>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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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 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.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 45.3 ms ] threadI 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.
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.
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.
So the dead do have rights, and a process for defining them.
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.
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
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.
Do we really want the rights of dead people to trump laws against destruction of evidence?