The ethics of AI copies of loved ones

Updated 18 October 2026 · 2 min read

Making an AI copy of a person, especially of a parent, touches consent, grief, identity and trust all at once. These are the questions we think every family, and every company building such tools, should be able to answer.

1. Consent

The clearest case is a person building a copy of themselves, or helping their children build one, while they are alive. Their own answers, their own voice, their own choice. It gets harder when someone has already passed away and cannot agree.

Our view: families have a legitimate wish to keep a loved one's stories, and the person's own words and recordings are part of the family's memory. But a voice deserves special care. A synthetic voice should be made only with the person's consent, or the family's right where the law allows it, and it should be easy to remove.

2. Grief

A copy can comfort. It can also keep someone stuck. Grief counsellors often point out that remembering, retelling and even "talking to" the dead are normal parts of mourning; the risk is in pretending the loss did not happen.

• A copy should be clear about what it is, every time it matters.
• It should not be designed to maximise how long someone spends with it.
• It should not send messages pretending to be the person, unprompted.

3. Ownership and control

Who owns a copy, and who decides what happens to it after the person dies? A good answer is: the person decides while alive, and people they chose decide afterwards. Not the company. In practice that means:

• everything can be downloaded in a usable form;
• any part, or all of it, can be deleted;
• the person names who looks after it later;
• what they shared is not used to train public AI models or sold.

4. Honesty and accuracy

A copy that invents a memory, or puts words in someone's mouth, can do real harm in a family. It should answer from what it was told and say plainly when it doesn't know. Companies should explain in plain words how their AI works and where it falls short; ours is at how our AI works.

5. Who may talk with it

A copy of a parent can mean different things to each child. Families should be able to decide together who can add to it and who can talk with it, and the maker should be able to remove anyone.

6. If the company closes

Families invest years of memories. They deserve warning and time. We commit to telling users at least 90 days before OtherMy would ever close, so everything can be downloaded.

A short framework

1. Consent, especially for a voice.
2. Honesty about what a copy is.
3. Control stays with the person and the people they choose.
4. No training of public models, no ads, no selling data.
5. Easy download and deletion.
6. Design for remembering, not for engagement.

These are the rules OtherMy is built on. If you are comparing tools, ask every one of them the same questions.