Beginner · Generative AI

Necromarketing

Visual diagram · (in preparation) · Math · (in preparation) · Worked example · 3 difficulty levels.

TL;DR. Using AI to resurrect dead celebrities for advertising; the digital clones are called delebs (digital celebrities).

Technical Definition

Using AI to resurrect dead celebrities for advertising; the digital clones are called delebs (digital celebrities).

How it works

Necromarketing is the practice of licensing (or merely mimicking) a deceased star's likeness and generating fresh performances — endorsements, cameos, full campaigns — with video and voice models. The economics are obvious and the ethics are not: a dead person cannot consent to an endorsement, estates and likeness-rights law were built for photographs, not unlimited synthetic performances, and audiences are split between delight and revulsion. By late 2026 the term had migrated from marketing-trade commentary into mainstream coverage as the first wave of lawsuits over estate rights and consumer deception advanced. It is the sharpest example of a general 2026 problem — generative systems can produce anything, but permission to produce a person is a separate, harder question.

Related Concepts

• Model-Level Invisible Watermarking — A provenance technique — introduced by Anthropic for Claude — that embeds an unalterable, imperceptible watermark during token generation itself, surviving rewriting and copy-paste.
• AI slop — AI slop is low-quality, high-volume output generated by AI systems, prioritizing quantity over usefulness.
• Generative AI — An AI field focused on creating models that can generate novel and complex content, such as text, images, audio, and video, that is coherent and original.
• Deepfake — Synthetic media in which a person in an existing image or video is replaced with someone else's likeness.