On 22 July 2026, a landmark international consensus paper addressing the ethical governance of AI simulations of individual minds was published in JME Practical Bioethics. The article, titled “Beyond deepfakes: ‘digital duplicates’ or AI simulations of real people. An international ethical consensus,” has been published in JME Practical Bioethics (doi: 10.1136/jmepb-2025-000054).
The consensus represents a landmark collaboration among leading ethicists, bioethicists, and philosophers across Europe, Asia, and North America, driven by pivotal contributions from scholars at the Centre for Research in Applied Ethics (CCEA). Cristina Voinea served as co-lead author alongside Clint Hurshman, joined by co-authors Mihaela Constantinescu, Constantin Vică, and Anda Zahiu. All four researchers advance this work as members of avataResponsibility (Avatar agency. Moral responsibility at the intersection of individual, collective, and artificial social entities in emergent avatar communities), a pioneering project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the leadership of Constantinescu as Principal Investigator.
The article is open access and can be accessed at: https://doi.org/10.1136/jmepb-2025-000054.
The paper is a result of the Digital Duplicates Workshop, held on September 4–5, 2025, in Singapore. The event brought together researchers from philosophy, bioethics, and technology to examine the ethical and social implications of digital duplicates.
Abstract: Digital duplicates (DDs), or artificial intelligence (AI) simulations of individual minds, are AI models designed to emulate real people. Depending on how they are trained, DDs can reproduce aspects or signs of a person’s psychology, values and communication style, enabling interaction with digital approximations of living, recently deceased or historical individuals. Proposed uses include education, advocacy, grief support, medical decision-making and the continuation of creative or personal projects. While potentially valuable, these applications also pose ethical risks such as privacy loss, misrepresentation, manipulation and the erosion of authentic human relationships. This paper argues that DDs should be treated as context-specific tools rather than general-purpose technologies. We outline a two-tier ethical framework grounded in considerations of harm and proportionality, supported by the values of information permission, transparency, authenticity and appropriate access. The framework unites diverse moral concerns under a single framework while allowing their relative weight to vary across domains such as medicine, education, memorialisation and entertainment. By situating ethical evaluation within a harm-reduction approach that is sensitive to context, we offer a practical basis for the responsible development and governance of human-emulating AI systems.