New publication: "The making of digital ghosts: designing ethical AI afterlives"

Giovanni Spitale (ITE Lab, IBME, University of Zurich) and Federico Germani (ITE Lab, IBME, University of Zurich; Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, Boğaziçi University) have published a new paper in Ethics and Information Technology addressing the ethical governance of AI-mediated digital afterlife technologies, i.e. systems that simulate the communicative presence of deceased individuals, commonly referred to as "deadbots," "griefbots," or "posthumous avatars."
The rapid proliferation of these technologies, from chatbots trained on personal messages to voice clones and video avatars, has generated substantial ethical debate. Yet despite growing consensus on the moral risks involved (privacy violations, threats to dignity and autonomy, psychological harms to the bereaved), existing frameworks have not translated ethical principles into operational design requirements.
The paper addresses this gap by introducing a nine-dimensional taxonomy of digital afterlife systems, mapping the morally salient design features that determine their ethical profile: timing of creation, consent, data sources, interaction modality, fidelity and disclosure, purpose, audience and access, governance and ownership, and autonomy/behavioral agency.
Building on this taxonomy, the authors derive a two-tier structure of design constraints. Three threshold conditions — consent, fidelity/disclosure, and purpose — function as near-absolute requirements for permissibility. Six further contextual dimensions modulate the ethical risk profile without individually determining it. A system that fails any single Tier 1 constraint is impermissible regardless of how well it performs on the remaining dimensions.
The framework is explicitly designed to be auditable and actionable. By locating normative assessment at the level of design configuration rather than stated intent alone, the paper offers a concrete bridge between ethical consensus and the governance of AI-mediated digital afterlives, one that regulators, platform designers, professional bodies, and legislators can draw on directly.
The paper is published open access.
 
Spitale, G., & Germani, F. (2026). The making of digital ghosts: designing ethical AI afterlives. Ethics and Information Technology, 28, 34.