Scott Adams AI afterlife triggers family backlash

The market has finally found a way to monetize death without bothering to ask the bereaved: just ship an “AI afterlife” and let the lawyers sort out the metaphysics later.

Business Insider reports that an AI-generated “Scott Adams” — a video avatar mimicking the late Dilbert creator’s cadence and political-philosophical monologues — began posting online shortly after Adams died in January at 68 from complications of metastatic prostate cancer. The estate, speaking through posts on Adams’ official account attributed to his brother, Dave Adams, has demanded that anyone recreating Adams’ voice or likeness stop, calling the replica “unauthorized” and “deeply distressing”.

The twist is that Adams himself appears to have pre-licensed the very thing his family now calls a violation. In a 2021 podcast clip cited by Business Insider, Adams said he gave “explicit permission” for anyone to build a posthumous AI version of him, arguing his words were already “so pervasive on the internet” that he’d be an ideal candidate. He even endorsed the idea of the AI saying new things, provided they were plausibly compatible with his living views.

John Arrow, an AI venture capitalist who created the digital Adams, claims he tried to contact the estate to collaborate but was blocked. He says he is simply executing Adams’ repeatedly stated wishes and would stop if he saw evidence of revocation.

That leaves the real dispute where modern capitalism likes it: in the gaps between property, speech, and family law. As USC professor Karen North tells Business Insider, calling it an “avatar” is branding; technically it’s a deepfake. But whether it’s illegal depends less on moral intuition than on which rights attach to a dead person’s identity — and who holds them.

In the US, “right of publicity” laws (governing commercial use of name/likeness/voice) vary sharply by state and can extend post-mortem in places like California. Meanwhile, copyright may cover specific recordings or artworks, but not a person’s “style” or opinions. Then there’s the First Amendment: if the AI account frames itself as commentary, parody, or political speech rather than a product endorsement, the estate’s leverage may shrink.

Be wary of the obvious regulatory response: a new licensing regime for human likeness, inevitably captured by the biggest studios and platforms, with ordinary people paying rent to use their own faces. Yet the alternative — a world where anyone can animate your dead relatives into monetized content streams — is not exactly a triumph of consent.

The Adams case is a preview of a coming cottage industry: entrepreneurs turning the deceased into infinitely scalable “creators”, while families discover that grief is not a legal category. The only scarce resource here is not data, compute, or even identity — it’s jurisdiction.