Inside the resurrection economy

When actor James Earl Jones, best known as the voice of Darth Vader, reached an agreement with Disney’s Lucasfilm to allow the studio to recreate his voice using artificial intelligence for future Star Wars projects, the arrangement appeared to sit at the edges of the entertainment industry. When Jones died in September 2024, however, the deal became something else: a business asset with commercial applications that have since expanded to include a Disney-Fortnite partnership with Epic Games.

But Jones’ case was not an isolated one. It served as an early example of an industry now moving at considerable scale. Dubbed “the resurrection economy,” the market for AI-generated replicas of deceased actors, musicians, and public figures is becoming a fast-growing business across entertainment, advertising, gaming, and personal services.

The industry is already producing substantial revenue. A 2025 report by Bloomberg Law found that the “digital immortality” market was valued at $27.3 billion in 2024 and projected to reach $53.5 billion by 2029, driven by licensing agreements, virtual performances, AI-generated likenesses, and memorial technologies. Estates representing figures such as James Dean, Elvis Presley, and Marilyn Monroe have also entered partnerships allowing AI-assisted recreations for commercial projects, even as criticism surrounding consent and exploitation intensifies. The dead, it seems, are increasingly being put back to work.

The business of digital resurrection

Much of the commercial momentum is coming from the entertainment industry, where AI sharply reduces the technical barriers involved in recreating performers after death. While traditional CGI recreations required years of visual effects work and enormous budgets, generative AI systems can now synthesize realistic speech, facial expressions, and conversational patterns from existing recordings in far less time and at significantly lower cost. Studios now increasingly view celebrity archives not simply as historical material, but as trainable “data” capable of producing new content indefinitely.

Researchers writing in Neuroscience News describe the phenomenon as “spectral labor,” where deceased individuals continue generating economic value through AI-generated performances and interactions. Their analysis examined more than 50 examples across the United States, Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East, arguing that generative AI is weakening the historical boundary between death and participation in economic life.

As larger portions of everyday communication become digitally archived, the technology is no longer limited to celebrities. Since ordinary individuals increasingly leave behind enough data to create convincing AI replicas of their speech, personality, and behavior, some companies are now marketing “digital afterlife” services that allow users to create AI avatars trained on personal photos, voice notes, text messages, and written communications. These systems are often promoted as memorial tools capable of preserving conversations with deceased relatives. The result is an expanding industry built not simply around preserving memory, but extending the commercial life of identity itself.

A legal framework playing catch-up

The laws governing digital resurrection remain fragmented and inconsistent.

In the United States, California’s Assembly Bill (AB) 1836, which took effect in January 2025, restricts the use of AI-generated replicas of deceased performers without estate authorization and allows estates to seek damages and injunctive relief. In the same legislative cycle, California passed AB 2602, which rendered unenforceable any contract permitting digital replication of a person’s voice or likeness without clearly specifying intended uses and requiring legal representation during the agreement process.

Tennessee’s 2024 ELVIS Act, meanwhile, expanded right-of-publicity protections to include voice replication, whether a person is living or deceased. At the federal level, lawmakers introduced the bipartisan NO FAKES Act, which would establish national protections governing unauthorized digital replicas, though the bill has not yet become law.

Yet legal protections remain uneven and incomplete. The U.S. Copyright Office addressed the issue directly in its report Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 1: Digital Replicas, warning that inconsistent protections leave major gaps in the current legal framework.

Legal scholars have also identified an additional complication that legislation has not fully resolved: estate consent is not necessarily equivalent to personal consent. Under current law, estates can authorize the use of a deceased individual’s likeness in projects or endorsements the person themselves may have rejected while alive.

That concern is beginning to influence estate planning. Attorneys increasingly advise clients to create “digital wills” specifying how their voice, likeness, personal archives, and AI-generated replicas may be used after death. The legal system is increasingly being forced to confront questions about human likeness that existing intellectual property frameworks were never designed to answer.

The backlash

Public discomfort surrounding AI resurrection technologies is growing alongside the industry itself.

A survey conducted by market research firm NRG and The Wrap found that 51% of respondents considered AI replication of deceased actors and celebrities unacceptable, compared to 35% who supported the practice. More broadly, critics have argued  that the resurrection economy is creating a new form of labor performed by people who can no longer consent and exploiting grief and nostalgia while turning human identity into a commercial asset.

The broader concern is not simply technological, but philosophical. Historically, death imposed clear limits on ownership, authorship, and public presence. Generative AI weakens those limits by allowing identity to remain commercially active long after biological life ends.

The resurrection economy is still in its early stages, but the incentives surrounding it are accelerating rapidly. Entertainment companies see monetizable archives, while estates pursue new licensing revenue streams tied to increasingly powerful generative systems. As those tools become cheaper and more convincing, regulators are confronting a question the legal system was never designed to answer: whether identity itself can continue functioning as commercial infrastructure after death.