{"id":77284,"date":"2025-06-18T00:04:09","date_gmt":"2025-06-18T04:04:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/world.edu\/?p=77284"},"modified":"2025-06-18T00:04:09","modified_gmt":"2025-06-18T04:04:09","slug":"ai-reanimations-making-facsimiles-of-the-dead-raises-ethical-quandaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/ai-reanimations-making-facsimiles-of-the-dead-raises-ethical-quandaries\/","title":{"rendered":"AI \u2018reanimations\u2019: Making facsimiles of the dead raises ethical quandaries"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Christopher Pelkey was shot and killed in a road range incident in 2021. On May 8, 2025, at the sentencing hearing for his killer, an AI video reconstruction of Pelkey delivered a\u00a0victim impact statement<\/a>. The trial judge\u00a0reported being deeply moved<\/a>\u00a0by this performance and issued the maximum sentence for manslaughter.<\/p>\n

As part of the ceremonies to mark Israel\u2019s 77th year of independence on April 30, 2025, officials had planned to host\u00a0a concert featuring four iconic Israeli singers<\/a>. All four had died years earlier. The plan was to conjure them using AI-generated sound and video. The dead performers were supposed to sing alongside Yardena Arazi, a famous and still very much alive artist. In the end Arazi pulled out, citing the political atmosphere, and the event didn\u2019t happen.<\/p>\n

In April, the BBC created a deep-fake version of the famous mystery writer Agatha Christie to\u00a0teach a \u201cmaestro course on writing<\/a>.\u201d Fake Agatha would instruct aspiring murder mystery authors and \u201cinspire\u201d their \u201cwriting journey<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The use of artificial intelligence to \u201creanimate\u201d the dead for a variety of purposes is quickly gaining traction. Over the past few years, we\u2019ve been studying the moral implications of AI at the\u00a0Center for Applied Ethics<\/a>\u00a0at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and we find these AI reanimations to be morally problematic.<\/p>\n

Before we address the moral challenges the technology raises, it\u2019s important to distinguish AI reanimations, or deepfakes, from so-called\u00a0griefbots<\/a>. Griefbots are chatbots trained on large swaths of data the dead leave behind \u2013 social media posts, texts, emails, videos. These chatbots mimic how the departed used to communicate and are meant to make life easier for surviving relations. The deepfakes we are discussing here have other aims; they are meant to promote legal, political and educational causes.<\/p>\n