Deakin Digital Death Ethics Lab
Navigating the ethics of our digital afterlives
How our research works to protect the dead in the digital age
The Deakin Digital Death Ethics Lab confronts the challenges, opportunities and threats posed by emerging technologies when it comes to death, dying, and the dead. Through data and AI, we now have increasingly powerful and sophisticated ways of preserving and even ‘reanimating’ the dead, allowing their voices to persist among the living but no existing norms and ethics to guide us.
Our research grapples with how we protect the dignity and privacy of the dead alongside the autonomy and wellbeing of the bereaved. We also explore what best practice in managing the digital dead looks like and how it can be implemented.
Our research areas
Through collaborations with researchers and institutions across the globe, we investigate some of the most pressing questions at the intersection of death, data and artificial intelligence.
Deathbots and protecting the dead
AI chatbots based on dead people – referred to as ‘Deathbots’ – have gone from sci-fi premise to commercial reality in just a few years. We interrogate how society can balance the interests of the living with the need to protect the dead from indignity and exploitation.
Digital legacies
Hundreds of millions of internet users have died, leaving enormous amounts of data behind. These ‘digital remains’ present a challenge unprecedented in human history. Our researchers consider how we preserve, manage or dispose of this data in an ethical way.
Agential AI and archives
The galleries, libraries, archives and museums sector is using AI as a powerful way to explore and present archival material. Our research explores the ethical questions that arise when we use data from the long-dead in ways they could never have imagined.
Need an ethics consult?
The Deakin Digital Death Ethics Lab can help with your project – from startups and educational applications to memorials and exhibitions – reach out to our team for an ethics consult to support your needs.
Our researchers
Our team of renowned experts explore the ethical, social and technological questions surrounding the management of the digital dead.
Associate Professor Patrick Stokes is associate professor of philosophy at Deakin and the chief investigator on the ARC Discovery Project Digital Death and Immortality (2024-26). He is a leading media commentator on philosophical issues who explores issues of personal identity, the philosophy of death and dying, narrative selfhood, and moral psychology.
Dr Deborah Lee-Talbot is a social historian and consultant working on ethical AI in the humanities. A recipient of the Alfred Deakin Medal, CH Currey Fellowship and NLA Summer Scholarship, her research investigates practical and ethical challenges of integrating machine learning into archive and museum workflows.
Dr Adam Buben is university lecturer in philosophy at Leiden University and Partner Investigator on the ARC Discovery Project Digital Death and Immortality (2024-26). He publishes extensively on philosophy of death, existentialism, technology and comparative philosophy.
Featured projects
Our projects explore the opportunities, risks and responsibilities associated with the digital dead.
Ethical approaches to deathbots and protecting the dead
This project explores the risks and responsibilities associated with AI agents, with a particular focus on how ‘deathbots’ of private and public figures might require different ethical approaches.
Contact us
If you want to study with us, partner with us or learn more about our research and initiatives, please get in touch with the team.
+61 3 9244 3941
