Leaving Your Legacy Via Death Bots? Ethicist Shares Concerns; Medscape, August 21, 2024

Arthur L. Caplan, PhD, Medscape ; Leaving Your Legacy Via Death Bots? Ethicist Shares Concerns

"On the other hand, there are clearly many ethical issues about creating an artificial version of yourself. One obvious issue is how accurate this AI version of you will be if the death bot can create information that sounds like you, but really isn't what you would have said, despite the effort to glean it from recordings and past information about you. Is it all right if people wander from the truth in trying to interact with someone who's died? 

There are other ways to leave memories behind. You certainly can record messages so that you can control the content. Many people video themselves and so on. There are obviously people who would say that they have a diary or have written information they can leave behind. 

Is there a place in terms of accuracy for a kind of artificial version of ourselves to go on forever? Another interesting issue is who controls that. Can you add to it after your death? Can information be shared about you with third parties who don't sign up for the service? Maybe the police take an interest in how you died. You can imagine many scenarios where questions might come up about wanting to access these data that the artificial agent is providing. 

Some people might say that it's just not the way to grieve.Maybe the best way to grieve is to accept death and not try to interact with a constructed version of yourself once you've passed. That isn't really accepting death. It's a form, perhaps, of denial of death, and maybe that isn't going to be good for the mental health of survivors who really have not come to terms with the fact that someone has passed on."