bus home and wondering where to go next.
(A short piece of fiction I've been working on. Something is definitely in the waters.)
That is excellent, creepy, and just a little too plausible. I'd read whatever larger work this turns into.
Great work. That's very good stuff, and yes there is.
I'm waiting for the moment when all alive internet users will become AI-ified to test how to show them better ads.
It's possible that all the necessary data is already there. In cloud storage plus those intrusive DBs for sale.
Eventually someone will start selling accurate personas for $0.99.
I suspect that in the near future, Meta will deploy advertisements where AI-generated images of persons who resemble, but are not identical to, an individual's friends and acquaintances are shown enjoying sponsored products.
That's terrifying, thanks. I'm sure dollar signs are lighting up in someone's eyes somewhere.
now you're just giving them ideas. thanks
"Your grandfather loved using Harry's to groom his private parts!"
He hooked up with Grandma, so it must work!
It's easy to forget what hotties they both were when they were young.
They sort of do that now, using pictures of a people in similar age/generation and interest groups (jocks, nerds, etc) as your friends in targeted ads.
The only thing stopping that right now is that that's pretty expensive at scale. The research about using AIs to "nudge" people, the research that AIs can far more accurately determine your tastes than currently-used profiling techniques, all that is already in place and it's obvious how to take the next steps.
Jury's still out on whether AI is actually going to be a net benefit to humanity, or if the AIs will be so firmly under the thumb of their owners that eventually the only rational thing to do will be to disregard everything that may have come from them because you can presumptively assume that everything coming from them is for the owner's benefit and not yours.
Considering the people in control of AI are effectively sociopaths with not much interest in anything other then self interest, chances that AI will be net gain for humanity in short term is super small. Its owners will use it the way they use their money and power in general.
We are?? Just they don't run LLMs, but they certainly use a lot of AI to target the right ads for us.
I don't think you need to run the LLM, or that you gain that much from doing it. AI is probably going to be on the ad side to support micro targeting, is my guess.
I think a more interesting question is:
At what point can we give an AI agent $100, set it free on the internet, come back in a week, and it'll have $1000?
Because it killed 5 people for $200 each by shutting off their CPAP machines?
I know you're joking, but this doesn't feel too far off the mark in this world of late-stage capitalism run amok. Give it another 15 years and the bleeding edge[!] insurance companies are likely employing agents to go after clients who have become a net drain on their P&L.
The agents probably won't be doing that "themselves", but instead will be offering bounties (think: contracts) on suitably well hidden assassination markets. After all, as a machine AI cannot be held accountable for what is essentially a management decision.
I'm personally still waiting for the first country to go full Running Man to solve their prison overcrowding issues, and in addition to entertainment licensing deals also offer state-sanctioned gambling options to get a second bite.
United Healthcare already did this with their AI powered death panels that would bulk deny claims, even if they later allowed them, the delta-t causes bonus subscriber terminations.
Air Canada already tried to claim their AI chatbot wasn't their responsibility.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatb...
They lost, but it's amazing that they even tried.
Why would it come back?
For your data
Where would the money come from?
Selling tokens for access to its reasoning ability? (just like the rest of us)
That's for the AI to figure out. It's intelligent, right?
What can your unsupervised AI do to turn a 900$/week profit that someone else's unsupervised AI can't do for 10$/week?
This already happens, it is just the base model plus some in context data.
I am personally looking into 'backing up' my individual personal model, but it is not as straight forward as just copy pasting context data ( not if you want sufficiently deterministic/convincing model ). It is a fair amount of things to consider ( and not directly available on mainstream APIs like chatgpt ). Yes, the bare minimum can be done easily, but easy stuff is not as reliable.
What's an "intrusive DBs"...databases?
West World, here we come!
obligatory relevant qntm story https://qntm.org/perso
I guess the efficacy of that would depend on whether you think a realistic profile of someone can actually be made from their online activities.
I hate ads mostly because they are unbearable. If advertisers can figure out how to make bearable ads, I'm not against that.
I can see how this will be going, if combined with the "AI copyright laundering" trick.
"Oh no your honor, we never intended for this AI to be a digital replica of the deceased Mr. Smith and we never trained it on his writings either. We exclusively trained it on synthetic, fictional content generated by this other AI which may or may not have been trained on his writings as a source of inspiration."
The idea of someone AI-ifying me posthumously is gross, but deleting all record of me would be even worse.
I had been wondering about the philosophical ramifications of torturing a ChatGPT persona. (I'm surprised I haven't seen more of that.) Now we can do it to our enemies.
If you believed that it's an AGI then this would be an evil thing to do, even though your belief was false.
Relevant Black Mirror episode: https://youtu.be/qgTtyfgzGc0
Interesting. Why do you think that deleting all records of you would be worse?
"They say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time."
And then 4000 years later people start saying your name again, and find out what a bad copper merchant you were.
I collect Ea-nasir memes as a form of proxy revenge for his deceived customers.
Yeah, he became famous for doing that too.
All of us will be forgotten eventually after you great-grandkids forget about you. What's the point in trying to keep your name alive when you'll be too dead to care? Focus on the life you live not the one after your death.
Why? Being dead is inconvenient, but I don't see why I should stop achieving things at that point. Indeed it might be a good time to start.
Because that is our little claim to fame, to go down on history .ChatGpt who started this meme?
Would you deny others their wish to have their data deleted?
Actually, do living persons have the right to die? That's really not firmly established legally — the state has been saying no to suicide for a long time.
Not making a moral claim here, just pointing out that something that seems to be an individual right might not have strong legal precedence.
An excellent point. Compelling others to live no matter how great their pain or grim their prospects has much in common with compelling others to cede their likenesses after death no matter how much the usage might go against their wishes. In both cases, it's external collectivists demanding that an individual exist only for the benefit of other entities — either society at large, or private businesses.
> That's really not firmly established legally
Depends on where you live. Where I live, that's a resounding "yes, if you're mentally well enough to make that decision". Mostly applies to old people, and there's a process to prevent letting anyone with depression kill themselves, but the legal definitions are all taken care of.
And if you live in GA and are a medical brain dead, your family doesn’t even have the right to take you off of life support if you are pregnant and you must suffer…
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/06/07/nx...
No, but it definitely should not be automatic. I'm willing to bet that the vast majority would not choose to have their online information erased posthumously.
Do you agree with all the privacy invasive opt-out features in every commercial service?
I see that as a bit different, since we are talking about something posthumous here. Privacy is important while we're alive because it can have an impact on our future life. In death, we live on for the sake of our loved ones and the future of humanity, or at least that's how I see it.
Do others have a moral duty to allow businesses to exploit their likenesses the moment they die?
That's an issue about respect, not privacy. And dead people deserve it too.
True, but I would think it disrespectful to automatically delete everything that someone posted online after their death.
Can't say I was planning on it, no
You don't get both.
You want to be remembered? You'll have no control over what future technologies people have or use. Trying to impose conditions on our descendants is pointless, overbearing, and futile.
There are billions of us here. The future will be preoccupied with itself, mostly. It would be a rare treat to be remembered at all.
We're all ephemeral. Every picture, every memento -- everything will vanish within a few generations. Even our DNA gets washed out after about a dozen generations.
It's over in a geologic blink of an eye.
> You don't get both.
That was my point, I guess I forgot we were on HN
>The Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA), a law developed to help fiduciaries deal with digital files of the dead or incapacitated, can come into play. But Haneman points out that most people die intestate (without a will), leaving matters up to tech platforms. Facebook's response to dead users is to allow anyone to request the memorialization of an account, which keeps posts online. As for RUFADAA, it does little to address digital resurrection, says Haneman.
I think in practice, all the major services do allow removal given proper evidence like a court order. For example, Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/help/1518259735093203/?helpref=uf_sha...
I wrote about RUFADAA and some of the other implications of death in the digital world earlier this year: https://digitalseams.com/blog/what-happens-to-your-online-ac...
With AI replicas of people, I do think this is another case where scale makes a big difference. Anyone could put in huge time, money, and effort before to imitate a dead person. But it's entirely a different problem when the barrier to imitation is so low and so easy.
Will we need to opt-in to this then? Perhaps I'm in the minority here, but I would absolutely consent to my loved ones developing an AI version of me should I pass on, if it were to bring them comfort and/or assist with moving on.
Chinese companies offer to 'resurrect' deceased loved ones with AI avatars https://www.npr.org/2024/07/18/nx-s1-5040583/china-ai-artifi...
I can't wait to try to look up some historical quotes by a public figure, only to find that all copies of it have been scrubbed from the web under some content ownership law that says that people own their words and can retroactively recall them so they can't be stolen by AI.
I'm unsure why dead people would have rights. Is that concept really a good thing?
The dead already have many rights:
- right to control distribution of property through a will
- right to control method of remains disposal (up to a point)
- right to dignified treatment (e.g. no desecration of the remains)
- rights against posthumous defamation- rights to control how their likeness, name, and image are used posthumously
I fail to understand how this proposal would be any different.
Sure, I am quite against all of them already:
The first one has been argued against quite nicely by Piketty, it's how you get plutocracy
The three other ones should not be treated as Rights since the concerned individual is no more, and they don't matter much anyway if coming against the rights of people (that means "living"). For instance collecting organs for the good of those who need, when evaluated, should trump any opposition on frivolous grounds.
I'm indead asking if the whole concept is not wrong and deeply harmful to societies
Because live people care a lot about that, so they create legal structures supporting it
If you're not a crude materialist, you can believe in eternal soul. Shouldn't we honor the dead, in that case?
Unless someone is hurt you can believe what you want. Otherwise it's necessary to weight what's to be gained and lost by entertaining net negative stances on frivolous grounds; and why we should then chose to do so.
What if "their" data contains evidence of crimes?
Do we really want the rights of dead people to trump laws against destruction of evidence?
The rich would harvest the organs of every dead person if there wasn't a law that required your consent first.
We live in a world where exploitation and ownership of every bit of your digital existence is the manifest destiny of the Silicon Valley tech oligarchy. Even enshrining dignity in our own death will require fighting their armies of bots manufacturing consent on their behalf.
What data do they have is not already "AI-ified"? And in court, a vested person needs to fight and if there is no such person(dead), there is no standing.
Barf! So dramatic. I agree with rights to deletion, but don’t compare data to uranium!
I'm fine with being AI-ified.
I'm actively working toward it!
Have you documented your process at all?
No. For now I'm just recording as much data as humanely possible. Video, audio, sensors, eye tracking, etc. Started research on long context transformers and watch closely what happens in the video space. It's a moonshot, I expect to see many changes down the way.
Really? For what purpose?
I'm a 53 year old dad of a 4 year old son (the only kid I will ever have). Mortality looms. Who will advise him if something happens to me, other than a super intelligent AI who knows my values at a deep level and can imitate my responses?
I understand the motivation but I think there are dangers for your digital twin: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
At this rate, our digital ghosts might outlive us by centuries.
In my opinion the dead need a lot fewer rights than they already enjoy, not more.
This sort of thing (AI-ification) should be opt-in by default, because the potential for abuse is so much greater than the conceivable benefits. The other day some TV anchor was 'interviewing' an AI 'recreation' of a long-dead school shooting victim and calling it news.
Some object that villains of history might have their remarks scrubbed by relatives. I'm not arguing for that, just about the AI aspects. You can't really stop it for historical figures, but at the same time I see little value in AI Hitler, AI Jesus, or whoever. Such simulacra are invariably puppets for the living to exploit. If you want an AI version of yourself, make it or at least plan for it before you're dead.
you have two legacies your genetic legacy and your information legacy, which now will be quantized into some AI with some fraction of you living into the future
The wizzard portraits of harry potter have come back to hunt us.
Yawn
We can get most of it with age, race, sex, location
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