Abstract

Proposals to create AI chatbots or conversational ‘agents’ modelled on real human individuals, including specific bioethics scholars1 in the academic context, or individual patients (or potential future patients) in the medical context,2 have taken off in recent years. This has been accompanied by a lively and sometimes heated discussion about the ethics of creating or deploying such person-emulating chatbots in various contexts, both within and beyond the healthcare domain. Currently debated questions that are relevant to medical ethics and bioethics include: Not long ago, these questions would have seemed like science fiction. In the last few years, however, especially since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November of 2022, it has become increasingly easy to create digital simulations of individual human subjects, for example by fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on person-specific corpora of speech, writing or other relevant data. Depending on …