The specter of corporate necromancy: who controls the dead in the age of digital doppelgängers?

Journal article : Comment

Abstract:: The development of digital doppelgängers (DDs)—AI systems trained to replicate individual personalities— raises questions about corporate control over digital representations of the deceased. As language models become better at mimicking human interaction patterns, companies are developing platforms that aim to preserve and commercialize digital personas after death.1 In their recent, thought-provoking paper, Iglesias and colleagues argue that DDs could provide a form of persistence that can maintain certain aspects of relationships and legacy (Iglesias et al. 2025). However, they overlook a fundamental risk: the ongoing vulnerability of these digital selves to exploitation, and how this may fundamentally alter our intuitions in some of the thought experiments they pose. This essay will explore how the creation of DDs opens the door to a range of indefinite potential abuses which may undermine the value they might otherwise offer.

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Copyright holder:: Hazem Zohny
Rights statement:: © 2025 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.

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