December 04, 2024

In-Ear Insights: Digital Ghosts, AI Ethics, and Employment Agreements

30 minutes

In this episode of In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris discuss your digital ghost. You will learn whether employers can put your digital ghost to work, the legal and ethical implications of employers using your digital assets, how to safeguard your digital likeness, and what you need to negotiate with your employer.

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Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

Christopher S. Penn – 00:00

In this week’s In Ear Insights, let’s talk about your digital ghost. This is a topic that I posted about on LinkedIn about a week ago. In the old days, we would go to a company—Katie, you and I worked together at an old agency—and we would do stuff. We’d write, create, send emails, go to meetings, go to more meetings, and then have meetings about the meetings and the pre-meeting for the meeting. And when we left the job, we were gone. The IT department would archive all of our stuff on a backup tape somewhere, maybe, and we were forgotten. Maybe a few coworkers remembered us fondly at the holiday potluck, but that was about it in the era of generative AI.

Christopher S. Penn – 00:50

However, it raises an interesting question: could your digital ghost—that record of everything that you said and did—could it be put back to work by an employer? Could they say, “Okay, I’m going to take all of Katie Robbert’s emails and conference call transcripts and work product and build a custom app powered by generative AI that can do what she did while she was here”? Now, today’s models and technologies can’t do that as well, and it needs a lot of supervision. But we are rapidly on a path towards that being a very straightforward reality.

Christopher S. Penn – 01:29

So the question I have for you, Katie, is—well, I have a bunch of questions for you—but we’ll start with what are the implications of this, particularly for, in your case, a CEO, an owner of a company? And then what does it mean for the workforce that we employ?

Katie Robbert – 01:47

Well, it really comes down to what you, as an individual, agreed to. One of the things that we wanted to talk about in today’s podcast was the ethics of it, specifically. The short answer is yes, it can be done. The longer, more complicated answer is it really depends on what’s in your contract and how much of the IP that you create belongs to the company. That’s going to become increasingly more challenging for people moving forward as they start to figure out what IP really covers. So in my case, that’s anything I created for the company prior to this based on the employment contract that I signed. That

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