The Ethical Implications of Prosocial Synthetic Resuscitation: Analysing User Comments to a Deepfake Campaign Addressing Intimate Partner Violence

Abstract

In recent years, the ‘digital resurrection’ of the deceased through Deepfake technology has become a reality accessible to the general public and has raised profound ethical discussions in society. While the academic literature focuses primarily on regulatory and political implications, the public reception of digital resurrection remains largely unexplored. Furthermore, much of the public discourse around Deepfakes centres on their malicious applications, despite the potential for digital resurrection to serve prosocial purposes. This study focuses on an Israeli campaign called ‘Listen to My Voice’ (2021), which ‘resurrected’ women murdered by their partners, having them ‘tell’ the stories of the abusive relationships that preceded their deaths. An analysis of viewer responses shows that the campaign elicited strong reactions straddling the line between technology and ethics. Quantitatively, most comments supported the use of Deepfakes, given the importance of the cause and the impactful messaging. Qualitatively, two key themes emerged: one technical, indicating that visceral realism sparked both emotional connections and fundamental misunderstandings of the technology itself. The second highlighted an ethical tension between desires to protect autonomy and justifications for posthumously using an individual’s likeness for positive aims. The findings suggest Deepfakes’ technical attributes, particularly tangibility, significantly shape its ethical reception—a phenomenon we term ‘the ethics of technological misunderstanding’.