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.
"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."
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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
In - A legal ad tech company using an AI generated deceased grandmother to ask their grandchild to purchase a product
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.
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 don’t claim to understand all the intricacies but it is the relevant term of art when discussing this topic from a legal perspective.
In which case, I don't give a fuck about consent either. Not even the living can expect privacy rights or to be consulted for consent. To hell with the dead; they don't have any rights either.
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.
We can get most of it with age, race, sex, location
Retr0id•3h ago
opdahl•3h ago
ttemPumpinRary•3h ago
Retr0id•3h ago
acheron•3h ago
FirmwareBurner•2h ago
card_zero•1h ago
rectang•3h ago
Retr0id•3h ago
dr_dshiv•2h ago
Not making a moral claim here, just pointing out that something that seems to be an individual right might not have strong legal precedence.
scarface_74•2h ago
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/06/07/nx...
hodgehog11•2h ago
Disposal8433•2h ago
hodgehog11•54m ago
rectang•16m ago
echelon•3h ago
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.
Retr0id•3h ago
That was my point, I guess I forgot we were on HN
jfengel•2h ago
card_zero•1h ago