INTRODUCTION
Imagine seeing Freddie Mercury at a live concert singing brand-new songs, or a dead actor appearing in a new movie coming out several years after he/she died. What used to be only in the domain of sci-fi is now the commercial reality of AI. Through voice cloning, deepfakes, CGI reconstruction, and holograms, AI is capable of recreating the faces, voices, and attitudes of dead celebrities with a level of accuracy that is often quite startling and sometimes even disturbing.[1]
Entertainment and advertising industries have been quick to exploit this feature. Posthumous live shows, digital brand endorsements, and AI-recreated actors are not just a theoretical concept – they are reality now, and the market for this type of content is growing at a very fast pace.[2]
Then again, this development opens a very serious legal question: Is it possible to commercially recreate the identity of a deceased person without infringing on their rights and dignity? Since AI is outpacing law, this question needs priority.
WHAT IS DIGITAL RESURRECTION?
Digital resurrection means using AI and digital technologies to bring back a deceased person’s use of face, voice, or overall character through creating new content for them. It uses mainly four different methods for digital resurrection:
Deepfake: Machine learning models that overlay a person’s facial image on another person’s whole body so that the final altered video looks very real and is fabricated.
AI Voice Cloning: Using analysis of the available speech samples for making a synthetic voice that sounds just like and can be hardly distinguished from the original.
Holograms: Three-dimensional visual effects created by the projection which can be seen from different viewing angles; these have been prominently used in live events and performances of deceased artists.
AI-Generated Avatars: Completely digital characters that look and move like the real person, have the same way of speaking, and so on, are created with the help of recording the launch individual’s appearance, movements, and speech patterns.
Michael Jackson 2014 Billboard Music Awards: A digitised Michael Jackson performing Slave to the Rhythm for a live audience has become one of the initial occasions of the use of sophisticated hologram technology to bring back a deceased celebrity, which also became a cause of continuing legal and ethical debate.[3]
MAJOR LEGAL ISSUES
Personality and Publicity Rights
A famous person’s identity, their name, face, voice, and physical appearance, is a very valuable asset that has been accumulated over many years. Publicity rights serve to protect the identity from being commercially exploited without permission while the individual is alive[4]. The main point The question is whether these rights extend beyond death.
In a lot of jurisdictions, the answer is yes. But, in India, the legal situation is still very puzzling and unclear. The Indian courts have acknowledged personality rights in matters about living celebrities[5], but no posthumous publicity rights system has been legislated. So, the heirs of deceased Indian celebrities and the public find themselves in a rather significant legal dark area.
Consent and Commercial Exploitation
When a famous person passes away, who really has the right to agree to their digital resurrection? The families might argue that they are the rightful moral guardians of the deceased’s legacy, whereas the production companies have contractual and financial interests. This results in a dangerous power imbalance. [6]In the absence of a legal system that clearly controls posthumous consent, the risk really exists that digital recreations are not tributes but are rather motivated by commercial purposes; the person’s identity is being exploited without any real or informed authorisation.
Deepfake and Misrepresentation Concerns
AI doesn’t just imitate; it can invent too. Through deepfakes, it is possible to show a dead celebrity endorsing a product, voicing a political opinion, or even making statements that they never made in real life.[7] Such a situation is a potential defamation and public deception issue. When it comes to advertising, fake AI-generated celebrity endorsements can be considered misleading and thus violate consumer protection laws as well as the guidelines of the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI), which bans false celebrity endorsements. [8]The judicial system has barely started dealing with AI-fabricated speech as a new type of commercial fraud.
Ethical Concerns
And besides law, ethics are very clear. Yes, creating a digital image of someone who has passed away may be the beginning of turning a person’s life story into a mere source of income. It also causes us to think about human dignity; after death, does a person still have the right to remain uncommodified? On another hand, this practice can mean the manipulation of emotions by taking advantage of the mourning of the fans being used as a means for making money. In the most cynical way, it is the making money from dead beings.
- Indian Legal Position and Global Comparison
India does not have a specific law that deals with AI yet, but some parts of the rules that are already there can provide only partial and imperfect protection. As per the Copyright Act of 1957, original performances and recordings are protected, which means an estate can technically have the copyright of a celebrity’s recorded works. But this does not fully stop AI-generated re-creations from being made.[9] Article 21 of the Constitution, which the Supreme Court has interpreted to include the right to privacy and personal dignity, might even be used to defend posthumous personality rights.[10] The Information Technology Act, 2000, deals with some types of digital misrepresentation, but the rules there are not a very good match to the peculiarities of AI-generated celebrity content.[11]
Jurisdiction | Key Law/Framework | Posthumous Protection |
India | Copyright Act 1957; IT Act 2000; Art. 21 | Indirect & unclear; no particular AI law |
California, USA | Celebrities Rights Act 1985 (Cal Civ Code Sec. 3344.1) | Explicit: 70 years of posthumous publicity rights[12] |
China | Deep Synthesis Regulations 2022 | Explicit consent is required for AI likeness use.[13] |
California’s Celebrities Rights Act gives a deceased celebrity’s estate the right to commercially control the use of their image for a period of 70 years after the death of the celebrity. China’s recently updated Provisions on the Administration of Deep Synthesis Internet Information Services (2022) not only prohibit the use of a person’s image for the creation of AI-generated content without their explicit prior consent, but also directly address the issue of digital resurrection. Compared to it, India’s regulatory lacuna is glaring and demands immediate attention.
CONCLUSION
Artificial intelligence is going to keep evolving, and the ability to digitally resurrect people will become increasingly clever and profitable. The issue is not if it comes; we’ve reached that point already. The issue is if our legal systems are up to the task of making sure it is done ethically.
India could do a lot more than engaging in a running judicial interpretation of the situation; in fact, it is high time that India should come up with a law specific to AI-generated recreations of the dead, including posthumous publicity rights, consent mechanisms, and penalties for misrepresentation. There is no reason why innovation and dignity cannot be at tension. Still the latter will require a conscious regulation.
Author(s) Name: Aarya Vaishnavi (Bharati Vidyapeeth New Law College, Pune)
References:
[1] Ryan Calo, ‘Artificial Intelligence Policy: A Primer and Roadmap’ (2017) 51 UC Davis Law Review 399, 401–403.
[2] Samantha Bradshaw and Philip N Howard, The Global Disinformation Order: 2019 Global Inventory of Organised Social Media Manipulation (Oxford Internet Institute 2019) 4–6.
[3] Taylor Soper, “Cool and Creepy: Watch Michael Jackson’s Hologram Perform at Billboard Awards – GeekWire” (GeekWire, May 19, 2014) <https://www.geekwire.com/2014/michael-jackson-hologram/> accessed May 1, 2026.
[4] J Thomas McCarthy, The Rights of Publicity and Privacy (2nd edn, Thomson Reuters 2000) §1:3.
[5] ICC Development (International) Ltd v Arvee Enterprises and Anr 2003 SCC OnLine Del 2.
[6] Deven Desai and Gerard Magliocca, ‘Patents, Meet Napster: 3D Printing and the Digitalisation of Things’ (2014) 102 Georgetown Law Journal 1691, 1720–1722.
[7] Bobby Chesney and Danielle Citron, ‘Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security’ (2019) 107 California Law Review 1753, 1758–1764.
[8] Advertising Standards Council of India, Guidelines for Celebrities in Advertising (ASCI 2022) cl 2–3.
[9] Copyright Act 1957 (India) s 57.
[10] Justice K S Puttaswamy (Retd) v Union of India (2017) 10 SCC 1.
[11] Information Technology Act 2000 (India) s 66D.
[12] California Civil Code § 3344.1 (Celebrities Rights Act 1985, as amended 1999) (Astaire Celebrity Image Protection Act).
[13] Provisions on the Administration of Deep Synthesis Internet Information Services (China) 2022, Art 14.