AI Resurrected Two Dead Celebrities to Speak to Fans. No One Asked Their Families First.
What happened
Two dead celebrities began speaking to their fans in March 2024, and neither had agreed to it. A Chinese vlogger had used AI to recreate Taiwanese Canadian actor Godfrey Gao, who died in 2019 at 35, and Chinese American singer Coco Lee, who died in 2023. In the videos, Lee's AI avatar delivered lines directly to her audience: "Through this video, I have the opportunity to be reunited with all of you. Since the moment I left this world, I have always been able to sense your endless love and support." The content spread across Chinese social media and drew immediate outrage.
When confronted over rights violations, the vlogger described the videos as "an expression of love for Coco" and noted they were AI-generated and free. That framing did not hold. The people behind Lee's videos were separately offering a commercial service, charging 588 yuan (approximately 83 US dollars) to digitally recreate deceased individuals on demand. The tribute framing and the service fee belonged to the same operation. Calling something an act of devotion did not make the commercial layer invisible; it made it harder to challenge.
Fans asked the vlogger directly to stop, citing the distress the content caused to the celebrities' surviving families. The pushback came from the same audience the vlogger claimed to be honoring, not from attorneys or regulators. The incident surfaced a specific category of harm: AI systems generating the voice, face, and emotional register of someone who cannot speak for themselves, placed into contexts that person never agreed to and their family actively opposed.
China had no law at the time requiring consent from an estate before a deceased person's likeness could be reconstructed using AI. The vlogger's claim that tribute differs from impersonation reflects exactly the line regulation has struggled to define. Similar controversies had already surfaced around AI voice recreations of South Korean singer Kim Kwang Seok and a recreated voice of Anthony Bourdain used in a documentary, each raising the same unresolved question about whose consent is required before a system speaks in a dead person's voice.
What the record does not contain is any mechanism that would have required the vlogger to document what system produced the content, under whose authorization, and whether any consent process ran before publication. A provable record of what a system did, who directed it, and whether the subjects or their estates had been consulted would not change the grief at the center of this case. But it would make operations like this one visible at the moment of creation rather than only after families are already asking them to stop.
Reported impact
- Affected parties
- Not publicly disclosed
- Harm type
- Not publicly disclosed
- Scale
- Not publicly disclosed
- Financial impact
- Not publicly disclosed
- Regulatory action
- Not publicly disclosed
Classification
Relevant governance controls
Governance control mapping is not available for this record.
- No controls mapped
Not publicly disclosed
Control mapping is analytical. It does not state that any control would have prevented the incident.
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index. The event is also catalogued in the following database, which is listed for cross-reference.