Biblioracle: Why I'm against ‘digital necromancy,' like the AI-driven Agatha Christie writing course
In 2012, hip hop star Tupac Shakur performed at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts festival on stage with Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, even though Tupac had been killed in a drive-by shooting in 1996.
The Tupac hologram was a little Hollywood special effects trickery that cost heavy sums, but now, thanks to generative artificial intelligence, we can resurrect just about any historical figure.
Or can we?
The most recent example to come across my radar is a BBC Maestro course featuring the woman who is considered the best-selling author of all time, Agatha Christie. BBC Maestro courses are essentially slickly produced, extended informational lectures combined with some exercises the viewer is meant to do along the way. They are not interactive, nor do they count for credit. They are, to my eye, purely for entertainment purposes.
The maestros range across experts in singing, cooking, acting, decorating with flowers, and even sleeping. Still living writers who have done Maestro courses include Harlan Coben and Isabel Allende.
But Agatha Christie is new because she is deader than one of the victims of her iconic mysteries, including 'Murder on the Orient Express' and 'Death on the Nile.' But there, on screen, in the preview video, is the voice and words (sort of) of Agatha Christie briefly expounding on the essential elements of a good mystery while she walks through a stately country house.
This 'reanimated' Agatha Christie is being done with the permission of her estate, and consists of a script drawn from her writing, an AI that's mimicking her voice, and a layering of her face over that of a live actor.
While the Christie estate and the avatar developers insist that they are working hard to be faithful to the original sentiments of the living person, AI ethicists object to this resurrection, pointing out that it is literally putting words in the mouth of someone who lived, and who cannot consent to this use.
This is an example of what I have taken to calling 'digital necromancy,' and if you can't tell from my choice of term, I'm against it. There was a time where I would have brushed off the Agatha Christie example as mostly harmless, and on the scale of the application of generative AI in the service of digital necromancy, it's less egregious — especially considering its being done with permission from the people who have the rights to give permission — but I now see this and other examples as part of a bad movement that should be not just resisted, but rejected.
Worse are the historical chatbots where people who lived and spoke and wrote are compiled into bespoke large language models and then let loose without consideration or care. Earlier this year, it was found that an Anne Frank chatbot could not and would not condemn the Nazis who killed her, much of her family and millions of others.
This is likely because of Anne Frank's most famous passage from her 'Diary of a Young Girl,' 'In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.'
Defenders of this use of the technology say it helps students 'engage' with history, but what kind of engagement is this? It's not just pedagogically dubious, it's morally offensive.
We have Anne Frank's words. We have scholars who have written about Frank, including 'The Many Lives of Anne Frank' by Ruth Franklin, which I reviewed here.
If you want to know what someone thought, read them. If you want a writing teacher, find an interested, sufficiently expert human with whom you can interact.
We are abundant, I promise.
John Warner is the author of books including 'More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI.' You can find him at biblioracle.com.
Book recommendations from the Biblioracle
John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you've read.
1. 'American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis' by Adam Hochschild
2. 'The Message' by Ta-Nehisi Coates
3. 'Fraud' by David Rakoff
4. 'The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels' by Pamela J. Prickett and Stefan Timmermans
5. 'You Dreamed of Empires' by Álvaro EnrigueI think Scott is a good fit for the family drama (with a nice dash of comedy) from Luis Alberto Urrea, 'The House of Broken Angels.'
1. 'The Corrections' by Jonathan Franzen
2. 'This Is Water' by David Foster Wallace
3. 'The Goldfinch' by Donna Tartt
4. 'The Last Samurai' by Helen DeWitt
5. 'Long Division' by Kiese LaymonFor Bill, it feels like an occasion for some oddness and wit, which is excellently met by Charles Portis and 'Masters of Atlantis.'
1. 'Lessons in Chemistry' by Bonnie Garmus
2. 'Pride and Prejudice' by Jane Austen
3. 'The Housemaid' by Freida McFadden
4. 'Booth' by Karen Joy Fowler
5. 'Memorial Days' by Geraldine BrooksI have yet to find the reader who is not charmed by Rufi Thorpe's 'Margo's Got Money Troubles.'
Get a reading from the Biblioracle
Send a list of the last five books you've read and your hometown to biblioracle@gmail.com.
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Fast Company
2 days ago
- Fast Company
Why AI ‘reanimations' of the dead may not be ethical
Christopher Pelkey was shot and killed in a road range incident in 2021. On May 8, 2025, at the sentencing hearing for his killer, an AI video reconstruction of Pelkey delivered a victim impact statement. The trial judge reported being deeply moved by this performance and issued the maximum sentence for manslaughter. As part of the ceremonies to mark Israel's 77th year of independence on April 30, 2025, officials had planned to host a concert featuring four iconic Israeli singers. All four had died years earlier. The plan was to conjure them using AI-generated sound and video. The dead performers were supposed to sing alongside Yardena Arazi, a famous and still very much alive artist. In the end Arazi pulled out, citing the political atmosphere, and the event didn't happen. In April, the BBC created a deepfake version of the famous mystery writer Agatha Christie to teach a 'maestro course on writing.' Fake Agatha would instruct aspiring murder mystery authors and 'inspire' their 'writing journey.' The use of artificial intelligence to 'reanimate' the dead for a variety of purposes is quickly gaining traction. Over the past few years, we've been studying the moral implications of AI at the Center for Applied Ethics at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and we find these AI reanimations to be morally problematic. Before we address the moral challenges the technology raises, it's important to distinguish AI reanimations, or deepfakes, from so-called griefbots. Griefbots are chatbots trained on large swaths of data the dead leave behind—social media posts, texts, emails, videos. These chatbots mimic how the departed used to communicate and are meant to make life easier for surviving relations. The deepfakes we are discussing here have other aims; they are meant to promote legal, political, and educational causes. Moral quandaries The first moral quandary the technology raises has to do with consent: Would the deceased have agreed to do what their likeness is doing? Would the dead Israeli singers have wanted to sing at an Independence ceremony organized by the nation's current government? Would Pelkey, the road-rage victim, be comfortable with the script his family wrote for his avatar to recite? What would Christie think about her AI double teaching that class? The answers to these questions can only be deduced circumstantially, from examining the kinds of things the dead did and the views they expressed when alive. And one could ask if the answers even matter. If those in charge of the estates agree to the reanimations, isn't the question settled? After all, such trustees are the legal representatives of the departed. But putting aside the question of consent, a more fundamental question remains. What do these reanimations do to the legacy and reputation of the dead? Doesn't their reputation depend, to some extent, on the scarcity of appearance, on the fact that the dead can't show up anymore? Dying can have a salutary effect on the reputation of prominent people; it was good for John F. Kennedy, and it was good for Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The fifth-century BC Athenian leader Pericles understood this well. In his famous Funeral Oration, delivered at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War, he asserts that a noble death can elevate one's reputation and wash away their petty misdeeds. That is because the dead are beyond reach and their mystique grows postmortem. 'Even extreme virtue will scarcely win you a reputation equal to' that of the dead, he insists. Do AI reanimations devalue the currency of the dead by forcing them to keep popping up? Do they cheapen and destabilize their reputation by having them comment on events that happened long after their demise? In addition, these AI representations can be a powerful tool to influence audiences for political or legal purposes. Bringing back a popular dead singer to legitimize a political event and reanimating a dead victim to offer testimony are acts intended to sway an audience's judgment. It's one thing to channel a Churchill or a Roosevelt during a political speech by quoting them or even trying to sound like them. It's another thing to have 'them' speak alongside you. The potential of harnessing nostalgia is supercharged by this technology. Imagine, for example, what the Soviets, who literally worshipped Lenin's dead body, would have done with a deepfake of their old icon. Good intentions You could argue that because these reanimations are uniquely engaging, they can be used for virtuous purposes. Consider a reanimated Martin Luther King Jr. speaking to our currently polarized and divided nation, urging moderation and unity. Wouldn't that be grand? Or what about a reanimated Mordechai Anielewicz, the commander of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, speaking at the trial of a Holocaust denier like David Irving? But do we know what MLK would have thought about our current political divisions? Do we know what Anielewicz would have thought about restrictions on pernicious speech? Does bravely campaigning for civil rights mean we should call upon the digital ghost of King to comment on the impact of populism? Does fearlessly fighting the Nazis mean we should dredge up the AI shadow of an old hero to comment on free speech in the digital age? Even if the political projects these AI avatars served were consistent with the deceased's views, the problem of manipulation—of using the psychological power of deepfakes to appeal to emotions—remains. But what about enlisting AI Agatha Christie to teach a writing class? Deepfakes may indeed have salutary uses in educational settings. The likeness of Christie could make students more enthusiastic about writing. Fake Aristotle could improve the chances that students engage with his austere Nicomachean Ethics. AI Einstein could help those who want to study physics get their heads around general relativity. But producing these fakes comes with a great deal of responsibility. After all, given how engaging they can be, it's possible that the interactions with these representations will be all that students pay attention to, rather than serving as a gateway to exploring the subject further. Living on in the living In a poem written in memory of W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden tells us that after the poet's death Yeats 'became his admirers.' His memory was 'scattered among a hundred cities,' and his work subject to endless interpretation: 'The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.' The dead live on in the many ways we reinterpret their words and works. Auden did that to Yeats, and we're doing it to Auden right here. That's how people stay in touch with those who are gone. In the end, we believe that using technological prowess to concretely bring them back disrespects them and, perhaps more importantly, is an act of disrespect to ourselves—to our capacity to abstract, think, and imagine.
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