Let’s be honest, the idea of a last will and testament feels a bit… Dickensian. A dusty document, sealed with wax, read aloud in a solicitor’s wood-panelled office. But while we’ve been focused on who gets the silverware and the antique clock, a far larger, more complex inheritance has been quietly accumulating online. Every email, every photo uploaded to the cloud, every daft message—it all has to go somewhere. This is where AI estate planning logs on, moving the conversation from heirlooms to data streams.
For decades, your legacy was what you left behind in the physical world. Now, it’s also the ghost in the machine. We’re talking about your digital inheritance, a sprawling, messy collection of assets that define your online self. It’s a problem we’ve largely ignored, but one that technology itself is now offering to solve, with some rather strange and unsettling results.
What Exactly is a Digital Ghost?
Think of traditional estate planning as creating a neat inventory of your physical possessions. AI estate planning attempts to do the same for your digital life, but the task is infinitely more complicated. It’s not just about passing on a password for your online banking. It’s about deciding the fate of your social media profiles, your personal emails, your cryptocurrency wallets, and the terabytes of photos stored on Google or Apple servers.
It’s less like writing a list and more like being the sysadmin for your own afterlife. Who has the right to access your private messages? Should your social media profile be deleted, or turned into a memorial page? These aren’t just technical questions; they’re deeply personal ones. The legal frameworks are lagging desperately behind the technology, leaving families to navigate a digital maze without a map.
The Chatbot at the Wake
This is where things get truly futuristic, and frankly, a little odd. An emerging industry, which a recent BBC report claims is worth over £100bn, is built around the idea of posthumous communication. Companies are now offering to create AI-powered ‘deathbots’—chatbots trained on a deceased person’s digital footprint, like their text messages and voice notes. The goal? To let the living talk to the dead.
Researchers from Cardiff University and King’s College London who studied this memorial technology described the experience as both “fascinating and unsettling.” It raises a fundamental question: is this a healthy tool for processing grief, or a commercialisation of memory that keeps people trapped in the past?
Imagine a photograph that can talk back. It can repeat phrases it has heard and mimic a conversation, which might feel comforting for a moment. But it can’t create new memories with you, share new experiences, or evolve its understanding of the world. It’s a static echo. As bereavement expert Jacqueline Gunn noted in the same BBC article, these AIs “don’t grow or adapt in the way grief does.” Grief is a process, not a subscription service.
The Imperfect Echo and the Ethical Minefield
The current technology, while impressive on the surface, is still incredibly crude. Dr Jenny Kidd, one of the researchers, fed her own digital data into one of these platforms and found the result almost comical. “It didn’t sound like me,” she said, “in fact it sounded quite Australian.” This highlights a massive risk: misrepresentation.
This brings us to the idea of ethical wills. For centuries, people have written letters to pass down not their valuables, but their values—their wisdom, life lessons, and hopes for their family. The question is whether AI estate planning can augment this, or if it risks corrupting it.
Do you really want an AI, trained on your hastily written texts and public-facing social media persona, to be the source of wisdom for your great-grandchildren? An AI can’t understand context, irony, or the difference between a public statement and a private thought. It can’t capture the essence of a person. It can only create a flattened-out, simplified caricature. It’s the digital equivalent of being remembered only for your most liked Instagram post.
What Does the Future of Digital Legacy Look Like?
So, where is this all heading? It’s easy to see a future where major tech platforms get in on the act. Imagine a premium ‘Memorialise+’ feature on Facebook or a ‘Legacy’ setting in your Google account, allowing you to curate your own posthumous AI. It’s a compelling business model, turning eternal remembrance into a recurring revenue stream.
The technology will undoubtedly improve. Today’s Australian-sounding voice clones will become indistinguishable from the real thing. But better technology doesn’t solve the core ethical problem. If anything, it makes it worse. A perfectly rendered AI of a loved one could be even more emotionally manipulative and create a far more convincing, yet still hollow, illusion.
We need to start having serious conversations about data ownership after death. Should our digital selves be inheritable property, subject to the same rules as a house or a car? Or should there be a fundamental “right to be deleted” that overrides all else?
Ultimately, as you think about your digital footprint, the question isn’t just about who gets your Bitcoin wallet. It’s about who gets to tell your story after you’re gone. Will it be your family and friends, sharing genuine, messy, human memories? Or will it be a chatbot, serving up sanitised, algorithmically generated responses from the digital beyond?
What parts of your digital life would you want to be preserved, and what parts should be permanently deleted? The choices we make now will define what it means to be remembered in the 21st century.
