Being famous
I believe being famous comes with its goodies as well as its curses. People get to associate you with things that you do for the camera and not the person themselves. When these people are alive, they get to choose what they want to portray and how they want to describe that specific subject. However, with technological advancement, most people in the public limelight do not get to choose what to portray. In our daily news, the directors and editors cut people’s message to suit their needs and their target audience. Technological advancement has given rise to deep fakes.
The best part of such instances where news director cut and snip segments, you can defend yourself. You can issue an apology or clarification. However, when you are dead, you do not get this power. The ability to bring celebrities back to life without their prior consent is wrong. I believe this is a form of copyright infringement for most people or organizations which are going to use the dead person’s image, or voice will not have their consent.
However, if I were a celebrity, I would hand over that right to be digitally manipulated or produced to my immediate family. I would also state to what extent I would like my image to be used. I would not want to be used as a person who supports bigotry, child pornography and such things. I would also limit my image rights to my children and not my grandchildren. I believe my children will know what I support and what I stand for. I would expect them to bare absolute responsibility on the fallback that may come from the use of my image.
In my opinion, the use of digital necromancy is a sign of stagnation in the industry. Why would you like to reenact something that was done before? I believe content producers should be creative and utilize people who are alive. In instances where we are going to get dead people to help in the production of our content, it implies there is no creativity. Digital manipulation also denies new talent a chance to introduced into the industry. It even becomes worse when the job is done is substandard. They produce videos of those people with lip and sound mismatch.
That said and done, there some instances that I have appreciated digital necromancy. As fun of fast and furious, I was excited by the job done on Paul Walker. It gave us, the viewers, an excellent ending to his legendary career. We still talk about his last movie, which would not have been possible were it not for digital necromancy. The BET 2014 is also an excellent example of how proper necromancy can be utilized. The Michael Jackson hologram show was beautiful. I still remember his performance to date. I am sure his family benefited from the show, either directly by selling the rights to BET or indirectly by increased sales of his records.