"The Chatbot of Your Dead Relative Doesn't Need Anyone's Permission"

An industry now sells AI clones of the dead, trained on their voices and messages, and almost nowhere does the law require the deceased to have said yes.

Consent is close to the whole moral question. In one 2024 survey experiment, 58 percent of Americans found digitally resurrecting someone acceptable when the person had consented; when the person had explicitly refused, that fell to 3 percent. Cambridge researchers proposed guardrails (mutual consent, honesty that you are talking to software, adults only, a dignified way to retire the bot) and a cautionary scenario where a griefbot built without permission starts working ads into the conversation. Two years on, StoryFile's CEO is "absolutely interested" in making deadbots ad-friendly.

If you do not want to become someone else's chatbot after you die, or you do, say so in writing now. In most of the world, nobody is required to ask.