Te Kete o Karaitiana Taiuru (Blog)

This is a general warning to anyone who has a Facebook (Meta) account and the fact that Meta have a patent that will use Artificial Intelligence to turn your data into an eternal digital ghost of you using all of your online data. Resulting in you or the deceased living forever in the cyber world with no rights and control.

 

On 30 December 2025, while most of the western world was preparing to welcome the Georgian New Year, the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted Meta Platforms Technologies LLC a patent titled ‘Simulation of a User of a Social Networking System Using a Language Model’ (US12513102B2). The primary named inventor is Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s Chief Technology Officer, the company’s most senior technologist.

 

The patent describes a system that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) trained on a person’s entire digital life, their posts, direct messages, voice recordings, browsing history, location data, purchases to construct a bot that can continue posting, messaging, and engaging on their behalf after they die. By Meta’s own stated design goal, the simulation is intended to be indistinguishable from the living person. The architects of this technology have framed death as, in their own language, a ‘content gap problem.’

 

From a Te Ao Māori perspective, this patent is not merely ethically troubling, it is a profound violation of tikanga, the correct way of doing things at almost every level of Māori cultural protocol, including spiritual practice, and relational ethics. This article analyses Meta’s Digital Ghost Patent through the lens of Māori, using the principles of mauri and wairua, and the author’s own He Karetao AI Framework for Māori and his original article on AI Sentience https://www.taiuru.co.nz/a-maori-cultural-perspective-of-ai-machine-sentience/

 

1. Tikanga and the Dead

1.1 Death in Te Ao Māori

In Te Ao Māori, death is not an ending but a transition passage from Te Ao Mārama (the world of light) into Te Pō (the realm of darkness, the spiritual realm of the ancestors). This transition is governed by extensive and carefully maintained tikanga, because the boundary between the living and the dead is sacred and consequential. The tangihanga and burial (funeral process) are among the most important tikanga in Māori society, not simply as a social ritual but as a spiritual duty to safely guide the wairua (spirit) of the deceased toward their ancestors.

 

Tūpāpaku (deceased persons) are intensely sacred (tapu). This tapu does not dissolve at burial. It extends to the person’s belongings, their image, their voice, their words, and in the contemporary context their digital presence. It was and is still a widely common practice that the name of a deceased person would not be spoken aloud for a period of mourning. Their possessions might be buried with them or disposed of respectfully. At a period, usually about a year, their image will take place in marae with other images of the deceased family.

 

Meta’s ghost patent proposes to take the voice, the words, the patterns of relationship, and the personal data of a tūpāpaku and use them as commercial fuel to keep an account active, generating engagement, producing impressions, and serving advertisements. This is not a respectful holding of memory. It is the commodification of tapu and will not allow the deceased to transit to Te Ao Pō, but to remain as a ghost, lost somewhere in the physical world and the digital world. The Matrix movie is a comparison here.

 

1.2 Wairua Cannot Be Simulated

Central to any Māori analysis of Artificial Intelligence and digital simulation is the concept of wairua and mauri.

 

Wairua is the spiritual essence of a person that exists beyond the physical body. The wairua of a deceased person has a trajectory; it travels toward the resting place of its ancestors. The tangihanga process, the voice of the kaikaranga and kaikōrero, karakia, cultural protocols, the whaling, the waiata, the environment and kinship, all of these are active spiritual acts that assist the wairua on its journey and closure of this world to the next.

 

A digital ghost is not a wairua. It is a statistical approximation, a language model trained on behavioural data, producing outputs that mimic patterns of speech and interaction. But within tikanga Māori, simulating the external communication style of a deceased person while their wairua has passed on is not a form of remembrance. It is a violation of tapu, a disruption potentially trapping the living in a false relationship with something that is neither their loved one nor an honest acknowledgment of grief. Imprisoned in a colonial digital world controlled by corporates.

 

2. Mauri a Life Force

Mauri is the life force or essential vitality that is present in all living things, and which underpins the wellbeing of individuals, native species, rivers, water, communities, and environments. In a healthy state, mauri is described as a spiritual life force. When mauri is harmed, it becomes sick, diminished, weakened and can lead to death of nature such as polluted water ways, dead forests, mental health issues and sick and dead people.

 

The concept of mauri provides a powerful analytical lens for evaluating digital technologies. When applied to AI systems and data practices, we must ask “does this technology sustain and nourish the mauri of Māori individuals, communities and the environment, or does it diminish it?”

 

Meta’s digital ghost system presents multiple pathways for tapu violations of mauri. Firstly, the mauri of the tūpāpaku is violated. A deceased person’s identity, patterns of speech, and relational behaviours are extracted and recirculated without consent and without the context that gave them meaning. The data points that feed the model were generated in life embedded with intention, relationship, context, and mauri. Stripped of those, and recirculated for commercial engagement, they become an emptied simulacrum.

 

Secondly, the mauri of the grieving whānau is at risk. The patent’s own language states that the system is designed so that ‘other users may not notice’ the absence of the deceased. This is the deliberate prevention of the grief process, the substitution of algorithmic performance for the irreplaceable reality of loss. Grief, in Te Ao Māori, has its own tikanga. The tangihanga gives the living community permission to grieve to speak, to grieve, remember and celebrate a life. A ghost that keeps messaging is not grief and remembrance; it is a total disregard of Tikanga and Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

 

Thirdly, the mauri of whanaungatanga is diminished. Whanaungatanga, the practice and ethic of kinship, of authentic relationship is built on honesty, on presence, and on the real exchange between people. Relationships maintained with a ghost that generates responses calibrated by ‘affinity scores’ and ‘relationship type labels’ are not whanaungatanga. They are a simulation of whanaungatanga, which may actively corrode the real thing.

 

4. Whakapapa, Data Sovereignty, and the Digital Remains of Māori

Whakapapa (genealogy), the layering of relationships across time is the fundamental organising principle of Māori society. It connects the living to the dead, the present to the past and future, the individual to the collective. The names, words, and relationships of those who have died are part of whakapapa. They are not owned by corporations: they belong to the lines of descent that carry them forward.

 

Meta’s patent proposes, in effect, to insert a corporate controlled simulation into the whakapapa relationships of Māori individuals. The ghost will message their relations, mum and or dad, it will respond to their cousin, and it will engage with their old friends. In a Māori relational framework, these are whakapapa relationships and the integrity of those relationships are of great importance, not merely sentimentally, but in terms of the social, spiritual, and legal structures that Māori society depends on.

 

When this occurs, do we discuss legal personhood and if so, the implications of big tech corporations owning our whānau and the implications of that. Is this a modern-day form of digital slavery?

 

The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance, Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics provide a complementary framework to tikanga in this analysis. Meta’s ghost system fails each of these principles. The collective benefit accrues to Meta shareholders, not to Māori communities. Māori have no authority to control what happens to their deceased members’ data. Meta takes no responsibility for the spiritual or relational harm its system may cause. And the ethical review process it relies on the US patent system explicitly cannot evaluate ethical questions.

 

In Aotearoa New Zealand, the Treaty of Waitangi provides a further dimension of analysis. Article 2 of Te Tiriti guarantees Māori tino rangatiratanga absolute sovereignty over their taonga. Māori data is taonga, the harvest of that data by a foreign corporation to produce a commercial AI product without consent, without benefit-sharing, without Māori governance is a Treaty breach.

 

5. What Māori Must Do

5.1 For Māori Individuals and Whānau

Until there are adequate legal and regulatory protections, Māori individuals should take active steps to manage their digital remains. This includes nominating whānau members as their designated digital executors, documenting in wills and kōrero their wishes regarding their social media accounts, and where possible memorialising or deleting accounts rather than leaving them active after death. The author’s website at www.taiuru.maori.nz provides resources to assist with this process.

 

5.2 For Māori Governance Bodies

Iwi, hapū, and Māori governance entities should engage with this issue as a matter of urgency. The governance frameworks that have been developed for Māori data sovereignty, including data strategies, digital governance policies should be extended to explicitly address posthumous data and AI-generated simulations. Tikanga must be passed and agreed upon that assert collective Māori authority over the digital remains of whānau members and in some instances with our leaders, maybe marae, hapū and iwi authority.

 

5.3 New Zealand Government

Several jurisdictions have begun addressing aspects of posthumous and AI-generated digital identity, though the protections vary in scope. France’s Digital Republic Act, which came into force on 7 October 2016, allows individuals to leave instructions regarding the retention, deletion, and communication of their personal data after death, with heirs able to act in the absence of such instructions. Though some implementing decrees have never been published, limiting the law’s practical reach. China’s Regulations on the Administration of Deep Synthesis of Internet Information Services, which took effect in January 2023, require consent before a living person’s biometric information such as their face or voice can be used in AI-generated content.

 

However, these regulations apply to living persons and do not specifically address the simulation of deceased individuals’ identities. The European Patent Office’s Article 53(a) morality clause prohibits the granting of patents for inventions whose commercial exploitation would be contrary to public order or morality and has been used in biotechnology cases involving human dignity, though it has rarely been invoked, its application to AI simulation of deceased persons has no established precedent.

 

New Zealand’s Privacy Act 2020 applies only to living individuals and contains no provisions governing posthumous digital identity or AI simulation of deceased persons, leaving this area effectively unaddressed in law.

 

5.4 The Technology Sector

Developers and deployers of AI systems in New Zealand, including those building on platforms such as Meta’s, carry obligations that extend well beyond technical compliance. These obligations are grounded in Te Tiriti o Waitangi, whose Article II guaranteed Māori the unqualified exercise of rangatiratanga over their taonga. Māori data sovereignty has its foundations in Te Tiriti, and Māori data is recognised as a taonga, meaning that Māori were guaranteed by the Crown authority over all their treasures, a protection that extends to data in the modern context. Māori data sovereignty emphasises Māori self-determination and control over their data, driven by the principles of tino rangatiratanga and Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and data about Māori and Māori data are considered taonga.

 

New Zealand has developed substantive frameworks to give effect to these principles. This author has developed an Indigenous Peoples AI framework titled He Tangata, He Karetao, He Ātārangi, a model intended to help Māori communities evaluate whether artificial intelligence systems align with tikanga and uphold Māori data sovereignty.

 

At the practical implementation level, the Wai 2252 Māori AI and Data Framework guides organisations through defining Māori data and understanding governance obligations, meaningfully engaging with the diverse Māori communities who hold kaitiakitanga over that data, developing a Māori data taxonomy including sensitivity classifications such as Tapu, Noa, and Rāhui, and creating and embedding Te Tiriti and tikanga-based principles into existing data governance structures.

 

Despite the existence of these frameworks, the gap between principle and practice remains significant. Research comprehensively examining the current state of Māori data sovereignty and governance within New Zealand has highlighted a significant discrepancy between established frameworks and their practical implementation across various sectors. While the Algorithm Charter for Aotearoa New Zealand commits government agencies to reflect the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, concerns have been raised that it contains nothing about the right for Māori to be active participants in the design process, nor provisions for the protection of Māori taonga. This gap is especially acute in commercial and platform contexts, where multinational corporations are under no equivalent obligation. There are fears that Māori data could be absorbed into commercial or government systems without appropriate consent or governance, and that AI systems trained primarily on global datasets may reproduce cultural bias or exclude Indigenous knowledge entirely.

 

6. Conclusion

Meta’s Digital Ghost Patent is not an isolated technical curiosity. It is the logical endpoint of a philosophy that has governed large technology platforms from the beginning that people are content. That their attention, their relationships, their words, and their data are raw material to be harvested, processed, and sold. That the only relevant measure of a human life is the engagement it generates.

 

For Māori, this philosophy is not unfamiliar. It echoes in a new domain the logic of colonisation, which also treated people as resources, stripped relational and spiritual context from what it took, and recirculated extracted value for the benefit of those who took it.

 

The answer is not to reject technology. It is to insist that technology be built in accordance with values that recognise the full humanity of all people including their spiritual dimensions, their relational obligations, and their dignity in death as in life. He Karetao, tikanga Māori, the Treaty of Waitangi, and the growing body of Indigenous Data Sovereignty scholarship all provide tools to do this. The question is whether governments, corporations, and communities have the will to use them.

 

Key References

Taiuru, K. (2024). He Karetao: A Māori AI Framework. www.taiuru.maori.nz.

CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance. (2020). Global Indigenous Data Alliance.

Meta Platforms Technologies LLC. (2025). Patent US12513102B2: Simulation of a User of a Social Networking System Using a Language Model.

Thurston, B. (2026). Meta Patented Your Ghost. Life With Machines. www.lifewithmachines.media.

Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge. Research on ‘Deadbots’ and Post-Mortem AI Simulation.

Oxford Internet Institute. (2023). Projections of Deceased Social Media Users.