Abstract
Digital technology increasingly addresses people dealing with dying, death and grief. The range of options now extends to ai-based forms of “digital afterlife”, in which the deceased are represented digitally in the form of a chatbot or avatar. Based on large amounts of personal data, they can simulate the person’s communicative behavior, including their visual appearance, thus enabling him or her to interact with users. The applications of the so-called Digital Afterlife Industry not only offer new possibilities in the fields of grief culture, the education sector, and the entertainment industry, but also raise ethical, legal and security-related questions that have so far received little attention. At the intersection of technological innovation (especially artificial intelligence), cultures of mourning and collective memory, this article discusses the (potential) social effects of a digital afterlife and its implication in terms of memory. We will particularly address the fact that more and more people in their everyday life are able to use a digital public representation, which continues after their death and with which users can interact.
1 Introduction
Today, digital technologies are shaping nearly every aspect of social life. This applies not only to the ways in which people interact with one another in everyday life, but also how they create, record, update and make accessible memories and thus shape collective narratives. The fact that more and more of people’s personal information is stored digitally or online and can outlive their physical existence raises the question what this means for the formation of collective memories.
The significance of the technological transformation in general and digitalisation in particular is also becoming evident in view of our current and constantly changing relationship with dying, death and grief (Sofka, Cupit & Gilbert, 2012). Since the start of the general usage of the Word Wide Web in the 1990s, various online applications can be observed, which have attracted varying levels of interest and are being continuously expanded by integrating smaller or larger innovations. In the middle of the 1990s, virtual cemeteries appeared for the first time (Roberts, 2004). They are based on analogue cemeteries as it is possible to create electronically generated “grave sites” and “decorate” them and commemorate the deceased in words and images. The technical complexity has increased over time. Content from digital “grave sites” can now also be placed and shared with friends and family members on other online commemoration sites and digital memory archives. Also, grief support in general is now increasingly taking place online – for example via chats, video conferences or apps.
The fact that the end of life has long since become a topic on social media is not only evident because “here people can openly discuss death and dying” (Bassett, 2015, p. 1130; see also Thimm & Nehls, 2017), but also in the case when a user dies and leaves behind a profile page (Sisto, 2020). Although it may not have been one of the platform operators’ original intentions, social media platforms have now also become virtual meeting points for mourning and remembrance (Moore et al., 2019). Against this background, the use of digital media is a way to extend a person’s presence after death. The fact that “online” and “offline” are no longer clearly separable spheres, but rather must increasingly be thought of as intertwined, is reflected, among other things, by (analogue) gravestones or memorial plaques with a qr-Code. If it is scanned with a smartphone, the user will usually be redirected to the online representation of the deceased person (Gotved, 2015).
Yet there are also more technically advanced services whose users not only can view the digital representation of the deceased person, but also engage in dialogue with him or her. Instead of imagining the assumed or desired response, users receive an answer, which is based on the individual style of expression of the deceased. The chatbots and avatars1 used in these systems are able to conduct talks with users (both by reacting and on initiating conversations), tell them stories, give them suggestions or simply evoke memories together – as if the chatbot were the deceased person. “The dead are dialogically reanimated within the present” (Krueger & Osler, 2022, p. 239). To simulate the communicative behaviour of the deceased person as well as his or her character traits and personal appearance in the greatest possible detail, a kind of “double” is created which is trained with large quantities of personal data that were generated during their lifetime and digitally archived. Artificial intelligence (ai) techniques are increasingly being used during this process, which can also be applied to create synthetic media in other contexts: e.g., for deepfakes, i.e., audio, video or image media (Pawelec & Bieß, 2021).
A new growth market for the digital economy has emerged under the label of the so-called Digital Afterlife Industry (dai) (Savin-Baden & Mason-Robbie, 2020). It does not exclusively consist of interactions with the deceased via communication platforms. Chatbots, avatars or other ai systems, however, play an increasingly important role. This can change both our individual as well as collective relationship to mortality, grief, privacy, the public sphere and remembrance (Savin-Baden & Burden, 2019; Savin-Baden, 2022), and therefore requires critical reflection.
This article will, in particular, address the effects of the digital archiving of personal information and the ai-based digital afterlife for the formation, development and shaping power of collective memories. To what extent can we speak of the democratisation of the public culture of remembrance because interactive digital representation is no longer only possible for contemporary witnesses of historically relevant events or certain public figures, but also enables the interactive digital representation of private individuals? How does the already diverse construct “collective memory” change in terms of its logic, when the socially negotiated or established “relevance of remembrance” is no longer decisive for postmortem visibility, but rather the mere accessibility via databases and search engine research?
2 Techniques and Practices of Digital Afterlife
The dai applications intended for the private sphere are initially aimed at two groups of users. These are first the relatives who can interact with the digital representations (also known as “deadbots” or “thanabots”) of deceased companions or friends. Second, they comprise persons, who anticipate their own death in the near or distant future and are able to actively work on their own digital legacy. To do so, they forge a public memory of themselves, feeding selected documents from their own life (images, videos, written personal information, experience reports, social media postings, emails, messenger history etc.) into the system in the form of digital datasets and thereby prepare applications. These applications can be used after the death of their creators. For example, as one’s own moving and speaking double (avatar), which communicates with living friends and family and other interested persons.
One of such services is the app Hereafter, which enables the recording of voice data based on predefined categories (“A turning point in my life was …”). After death, surviving relatives and friends can post questions in the app, and relevant stories give an answer. The application, which from a memory studies perspective could be described as an “oral history” provides some kind of “digital life chronicle”. Other providers such as Eter9 speak of “cyber eternity” and promise the creation of a virtual self, which interacts with the living world beyond death. A digital “twin” could already “act” on the person’s behalf during their lifetime; e.g., by sending automated emails or taking on other tasks, in order to make the everyday life of the users more effective. In particular though, these digital “twins” are supposed to ensure the user’s perpetual existence in a metaverse.2
The services of dai can be differentiated by its generated output: in one case, previously entered material is put out selectively, but unchanged from its initial state according to the specific request of the user; in a second case, new content is generated by means of communication with those using the app. Here, the output aims at corresponding with the presumed responses or views of the deceased person.
An important decision to be made in this regard, and one that also plays a special role in the construction of collective memories, concerns the authorisation of the “source material” from which the digital representations are originally created. For applications used for private purposes, it is usually individual persons (the deceased themselves who had assembled their life data before death, or relatives and friends who own data of the deceased) who provide the selected data to the service provider. The material is entirely from the private sphere and thus only accessible for a relatively small number of people. In contrast, there are also representations which are based on publicly accessible data (in particular, media reports or works such as books, films, songs etc.). This is primarily the case for public figures, who, through their lifetime of work, have become a present part of the respective collective memory.
But who has the authority to select the data on which the digital representation is based? Does the decision about the use of this data lie with the represented persons themselves (who would have made a declaration before death)? Does it lie with their relatives and friends, or perhaps also the company that provides the service, and thereby pursues economic intentions, which may not coincide with the needs of the users in every aspect? In other words, who has the right to frame these afterlife memories? After all, the applications have been and still are provided primarily to generate more data and/or financial profits. This circumstance could then be reflected in the specific design of the digital representation, which primarily follows the premises of increasing attention and user satisfaction (Heesen, 2022, p. 168; see also Mitchell et al., 2012; Öhman & Floridi, 2017).
3 The Role of ai: Data Tracking and Imitation
As mentioned in the beginning, ai is one of the decisive technical requirements for dai and is one of the possibilities to recreate the deceased. ai applications enable users to create avatars and vocal imitations, to continue chats and answer questions, while making internet content available for exploitation by dai. In particular, the potential of ai for various forms of personalisation plays an important role in changing cultures of remembrance. ai makes it possible to track the data of individual persons in an increasingly effective manner. Based on such systems, training data can be compiled for digital afterlife services. This data, which is personal as it is stored on the internet by individuals during their life, remains on various servers around the world, even if the individuals have died. In addition, new data is created when the living interact with the social media profiles, avatars or other digital representations of the dead and thereby reveal information about themselves and their relationship to the deceased person. The data from these contexts can be lucrative for companies in several ways beyond the digital representation of the deceased. It is also useful for the identification of patterns which are used to predict the behaviour of living people.
The business models of data economy are based on the evaluation of patterns of action and personality which are collected using sophisticated and often non-transparent tracking and monitoring methods (Zuboff, 2019). The acquired data are enriched from various sources, aggregated into profiles and sold. Ultimately, they serve to create a personalised user experience with customised advertising and targeted information. The data of every – living or dead – individual is an indispensable building block to keep this machinery running. With this in mind, questions of collective remembrance are connected to data protection and informational self-determination. Moreover, the data economic business models associated with dai indicate the possible dependencies of future cultures of remembrance from leading ai firms and platforms (Simon, 2022). For journalism as well as for cultural institutions, critical questions regarding the independence and plurality of the applications have to be raised. There is always a connection to the chances for the visibility and success of creative, small and possibly financially weak actors and services. The development and application of ai should therefore be critically questioned regarding its influence on market structures and business interests.
4 Staged Identities
When people decide to set up a digital representation of themselves (or when others do this for an already deceased person), it is not merely a process of creating a copy of the living or previously living person. Rather, it is always a mediatised and staged identity, which indeed refers to its analogue “original”, but is not identical to it. As in other media representations, a specific logic of selection, of blocking out as well as of over- and underrepresentation comes into play.
Yet even if it were technically feasible to design the avatar to correspond with its human model in all facets and if it were no longer possible for third parties to recognise the simulation as such, it remains questionable whether this is in the interest of every user. Everybody who recapitulates a past life does not aim at capturing every single moment, but rather looks backs selectively. Remembering is not a reliable reproduction of what has been. In a personal life story, certain events or decisions can be emphasised, while others are given less or no attention. As soon as people make information available which they know can be potentially viewed and evaluated by an unspecified public, it is an act of staging. In particular, the design of a digital representation that could outlast one’s own life is also likely to follow certain ideal images reflecting the way one would like to be seen by others. That is a legitimate and fundamental part of informational self-determination even beyond death (for postmortem personal rights, see Kubis et al., 2019). This principle, which is known from data privacy law, thus includes the freedom to decide for ourselves on our appearance in public and in interactions with others (see Heesen, 2022, p. 165).
However, it is debatable whether there is not only a legitimate, but also an illegitimate postmortem self-optimisation – for example, if the avatar not only overemphasises or conceals certain characteristics of the deceased, but also when information which specifically goes beyond the scope of the truth enters its design and shapes its later presence. This could potentially result in greater disturbances for public cultures of remembrance, especially if we now remember people and their lives which never were that way. This makes it necessary to deal critically with conveyed memories, even though it is open to debate whether “truth” is actually a leitmotif of collective memories.
5 Grief and Digitalisation
As already outlined, the way in which people try to express and cope with their grief is increasingly influenced by digital media (Walter et al., 2011). This opens up numerous “new ways to remain connected with the dead” (Bassett, 2015, p. 1133). As a result, not only concepts such as spatiality and materiality, but also our previous understanding of “successful” mourning are questioned.
Whether sitting in front of a screen or as avatars in the ai-driven metaverse with vr glasses, mourners regardless of their geographical location can build a valuable network with groups of people and still share the loss they have suffered. A collection of digital data from the deceased also offers new opportunities for the bereaved relatives to create a post-mortem presence (Carroll & Landry, 2010).
The observation by Aleida Assmann that “in the age of modern mobility and renewal […] the memory of the place together with the adherence to a certain spot on earth has [become] obsolete” (2010, p. 326), [own translation] also applies to contemporary mourning and memory of the deceased. Both are taking place more than ever detached from specific spatial fixations. While traditional rituals and places like graves at a cemetery have not become meaningless, there is currently a trend towards delocalisation (Benkel & Meitzler, 2019). At the cemetery people mourn and remember a loved one precisely in the place where his or her physical remains are preserved, but are at the same time made invisible. Memories on the internet do not require a material connection to the deceased person. In this regard, one could distinguish two bodies of the dead (Benkel & Meitzler, 2021, pp. 87–89). The first body pertains to the corpse, the physical remains which are generally given no legitimate visibility in western cultures and therefore in established burial routines are deliberately kept out of sight of the living. This practice is normally regarded as a cultural achievement (Meitzler, 2017) and is thus unproblematic, because the first body generally does not play a role for mourning, remembering and generating a postmortem social presence. This is superseded by the second body, which can be conceptualised as a kind of “body of memories” and comprises all the material and non-material connections to the deceased which are created or used by his or her posterity as such – e.g., oral, graphic or written narratives, photographs, videographs, sound recordings. This “body of memory” also includes the “inner” images of individual memory, and its emergence and vanishing, which are more difficult to control.
The internet has become a popular “home” of the second body. The grave on a physical cemetery requires a certain “immobility” of visitors due to the (in most cases) irreversible location of the corpse. This can be problematic in a society characterised by spatial mobility and corresponding lifestyles. Digital portals, by contrast, offer a certain degree of flexibility. In principle, they can be co-designed and redesigned by different people from nearly any location (Irwin, 2018). Against this background, in particular the ai-based applications of digital afterlife promise additional benefit as they give the second body of the deceased an (interactive) appearance, which comes closer to the previously living person than at any other social and technological level of development before. Rather than reading and hearing the same sentences spoken by the deceased over and over again and seeing his or her same physical positions in photos and videos (Meitzler, 2011, p. 234), at least some of the digitally represented “counterparts” have the ability to respond to new communication impetuses in new situations and create new output. This results in “an interactive space that goes beyond mere memory” (Krueger & Osler, 2022, p. 239).
Regardless of this, a differentiated view of and sensitivity for the individuality of grieving needs and processes is required. To what extent the ai-supported services function as an “appropriate resource” (ibid., p. 234) depends on different factors; for example, the age of the deceased and the circumstances of their death, the perceived quality of the relationship, the digital literacy of the user or the time, frequency and duration of use of the dai service.
Some people might not be interested in a permanent digital presence of the deceased, but rather in a unique opportunity – a final conversation in which one can once again look into the familiar, albeit artificially created face of the other and say a few last things. In any case, it is important to consider that grief is usually a dynamic process which does not take place in linear fashion but has many twists and turns. What initially proves helpful may not be so in the long term. During a period of grief, the attitudes of the bereaved towards the loss and the associated needs for adequate forms of interaction also change. Contrary to some marketing rhetoric from the dai, the interactive digital representation of a deceased person does not necessarily need to be interpreted by users as overcoming death and/or imbued with corresponding gravity of meaning. Also conceivable are comparatively “playful” applications, such as the already established voice assistant systems in everyday media, which could be personalised to feature the familiar voice of a deceased individual instead of a stranger’s. This would not constitute a replacement, but rather an extension or addition to traditional practices of individual and collective remembrance.
Despite all the reservations expressed about this technology, the dai will most probably continue to develop and become more widespread. It remains to be seen what significance it will take on in the culture of grief of the future and how it will relate to other memorial practices and rituals in this area.
Whether ai simulations of deceased individuals for the bereavement of their relatives are productive, destructive, or neither, there are currently no established empirical findings. This is simply because most of the applications discussed here, especially those operating with generative ai and addressing grieving individuals, are not yet widespread and still at a relatively early stage of development. Thinking about the effects of ai on the future culture of mourning and remembrance therefore requires a willingness to engage in speculation (Hurtado, 2021). However, based on the current state of research on mourning and digitalisation, possibilities for future development and the associated social and ethical design options can be outlined.
6 Remembrance Cultures in Politics, Education and Entertainment
In addition to individual relationship constellations in the private sphere involving close relatives or friends and in which direct experiences of loss and grief play a central role, these technologies also impact collective cultures of remembrance. Already in 1988, Jan Assmann distinguished between different varieties and integral parts of constructions of collective memories. He names a communicative memory close to everyday life and a cultural memory that is more distant from everyday life (Assmann & Czaplicka, 1995; Ferdinand, 2022). All these areas have now been pervaded by digitalisation. One might consider, for example, the availability of textual, auditory and visual reports about certain historical figures (writers, artists, scientists etc.) or the digitalisation of their culturally significant output.
However, ai technologies in particular offer new possibilities to convey knowledge and preserve the memory of people and historical events. This applies, above all, to the education sector, as shown by the Museum of Jewish Heritage (New York). At this exhibit, witnesses to the Holocaust are represented virtually, and they can answer visitors’ questions based on voice imitation and numerous interviews conducted while they were alive (Museum of Jewish Heritage, 2017). Another example is the continued digital existence of famous figures (politicians, actors, musicians, etc.). Using digital simulation technology, it was possible to hear the speech that the assassinated U.S. president John F. Kennedy had planned to give in Dallas but never actually held. Yet the present-day digital treatment of living people from contemporary history suggests problems for the future. An example is the website The Infinite Conversation (2023), on which a potentially infinite dialogue between the film director and dramaturge Werner Herzog and the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek is simulated. The linguistic model on which this is based was trained beforehand through interviews with both men. Even though the protagonists were both still alive when the application was published, questions about the “correct” representation of public figures become apparent. Žižek, for example, complained about what he viewed as a “harmless” representation in which his thoughts were converted into “harmless shit” without the “occasionally incorrect vulgarities” (Der Standard, 2022; translation by the authors). From a societal perspective, this results in the difficulty of having to decide which contexts are adequate for the use of technologies for a digital afterlife and which are not. Which parts of cultures of remembrance should be conserved in this way and what should preferably be omitted? What is the relationship between the wishes of the individuals being represented, the desires of the audience, and (supra-individual) interests concerning the culture of remembrance?
Questions about the content to be preserved arise even more regarding the entertainment industry (Sherlock, 2013). Here, it is not just about remembering or collectively honoring deceased people, but also and above all about commercial expectations.
Numerous examples are known in the film industry, in which deceased actors were replaced by digital copies. In the seventh part of The Fast and the Furious series, for instance, the deceased main actor Paul Walker was partially represented by computer animations. Even if economic considerations are mainly behind these efforts, they simultaneously respond to corresponding cultural needs. When long-dead actors are digitally “resurrected” decades after their death, they cannot give their consent as “originators”. This raises legal issues regarding their inheritance and patent rights. These examples also point to comprehensive deepfake discourses (Ajder et al., 2019) and the increasingly blurred boundaries between mediality and reality. The entertainment industry, in particular, contributes to this problem; for example, if the reality of the physicality of the actors and the reality of the animators behind a digital representation become indistinguishable.
7 The Democratisation of Post-Mortem Visibility?
The memory of public events as well as private experiences is subject to permanent change and therefore shaped by specific social conditions and contemporary discourses (Assmann & Czaplicka, 1995; Assmann & Conrad, 2010; Erll, 2017). How we remember something, what we regard as relevant to hold onto and tell others and what we do not is thus not only subject to personal preferences, but also essentially dependent on how others (members of a society) remember something (Halbwachs, 1992). Just like individual memories, collective memories should therefore not be viewed as static storages, which are filled with content like a vessel. Some things remain present for generations, whereas others vanish already after a short while. A collective memory thus has a dynamic, normative, selective and position-related character.
Which events and people are relevant enough to become part of collective memories is always subject to negotiation and at the same time a question of power. After all, collective memories are also exclusive as certain knowledge is not activated as memory stock or specifically excluded. A collective memory which can manifest itself at different levels (nation, society, different communities, including transnational communities) is hence a code and concept for the relationship between time and identity. Just like a society requires individuals but is more than the sum of all individuals (Elias, 2001), collective memories require individuals and their ability to remember, but are not merely the sum of all individual memories.
Remembrance has always been bound to media. How people visualise the past thus always depends on the respective cultural techniques available to them (Walter, 2015). The language itself, songs, images, and rituals along with photographs and films as mass products have shaped collective memories. Technical advancements, in particular all forms of digitalisation, therefore, have an influence on the social organisation of what is respectively regarded as “collective memory”. What people remember, so the hypothesis goes, will increasingly depend on how they receive and communicate information in the virtual space of the internet. Knowledge not only becomes accessible through the internet and corresponding ai applications, but can also be updated and presented in a tangible manner. This can bring about new perspectives regarding the content of collective memories.
ai-based services of remembering the deceased thus follow the zeitgeist of contemporary cultures of remembrance: in a technological world in which looking back at the past is increasingly done digitally, they enable innovative ways of accessing historical events and people. This type of encounter with history appears to be compatible with the lifeworld of “digital natives”.
Traditionally, the collective public, social and political memory of people was dependent on the historical significance attributed to them, and their social status and public interest shown to them. The privilege of remembrance – in the sense of a social-national collective memory – was reserved for a comparably small circle of people in relation to the entire population. The contemporary technical potential, however, points to a possible transformation. Rather, the rapid spread of social media and other digital platforms in the new millennium gives a growing number of people, regardless of categories such as social status and prestige, the opportunity to preserve and share with others their personal life story along with the associated experiences and memories in digital channels. Even if in most cases it may not be the primary intention to set up a digital legacy after one’s own death, the data left behind do not simply disappear with the death of the individual (Georges, 2014). Instead, they can often be accessed long after by survivors and, in principle, also be appropriated for commemorative purposes (Pyng, 2020; Stokes, 2021). The resulting data basis would lead to even more promising possibilities for dai and the detailed construction of avatars. In this way, possibilities to take part in public remembrance are offered to everyone who has access to this technology (Bassett, 2015, p. 1135).
Consequently, we could assume that democratisation and diversification are taking place because from now on not only the stories, experiences and perspectives of public figures are relevant and accessible, but rather also those that would otherwise remain largely invisible. This could lead to a more inclusive historiography, as a much larger number of people will have a “postmortem voice” as well. While in the past, powerful institutions and actors controlled which people, which (positively or negatively connoted) “life achievements”, and which events were attributed collective memorial relevance, the entry barriers have been lowered nowadays. Private individuals from different social, cultural or geographical backgrounds are able to actively set up their own digital archives by themselves and modify them according to their own ideas. This way they can at least partially maintain control over the memories they leave behind and can be remembered by a potentially vast number of people. The latter would change the logic of public cultures of remembrance insofar as the retrospective representation of people and events is increasingly resulting from search engine research and the selective mechanisms of algorithms (Seyfert & Roberge, 2017).
However, questions should also be raised about the terms and conditions of a digital afterlife. This includes, on the one hand, economic resources, considering that most of the services are subject to fees. Therefore, people must have enough money to be able to use the applications and required hardware, i.e., an internet-compatible end device. Despite advancing digitalisation worldwide and ever fewer requirements for the creation, modification and distribution of media content, this still does not apply to all regions of the world. An additional necessity is sufficient data volume. Currently, large quantities of personal data are still required in order to train the replica to become as similar as possible to its analogue original. Anyone who has been online regularly over many years, who has left many traces of communication on the internet, and who is “present” in many photographic, video and audio recordings, have much better chances of a good result than someone who has not. Digital afterlife is thus not possible for everyone, but only a certain, albeit continuously growing part of the population.
However, not everyone who has a large digital database can automatically be attested to a great interest in a postmortem publicly-accessible presence as an avatar. From the relatives’ perspective, the extent which the digital representations of their own parents, partners or even children with personal and sometimes intimate content should be shared with an unknown public should also be questioned. For instance, what occurs if the deceased, while alive, determined that their chatbot/avatar should be publicly accessible, which reveals not only information about the deceased but also about family members, who do not agree because they see their private sphere violated? And what happens in the reverse case, when survivors wish to share the digital representative of their deceased relative with the public, but he or she did not clearly express his or her will regarding this option while living (Sisto, 2020)? What about other people from the deceased’s environment for whom the unexpected encounter with the avatar is not positive support, but an emotional burden?
Furthermore, questions regarding the public interest arise; after all, the existence of a publicly accessible avatar and availability of a large collection of media content do not necessarily mean that this person is part of a collective memory. Ultimately, it is people and not technologies who remember. Only people can create a meaningful connection to the past – and only when they do so can one speak of memory in the true sense (Sebald, 2018, p. 35). The essential task is to give an interpretation and to give meaning to the technologically portrayed content, which goes beyond these digital manifestations. Just like the social presence of the deceased in general depends on the existence of people, who can and want to remember, this applies in the same way to digital afterlife as well. In this regard, we can only speak of democratisation to the extent that it becomes possible for an increasingly large number of people to be publicly visible and approachable through an interactive digital representation. However, as is the case with social media, this increased public presence for everyone comes at the price of an inflationary loss of the importance of public representation.
It is no new phenomenon to socially negotiate who or what is regarded as (not) worth remembering. Perhaps it is ultimately also not so much about whether one de facto plays a role in the constitution of collective memories with a self-made virtual monument. What could be much more crucial – and indeed a cultural novelty – is that the societal and technical conditions create the feeling (or even the demand) to be able to generate postmortem relevance based on digital traces and thus impact collective memories.
8 Outlook
Remembrance can be manipulated in both the analogue and digital spheres. Remembering and memory, whether at the individual or collective level, have not merely been based on objective or objectified facts, but rather on socially shaped interpretations, attributions, and perceptions of relevance. The market-orientated design of the commemoration of the dead and its contextualisation within data-economic business models is still a fundamental structural problem which can be observed in the new digital practices of coping with death. The debate on the digital future of collective memories should, however, also be conducted against the backdrop of ethical and data privacy concerns. Specific regulatory issues are important, including data protection as well as questions concerning the quality of training data. Has data for avatars been authorised during the lifetime of the deceased? Do they come from legal sources, and can their integrity be assured? Additional regulatory tasks for the future include mandatory labelling of avatars to prevent confusion with videos of living people or fictional characters. Only by doing so can we ensure that the potential of this technology is used not only to serve a few actors but also on a broader societal basis in a responsible manner.
Matthias Meitzler is a Research Associate at the International Centre for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities (izew) at the University of Tübingen in Germany. He studied sociology, history, and psychoanalysis at Goethe University Frankfurt. For several years, he has been conducting research on various social phenomena related to the end of life.
Prof. Dr. Jessica Heesen is head of the research unit Media Ethics, Philosophy of Technology & ai at the International Center for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities (izew) of the University of Tübingen. Her work focuses on the cultural and ethical implications of digitalisation and the use of ai systems in particular.
Dr. Martin Hennig is a postdoc and team leader in the field of media and digitalisation at the University of Tübingen’s International Center for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities (izew). His research topics include digital cultures, media ethics, ai imaginaries, semiotics, narratology, culture and mentalities.
Prof. Dr. Regina Ammicht Quinn has been the speaker of the International Center for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanties (izew), University of Tübingen, until the end of 2023, as well as the director of the Center for Gender and Diversity Research, also University of Tübingen. Her research interests are ethics in societal contexts, esp. challenges of anthopological, political and technological transformation, questions of gender and questions of religious/secular societal shifts.
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We consider chatbots to be computer applications designed to hold text-based conversations with “real” persons. They are already applied in various areas. For example, some companies use them when contacting customers. Avatars are additionally not only able to communicate by text, but also represent actual people in a visual sense.
The term refers to a sphere created by virtual reality technology, which expands the physical space by digital contexts for action. Areas on the internet are hereby combined to create a subordinate virtual world. Unlike conventional online offers, the users are not merely distanced recipients in front of the screen, rather they can “immerse” themselves into the three-dimensional environment of the metaverse, move around there in the design of an avatar and simultaneously interact with others (Meitzler, 2024). The metaverse thus offers a wide range of applications, i.e., virtual encounters with the avatars of deceased people, among other things.
