AI can now restore the faces and voices of deceased individuals and make them speak new lines — tools like Sora, Veo, Make-A-Scene, Runway, and Pika all promote "historical figure reality generation" as core features. The question has shifted from technology to ethics: when AI reconstructs the deceased, is it commemoration, manipulation, or violation of memory?
The Ambiguous Boundary of Posthumous Right of Publicity
Traditional publicity rights assume living subjects. AI has broken this premise. Legal systems worldwide offer different interpretations, leaving AI-generated "digital reconstructions of the deceased" in a legal gray zone — technology can reconstruct without lifetime consent, but law still cannot clearly answer who owns memory.
Conflict Between the Right to Memory and the Right to Oblivion
The "right to be remembered" has emerged as a counterpart to the "right to be forgotten." These rights fundamentally collide: the right to oblivion enables individuals or families to demand deletion of unwanted images and data; the right to be remembered enables preservation and reconstruction of a person's memory based on historical, press, and artistic freedom. Beyond a legal dispute, this expands to the question of who holds the power to design memory.
AI Has Become the "Editor of Memory"
AI doesn't simply recombine data — it rewrites the meaning of that data. Sora or Pika can generate video of MLK commenting on modern politics; ElevenLabs or DeepBrain can produce new advertisements in a deceased actor's voice; Adobe Premiere AI can automatically adjust the emotional tone of historical footage. AI has evolved as the "editor" of history and emotion. At this stage, legal publicity rights alone are insufficient. What's needed is an "Ethics of Memory Design."
International Guidelines
UNESCO (2024) requires AI-reconstructed historical figures to include fact-based source citation and context. OECD (2025) recommends consent procedures from families or legal representatives when using deceased persons' digital images. EU AI Act (2025) includes AI that reconstructs human identity, faces, and voices as "high-risk AI systems" requiring pre-registration and transparency reporting.
Digital Posthumous Rights
In an era where AI reconstructs memory, "rights after death" may become more important than lifetime rights. Three axes: Digital Likeness Right (prohibiting unauthorized use of the deceased's physical expressions); Memory Authenticity Right (obligation to clearly label AI-generated statements and actions as "fictional"); Family Consent Right (mandatory family or foundation approval for commercial use). Ultimately this could evolve into an "anthropological rights framework for the AI era" — in a society where AI reconstructs humans, people will demand rights over "how they will be remembered." Technology creates memories, but only humans give them meaning.
