Beyond grief: the raison d’être of interactive personality constructs of the dead

Abstract New technologies rarely announce in advance all the ways they threaten to upend established values and practices, and we must remain vigilant before and after their emergence if we do not want new problems to go unnoticed and unresolved for too long. This paper calls attention to ethical and regulatory worries about several already existing and possible future applications of the emerging technology referred to as “Interactive Personality Constructs of the Dead” (IPCDs). IPCDs are artificial intelligence bots either trained on decedents’ “digital remains” (e.g. emails, social media content, text messages, and voice notes) after the fact or intentionally developed in cooperation with future decedents pre-mortem to simulate the way they would have interacted with others via some combination of text, video, and audio modalities. It is necessary to offer a more diverse account of IPCDs because so much of the scholarly literature about the use of this technology—and the risks of its use—is focused on the realm of grieving. Some commentators even refer to them as “griefbots.” Unfortunately, this narrow focus risks ignoring a wide range of important questions and concerns about other applications.