By: Scott Harris
A while ago, someone sent me a link to a Facebook post with a picture of my mother in it. The photo and the quote under it were real. They came from a speech she gave while she was active in the League of Women Voters. The caption, though, said it was from her time as president of Quincy College, which was almost twenty years later. Different decade, different role, and suddenly she seemed to be taking a stand on behalf of the college that she never would have taken.
Nothing in that post was fake. The words were hers and so was the face. Only the timing was wrong, and that was enough to pull her completely out of context. When I asked, the person took it down quickly, and I’m grateful for that. But it left me with a question I haven’t been able to shake: now that she’s gone, who protects what she stood for? If the answer is me, what legal standing do I actually have to do it?
That question is where this series starts.
Useful, fast, and a little unsettling
AI is moving at what a lot of people describe as a record pace, and governments, tech companies, and the rest of us are all trying to figure out where the guardrails go. It’s spreading so quickly for a simple reason: it’s incredibly useful. It’s built into our browsers, email, operating systems, and even our appliances. Algorithms decide which ads we see, what gets stocked in warehouses, and how information reaches us, and AI now helps with financial trading, supply chain planning, and even military strategy.
Like every big technological leap before it, AI is a tool that helps people do more, faster. We’ve been adopting tools like that for a long time, from levers and gears to steam engines and computers. And every one of those shifts raised concerns. The seed drill meant fewer people were needed in the fields. Cars and trucks replaced horses. Assembly lines remade manufacturing in the early twentieth century, and industrial robots later replaced a lot of factory work. AI pushes that same trend into jobs that once felt safe from automation, like software development, finance, and other knowledge work.
Jobs aren’t the only worry. AI can now produce convincing images, audio, and video of real people, and those tools have already been used for fraud, harassment, and political manipulation.
The question underneath the headlines
Job losses and misinformation get most of the attention, but there’s a more basic question underneath them: who owns the rights to your identity in a digital world?
That’s what I mean by Digital Persona Rights: ownership and control of the pieces that make up who you are online, including:
- your face
- your voice
- your mannerisms
- your personality
- AI-generated versions of you
- and even how the things you’ve said or written get presented
My mother’s post is a good example of that last one. As AI gets better at recreating someone’s voice or image, the question of who owns that identity gets a lot more complicated. Most of the current conversation about regulating AI is about stopping obvious misuse like fraud, harassment, and disinformation. That matters, but it skips the deeper question of who ultimately controls a person’s digital identity.
It gets even harder after death. Should an AI system be allowed to recreate someone’s likeness forever? Should their family have a say? Should companies be able to train AI on publicly available photos and recordings without anyone’s consent?
None of this is hypothetical. The technology to build AI replicas of people already exists, and it improves every month. I believe we’re going to need to recognize Digital Persona Rights as their own category of rights, alongside privacy and intellectual property, and getting there will take careful legal, ethical, and technical thinking.
Before we can talk about the legal framework, though, it helps to understand the risks. In the next post I’ll look at one of the most visible and harmful examples of digital persona misuse, deepfakes, and what real cases tell us about why these rights matter.
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