AI 'Resurrections' Raise Ethical Issues, Prolong Grief, say Catholic Experts
Last year, AI-generated voices of some of the victims slain in the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High mass shooting in Parkland, Florida were used for a robocall campaign urging voters to demand Congress undertake gun reform.
But even if the goal is to serve a good cause, when it comes to such AI avatars, "there's a right way to do it and the wrong way to do it," said Brian Patrick Green, director of technology ethics at Santa Clara University's Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.
Green said that broadly speaking, it is understandable that parents of children killed in a mass shooting would find such AI advocacy "to be a good memorialization of their child."
However, he noted, "the child can't be asked their consent for it, because they're gone."
As a result, said Green, there is "a risk of violation here, which is that we owe something to the dead. ... We owe respect to the dead. We owe respect to future generations. We have this idea of respecting other people around us right now. But we tend to think of that in terms of space, not time."
Brian Green, director, technology ethics, quoted by The Pilot.