13.12.2024

Study on the ethics, law and security of digital survival

Edilife project

Study on the ethics, law and security of digital survival:

Digital technologies are increasingly shaping our lives - but they have also long influenced the way we deal with death, grief and remembrance. Against the backdrop of recent advances in the field of artificial intelligence, a separate market has emerged in the form of the digital afterlife industry. Its services simulate the “continued life” of the deceased by imitating their communication behavior and interacting with users (e.g. in the form of chatbots or avatars). This not only has an impact on private mourning, but also on public cultures of remembrance. As much as they serve collective ideas of overcoming finiteness, such offerings also bring with them a number of still largely unresolved problems and raise ethical, legal and security issues: What wishes and expectations do people have for their digital existence after their death? Can AI representations of the deceased make the loss easier or do they make it more difficult? Who makes the final selection of the data to be used and who has the power to shape the digital identity after the end of life? How can the technical security of applications be guaranteed against external manipulation and how can the rights of those affected be strengthened and enforced? This pioneering study sheds light on various facets of digital end-of-life from an interdisciplinary perspective. It thus provides empirically informed and ethically justified impulses and options for action for the future practice of AI-based digital survival.  

The study can be downloaded free of charge at the following link: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14222860