Interesting. Why do you think that deleting all records of you would be worse?

Would you deny others their wish to have their data deleted?

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.

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.

I'm actively working toward it!

Really? For what purpose?

West World, here we come!

obligatory relevant qntm story https://qntm.org/perso

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.

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 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 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?

What's an "intrusive DBs"...databases?

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.

This already happens, it is just the base model plus some in context data.

I hate ads mostly because they are unbearable. If advertisers can figure out how to make bearable ads, I'm not against that.

Chinese companies offer to 'resurrect' deceased loved ones with AI avatars https://www.npr.org/2024/07/18/nx-s1-5040583/china-ai-artifi...

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.

If you're not a crude materialist, you can believe in eternal soul. Shouldn't we honor the dead, in that case?

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

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.)

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.

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.

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).

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)

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.

> 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.

What about your identical twin, who has a very different take on what can be done with their likeness?

We know what the law is. We're talking about what the law should be.

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"

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.

Right, so the estate, and not a third party.

Or maybe a Family trust.

> distributed according to your will

So the dead do have rights, and a process for defining them.

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.

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.

Send it to their legal department instead.