The dead need right to delete their data so they can't be AI-ified, lawyer says

Summary

People die but their data may endure, which troubles legal scholar Victoria Haneman. The emergence of generative AI means a person's digital presence can be recreated and revived, even if they or their family don't want that kind of memorial. Haneman, Chair of Fiduciary Law at the University of Georgia School of Law, argues US law should give a dead person's estate a limited right to digital deletion as a defense against the exploitation of digital remains. She makes that case in an article titled "The Law of Digital Resurrection," published earlier this year in the Boston College Law Review. "Digital resurrection by or through AI requires the personal data of the deceased, and the amount of data that we are storing online is increasing exponentially with each passing year," Haneman wrote. "It has been said that data is the new uranium, extraordinarily valuable and potentially dangerous. A right to delete will provide the decedent with a time-limited right for deletion of personal data." There's already a burgeoning business in training generative AI models on personal digital files, so the models can respond in ways that evoke the creator of those files. Firms like Seance AI, StoryFile, Replika, MindBank Ai, and HereAfter AI offer the ability to recreate a person's voice and likeness. A living person may have some say on the matter through the control of personal digital documents and correspondence. But a dead person can't object, and US law doesn't offer the dead much data protection in terms of privacy law, property law, intellectual property law, or criminal law. The Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA), a law developed to help fiduciaries deal with digital files of the dead or incapacitated, can come into play. But Haneman points out that most people die intestate (without a will), leaving matters up to tech platforms. Facebook's response to dead users is to allow anyone to request the memorialization of an account, which keeps post...