The Making of Digital Ghosts: Designing Ethical AI Afterlives

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20094v1
• Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2025 09:10:03 GMT
• Title: The Making of Digital Ghosts: Designing Ethical AI Afterlives
• Authors: Giovanni Spitale, Federico Germani,
• Abstract summary: We offer a conceptual and ethical analysis of AI-mediated digital afterlives.<n>We identify core ethical tensions around grief and well-being, truthfulness and deception, consent and posthumous privacy, dignity and misrepresentation.<n>We argue for targeted regulation and professional guidelines to ensure that digital ghosts can aid remembrance without slipping into forms of deception.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Advances in artificial intelligence now make it possible to simulate the dead through chatbots, voice clones, and video avatars trained on a person's digital traces. These "digital ghosts" are moving from fiction to commercial reality, reshaping how people mourn and remember. This paper offers a conceptual and ethical analysis of AI-mediated digital afterlives. We define what counts as a digital ghost, trace their rise across personal, commercial, and institutional contexts, and identify core ethical tensions around grief and well-being, truthfulness and deception, consent and posthumous privacy, dignity and misrepresentation, and the commercialization of mourning. To analyze these challenges, we propose a nine-dimensional taxonomy of digital afterlife technologies and, building on it, outline the features of an ethically acceptable digital ghost: premortem intent, mutual consent, transparent and limited data use, clear disclosure, restricted purposes and access, family or estate stewardship, and minimal behavioral agency. We argue for targeted regulation and professional guidelines to ensure that digital ghosts can aid remembrance without slipping into forms of deception.

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