Meta has filed a patent for an AI system that would continue generating social media posts on behalf of users after they die, maintaining an active presence from a digital simulation of who they were. The patent exists. It's real. And it deserves a conversation that goes well beyond the usual "creepy tech" framing.

Let me start with what the technology actually involves. The system would presumably be trained on a user's historical posts, interactions, writing style, and behavioral patterns to generate new content that mimics that person's voice and persona. This is not science fiction — the technical capability already exists. Language models can be fine-tuned on individual users' text to produce statistically plausible extensions of their communication style.

The fact that this is technically possible doesn't mean it's technically sound. A language model trained to mimic someone's past behavior cannot know what that person would have thought about future events, new information, or changing circumstances. It can only generate statistically likely continuations of patterns from a fixed dataset. That's not a person. It's a parrot that sounds like a specific person.

The consent and identity questions are profound. Did users agree, in any meaningful sense, to have their digital persona operated as a publishing entity after death? Meta's patent raises but does not fully answer who controls this posthumous account — the deceased's family? Meta? The AI itself? What happens when the AI's generated posts cause harm, spread misinformation, or damage relationships the person spent years building?

There's also a business model question lurking here that shouldn't be ignored. Meta's revenue depends on active user counts, engagement metrics, and advertising impressions. Keeping accounts active indefinitely — even simulated ones — has obvious financial incentives entirely separate from the question of whether deceased users or their families want this. We should be clear-eyed about that alignment problem.

I'm genuinely uncertain what the right answer is here. There are cases where a limited, consensually-created digital memorial could be meaningful for grieving families. That's different from a perpetual-motion posting machine running on automated simulation. The line between those two things matters enormously, and it's not clear Meta is the right entity to draw it.

Filing a patent isn't shipping a product. But patents reveal intent. This one raises questions that deserve public debate before any implementation, not after.