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Posthumous Digital Face: A Semiotic and Legal Semiotic Perspective

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Abstract

The paper explores the semiotic and legal semiotic perspectives related to posthumous digital face. In doing so, the contribution also seeks to explore the complex relationship between AI-generated faces, including deep fakes, mourning, and posthumous rights. The article has five parts. In the introduction, we discuss the challenges of posthumous existence and the issues related to respecting the deceased. We also examine some examples of ‘digital personhood’. In part two, we present three case studies and use semiotics to help us distinguish between posthumous existence and digital resurrection. In part three, we provide a semiotic classification of representation in the context of digital faces and our case studies. We suggest that there is a difference between the phenomenological presence of a hologram and the cognitive value of recreating someone’s identity, including their biography, face, and voice. In part four, we explore the topic of digital spectra and mourning, including the concept of imputability. In part five, we analyse how the law offers new insights into the ontology of the face of the deceased and posthumous existence in hologram form. In the conclusion, we summarise the article’s key findings and highlight open issues and potential future developments.

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Fig. 1

© USC Shoah Foundation

Fig. 2

© France3

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Notes

  1. Ursache, Marius. The Journey to Digital Immortality. Medium. https://medium.com/@mariusursache/the-journey-to-digital-immortality-33fcbd79949. Accessed July 20 2023.

  2. The discourse changes, of course, when it comes to personalities from the world of show business. We will return to this point later.

  3. Hassan, Jennifer. AI is being used to give dead, missing kids a voice they didn’t ask for. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/08/09/ai-dead-children-tiktok-videos/. Accessed August 10 2023.

  4. Since the victims are minors, the video’s creators are criminally liable in most European legal systems.

  5. Polish naturalised Canadian, born in 1932, Gutter is today a famous Holocaust educator in Canada.

  6. It is also possible to interact with Pinchas Gutter’s hologram as a chatbot: https://iwitness.usc.edu/dit/pinchas.

  7. This also means that the material presence of the body was only crucial in the pre-productive part of the hologram production.

  8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yewm6TfLZ3Q&source_ve_path=Mjg2NjY&feature=emb_logo. Accessed 19 August 2023. A video was also released detailing the stages of the technological realisation of Flores’ avatar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQLTRMYHwvE&t=12s. Accessed 19 August 2023.

  9. From a tweet by famous Spanish TV journalist Mónica Carrillo.

  10. It is true that the face has an indexical value in all three case studies. This is evident in Hotel du Temps, where the body belongs to another person, and in the example of Margaret Thatcher’s digital resurrection (see footnote number 13). Despite this, the digitally resurrected face still refers to the entire resurrected person, whether it is Dalida or Margaret Thatcher, in an indexical sense.

  11. We might also ask ourselves whether the interest in spectrality, in this new age of A.I. diffusion, will not decline in the future, just as it did between the dawn of photography and its future development [1].

  12. In the same study [29], Denicolai notes how this resembles the characteristics of mythological narratives handed down from generation to generation. At the same time, Terracciano [ibid.] notes the end of the “domain of live experience”, referring to simultaneous history.

  13. The research addressed the possibility of digitally resurrecting Margaret Thatcher for a part in a screen drama. The part was too small to be attractive to actors who had played her on-screen in previous films. The filmmakers, therefore, considered the option of digital resurrection: instead of asking the audience to believe an actress’s interpretation of Thatcher, technology could allow them to build a hybrid on-screen character using an actor’s body combined with a digitally re-rendered face of Margaret Thatcher herself [22].

  14. For a more detailed analysis of the issue from a semiotic perspective, refer to Metz [31].

  15. As recalled by Lees et al. [22], agendas and discussions around the analysis and regulation of such manipulations without the consent of the original person have varied from performers’ rights [32] to image rights, rights of publicity and persona protection [13, 33], to the criminal law response to revenge pornography and privacy rights [4].

  16. Clearly, most deep fake images and videos raise the legal issue of identity theft and fraud [30, 44].

  17. We have already discussed the lack of consent by presenting the case of Hotel du Temps in Sect. 2, above.

  18. See, i.e. Hamilton Nolan. The Hollywood strike can and must win–for all of us, not just writers and actors. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/19/the-hollywood-strike-can-and-must-win-for-all-of-us-not-just-writers-and-actors. Accessed 23 August 2023; ‘Bargaining for our very existence’: why the battle over AI is being fought in Hollywood. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/22/sag-aftra-wga-strike-artificial-intelligence. Accessed 23 August 2023.

  19. Con l'intelligenza artificiale creo un alter ego per mio figlio. SkyTG24. https://tg24.sky.it/tecnologia/2023/07/11/gianluca-nicoletti-intelligenza-artificiale. Accessed 2 September 2023.

  20. In a semiotic sense, the notion of imputability is to be connected with the issues of the Sender (actant destinateur), both in terms of the objectives of the actions, i.e. contracts (Mandating Sender) and in terms of the retrospective judgement on the actions, i.e. sanctions (Sender-adjudicator) [19]. However, it was not a priority for this paper to delve into this theoretical connection.

  21. A person’s digital legacy is typically evaluated based on four legal parameters [44]: intangible objects, proprietary information, intellectual property, and personal data. Much debate surrounds the last parameter, personal data, such as those found on social media profiles or email accounts. The first three parameters are considered property and are subject to inheritance laws. However, personal data is not included as part of the estate and cannot be passed on to others, according to privacy laws. For the issues discussed in this contribution, we adopt a different framing. That is, we do not deal with property information and personal data and add the element of the deceased’s reputation.

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Acknowledgements

We have developed the contribution as part of the SOLARIS project, which is funded by the EU. The project is a Research and Innovation Action (RIA) led by Prof. Federica Russo from the University of Amsterdam. It brings together scholars from different fields, including philosophy, semiotics, philosophy of science, and computer engineering, from 12 partner institutions across 8 countries. The project focuses on investigating the socio-political impacts of deep-fake images created by Artificial Intelligence. For more information, you can

visit https://projects.illc.uva.nl/solaris/.

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  1. Department of Human Studies, LUMSA, Rome, Italy

    Giuditta Bassano & Margaux Cerutti

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Correspondence to Giuditta Bassano.

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Bassano, G., Cerutti, M. Posthumous Digital Face: A Semiotic and Legal Semiotic Perspective. Int J Semiot Law 37, 769–791 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-023-10067-2

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