Day: January 28, 2025

 

In the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons the spell Animate Dead allows the caster to re-animate a corpse as an undead slave. This sort of necromancy is generally considered evil and is avoided by good creatures. While the entertainment industry lacks true necromancers, some years ago they developed a technological Animate Dead in the form of the celebrity hologram. While this form of necromancy does not animate the corpse of a dead celebrity, it re-creates their body and makes it dance, sing, and speak at the will of its masters. Tupac Shakur is probably the best known victim of this dark art of light and there were plans to re-animate Amy Winehouse. As should be expected, AI is now being used to re-animate dead actors. Ian Holm, who played the android Ash in Alien, was re-animated for a role in Alien: Romulus. While AI technology is different from the older holographic technology, they are similar enough in their function to allow for a combined moral assessment.

One relevant factor in assessing the ethics of this matter is how the re-animations are used and what they are made to do. Consider, for example, the holographic Amy Winehouse. If the hologram is used to re-create a concert she recorded, then this is morally on par with showing a video of the concert. The use of a hologram would seem to be just a modification of the medium, such as creating a VR version of the concert. Using a hologram in this manner seems morally fine. But the ethics can become more complicated if the re-animation is not simply a change of the medium of presentation.

One concern is the ethics of making the re-animation perform in new ways. That is, the re-animation is not merely re-enacting what the original did in a way analogous to a recording but being used to create new performances. This is of special concern if the re-animation is made to perform with other performers (living or dead), to perform at specific venues (such as a political event), or to endorse or condemn products, ideas or people.

If, prior to death, the celebrity worked out a contract specifying how their re-animation can be used, then this would lay to rest some moral concerns. After all, this use of the re-animation would be with permission and no more problematic than if they did those actions while alive. If re-animations become common, presumably such contracts will become a standard part of the entertainment industry.

If a celebrity did not specify how their re-animation should be used, then there could be moral problems. To illustrate, a celebrity might have been against this use of holograms (as Prince was), a celebrity might have disliked the other performers that their image is now forced to sing and dance with, or a celebrity might have loathed a product, idea or people that their re-animation is being forced to endorse. One approach to this matter is to use the guideline of legal ownership of the rights to a celebrity’s works and likeness.

When a celebrity dies, the legal rights to their works and likeness goes to whoever is legally specified to receive them. This person or business then has the right to exploit the works and likeness for their gain. For example, Disney can keep making money off the Star Wars films featuring Carrie Fisher, though she died in 2016. On this view, the likeness of a celebrity is a commodity that can be owned, bought and sold. While a living celebrity can disagree with the usage of their likeness, after death their likeness is controlled by the owner who can use it as they wish (assuming the celebrity did not set restrictions). This is analogous to the use of any property whose ownership is inherited. It can thus be contended that there should be no special moral exception that forbids monetizing a dead celebrity’s likeness by the owner of that likeness. That said, the next essay in the series will explore reasons as to why the likeness of a celebrity is morally different from other commodities.

Socrates, it is claimed, was critical of writing and argued that it would weaken memory. Many centuries later, it was worried that television would “rot brains” and that calculators would destroy people’s ability to do math. More recently, computers, the internet, tablets, and smartphones were supposed to damage the minds of students. The latest worry is that AI will destroy the academy by destroying the minds of students.

There are two main worries about the negative impact of AI in this context. The first ties back to concerns about cheating: students will graduate and get jobs but be ignorant and incompetent because they used AI to cheat their way through school. For example, we could imagine an incompetent doctor who completed medical school only through their use of AI. This person would present a danger to their patients and could cause considerable harm up to and including death. As other examples, we could imagine engineers and lawyers who cheated their way to a degree with AI and are now dangerously incompetent. The engineers design flawed planes that crash, and the lawyers fail their clients, who end up in jail. And so on, for all other relevant professions.

While having incompetent people in professions is worrisome, this is not a new problem created by AI. While AI does provide a new way to cheat, cheating has always been a problem in higher education. And, as discussed in the previous essay, AI does not seem to have significantly increased cheating. As such, we can probably expect the level of incompetency resulting from cheating to remain relatively stable, despite the presence of AI. It is also worth mentioning that incompetent people often end up in positions and professions where they can do serious harm not because they engaged in academic cheating, but because of nepotism, cronyism, bribery, and influence. It is unlikely that AI will impact these factors and concerns about incompetence would be better focused on matters other than AI cheating.

The second worry takes us back to Socrates and calculators. This is the worry that students using technology “honestly” will make themselves weaker or even incompetent. In this scenario, the students would not be cheating their way to incompetence. Instead, they would be using AI in accordance with school policies and this would have deleterious consequences on their abilities.

A well-worn reply to this worry is to point to the examples at the beginning of this essay, such as writing and calculators, and infer that because the academy was able to adapt to these earlier technologies it will be able to adapt to AI. On this view, AI will not prevent students from developing adequate competence to do their jobs and it will not weaken their faculties. But this will require that universities adapt effectively, otherwise there might be problems.

A counter to this view is to argue that AI is different from these earlier technologies. For example, when Photoshop was created, some people worried that it would be detrimental to artistic skills by making creating and editing images too easy. But while Photoshop had a significant impact, it did not eliminate the need for skill and the more extreme of the feared consequences did not come to pass. But AI image generation, one might argue, brought these fears fully to life. When properly prompted, AI can generate images of good enough quality that human artists worry about their jobs. One could argue that AI will be able to do this (or is already doing this) broadly and students will no longer need to develop these skills, because AI will be able to do it for them (or in their place). But is this something we should fear, or just another example of technology rendering skills obsolete?

Most college graduates in the United States could not make a spear, hunt a deer and then preserve the meat without refrigeration and transform the hide into clean and comfortable clothing. While these were once essential skills for our ancestors, we would not consider college graduates weak or incompetent because they lack these skills.  Turning to more recent examples, modern college graduates would not know how to use computer punch cards or troubleshoot an AppleTalk network. But they do not need such skills, and they would not be considered incompetent for lacking them. If AI persists and fulfills some of its promise, it would be surprising if it did not render some skills obsolete. But, as always, there is the question of whether we should allow skills and knowledge to become obsolete and what we might lose if we do so.