26 ms·
The dead need right to delete their data so they can't be AI-ified, lawyer says
- Retr0id 1y agoThe idea of someone AI-ifying me posthumously is gross, but deleting all record of me would be even worse.
- opdahl 1y agoInteresting. Why do you think that deleting all records of you would be worse?
- ttemPumpinRary 1y agoBecause that is our little claim to fame, to go down on history .ChatGpt who started this meme?
- Retr0id 1y ago"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."
- acheron 1y agoAnd then 4000 years later people start saying your name again, and find out what a bad copper merchant you were.
- anigbrowl 1y agoI collect Ea-nasir memes as a form of proxy revenge for his deceived customers.
- marcosdumay 1y agoYeah, he became famous for doing that too.
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoAll 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.
- card_zero 1y agoWhy? 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.
- rectang 1y agoWould you deny others their wish to have their data deleted?
- Retr0id 1y agoCan't say I was planning on it, no
- dr_dshiv 1y agoActually, 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.
- scarface_74 1y agoAnd 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-s1-5425384/georgia-anti-abortion-fetal-personhood-law-pregnant-woman-life-support https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/06/07/nx...
- rectang 1y agoAn 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.
- jeroenhd 1y ago> 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.
- echelon 1y agoYou 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.
- Retr0id 1y ago> You don't get both. That was my point, I guess I forgot we were on HN
- jfengel 1y agoI 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.
- pmarreck 1y agoI'm fine with being AI-ified.
- lostmsu 1y agoI'm actively working toward it!
- jMyles 1y agoHave you documented your process at all?
- lostmsu 1y agoNo. 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- taway1a2b3c 1y agoReally? For what purpose?
- pmarreck 1y agoI'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?
- taway1a2b3c 1y agoI understand the motivation but I think there are dangers for your digital twin: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- d_taylor 1y agoAt this rate, our digital ghosts might outlive us by centuries.
- bobbiechen 1y ago>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_share 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-accounts-when-you-die 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.
- xg15 1y agoI 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."
- nvch 1y agoI'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.
- inetknght 1y agoWest World, here we come!
- Philpax 1y agoobligatory relevant qntm story https://qntm.org/perso https://qntm.org/perso
- i_am_proteus 1y agoI 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.
- netsharc 1y ago"Your grandfather loved using Harry's to groom his private parts!"
- RandomBacon 1y agoHe hooked up with Grandma, so it must work!
- amanaplanacanal 1y agoIt's easy to forget what hotties they both were when they were young.
- fortran77 1y agoThey 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.
- phendrenad2 1y agoI 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.
- hermannj314 1y agoThe 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.
- hodgehog11 1y agoWill 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.
- uonr 1y agoChinese companies offer to 'resurrect' deceased loved ones with AI avatars https://www.npr.org/2024/07/18/nx-s1-5040583/china-ai-artificial-intelligence-dead-avatars https://www.npr.org/2024/07/18/nx-s1-5040583/china-ai-artifi...
- ripped_britches 1y agoBarf! So dramatic. I agree with rights to deletion, but don’t compare data to uranium!
- knowitnone2 1y agoWhat 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.
- sheepdestroyer 1y agoI'm unsure why dead people would have rights. Is that concept really a good thing?
- free_bip 1y agoThe 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.
- sheepdestroyer 1y agoSure, 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
- xterminator 1y agoIf you're not a crude materialist, you can believe in eternal soul. Shouldn't we honor the dead, in that case?
- sheepdestroyer 1y agoUnless 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.
- eviks 1y agoBecause live people care a lot about that, so they create legal structures supporting it
- grej 1y agoOut - 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
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y agoThis 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
- jgalecki 1y agoEvery 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.)
- efitz 1y agoWhen 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.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoDenmark to tackle deepfakes by giving people copyright to their own features - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/27/deepfakes-denmark-copyright-law-artificial-intelligence 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.
- d1sxeyes 1y agoThis is already the law in Hungary.
- slyall 1y agoI'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?
- bethekidyouwant 1y agoyou 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
- ryandv 1y ago[flagged]
- PicassoCTs 1y agoThe wizzard portraits of harry potter have come back to hunt us.
- ikari_pl 1y agoI'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.
- pimlottc 1y agoI 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.
- junon 1y agoThis 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.
- ryandrake 1y agoWhat 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”
- anigbrowl 1y agoSend it to their legal department instead.
- jncfhnb 1y agoYawn We can get most of it with age, race, sex, location
- anigbrowl 1y agoThis 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.
- jeffbee 1y agoIn my opinion the dead need a lot fewer rights than they already enjoy, not more.
- cindyllm 1y ago[dead]
- DoctorOetker 1y agoWhat if "their" data contains evidence of crimes? Do we really want the rights of dead people to trump laws against destruction of evidence?