AI avatars of deceased people – or "deadbots" – are showing up in new and unexpected contexts, including ones where they have the power to persuade.
They're giving interviews advocating for tougher gun laws, such as when the family of Joaquin Oliver, a victim of the 2018 Parkland school shooting in Florida, created a beanie-wearing AI avatar of him and had it speak with journalist Jim Acosta in July. "This is just another advocacy tool to create that urgency of making things change," Manuel Oliver, Joaquin's father, told NPR.
And in May, a bearded AI avatar of Chris Pelkey, the deceased victim of a road rage incident in Arizona, gave a video impact statement at the sentencing of the man who fatally shot Pelkey. Pelkey's family created the deadbot. "I feel that that was genuine," said Judge Todd Lang after hearing the AI generated impact statement. He then handed down the maximum sentence.
Powers of persuasion
The digital afterlife industry, which manages a person's digital assets after their death, is expected to quadruple in size to nearly $80 billion dollars over the next decade. That includes the creation of deadbots. The more immersive these bots become, the more technology companies are exploring their commercial potential – causing concern in the research community and elsewhere.
"There is powerful rhetoric with a deadbot because it is tapping into all of that emotional longing and vulnerability," said New Yorker cartoonist Amy Kurzweil. Kurzweil's work frequently explores technological topics, including her 2023 book Artificial: A Love Story. The graphic memoir recounts how she and her father, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, created a text-based chatbot of her dead grandfather in 2018 using written materials from his archives. "I could feel like I had some communion with his presence," she said.
Kurzweil said more immersive voice- and video-based deadbots may have even stronger powers of persuasion. "It's sort of like a VR movie or a 3D movie instead of something that's grainy and black and white," Kurzweil said. "And so that can be more affecting."
Potential harms
Researchers are now warning that commercial use is the next frontier for deadbots. "Of course it will be monetized," said Lindenwood University AI researcher James Hutson. Hutson co-authored several studies about deadbots, including one exploring the ethics of using AI to reanimate the dead.
Hutson's work, along with other recent studies such as one from Cambridge University, which explores the likelihood of companies using deadbots to advertise products to users, point to the potential harms of such uses. "The problem is if it is perceived as exploitative, right?" Hutson said.
But Hutson says the American public has nevertheless been primed to accept the possibility of ads being fed to them through deadbots. "Something that might seem very crass and horrifying today is not going to seem so farfetched or inappropriate once it becomes normalized and fairly common," he said.
Hutson said for one thing, the deceased have been promoting products on screen for decades. A digitally-manipulated Fred Astaire was careening about in vacuum cleaner commercials way back in the 1990s.
For another, Hutson said, it hasn't taken long for consumers to begrudgingly accept commercials as a part of their paid subscriptions to streamers like Hulu and Netflix. So why not ad-supported deadbots too? (Deadbot companies like Hereafter and Project December currently monetize their products through paid subscriptions or by charging an upfront fee.)
Legal, ethical and moral issues
Before deadbot advertising can take off, there are legal kinks to work out. "In America, we're struggling with the privacy rights of the living, let alone the privacy rights of the deceased," said Jeffrey Rosenthal, an attorney in Philadelphia specializing in technology and privacy with the law firm Blank Rome LLP.
There are no comprehensive federal laws governing the use of AI in the United States. (The European Union does have legislation that seeks to put guardrails around the use of AI, but it does not specify deadbots.)
What the U.S. does have is a patchwork of state laws that recognize a person's right to protect the commercial use of their name, likeness, voice and other identifying characteristics even after they're dead. But Rosenthal said the current legal framework is, overall, ill-equipped to handle the harms that might arise from, say, a deadbot grandmother spouting ads at family members.
"Who is liable?" Rosenthal said. "The software company that developed the deadbot grandmother? The advertising company that inserted their ad? The company that owns the IP? There are many different ways that this could result in an unclear path as to what the law says should happen, and then separately what society deems should happen from an ethical and moral perspective."
The deadbot makers and digital advertising companies NPR spoke with for this story say they are repulsed by the ethical and moral ramifications of using deadbots to sell products.
" Ethically, I think using dead people is not sound at all," said Camille Chiang, head of content for the AI marketing company NEX, which is currently developing AI avatars for a professional basketball team to use in advertising campaigns – only they're working with living athletes; not dead ones.
"Why the hell would I want my grandma to say anything that's not authentic?" said Alex Quinn, the CEO of Authentic Interactions Incorporated, the parent company of deadbot creator StoryFile. "It would really turn me off as a consumer. And I don't think that leaves us with a high level of reputation."
But Quinn said he's "absolutely interested" in seeing if there are other ways to make deadbots ad-friendly. One scenario could involve inserting interstitial ads into peoples' conversations with deadbots – just like how traditional commercial breaks pop up during TV shows.
Another could involve the deadbot gleaning likes and dislikes from the living that could be useful to advertisers. "We can instruct those avatars to actually probe for information," Quinn said. "You know, who's your favorite athlete? What jerseys might be interesting to you?"
Quinn said companies are going to try to make as much money out of AI avatars of both the dead and the living as possible, and he acknowledges there could be some bad actors. "Companies are already testing things out internally for these use cases," Quinn said, with reference to such uses cases as endorsements featuring living celebrities created with generative AI that people can interactive with. "We just haven't seen a lot of the implementations yet."
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