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What happens to your voice, image and online accounts after you die? In this episode of Wealth Actually, I welcome back NATALIA PARKER and TATYANA THURSTON of DEXIT to discuss digital identity and estate planning in the age of AI.

The issue is bigger than recovering a password. An executor may have to decide whether to keep a book on sale, preserve a podcast, close a social media account or respond to an AI-generated version of the person who died. Those decisions can put income, reputation and family wishes in conflict.

We discuss how to build a digital-asset inventory, document instructions for online accounts, protect against deepfake scams and think through the use of your name, image, likeness and voice. The practical question: does your estate plan give the next person enough information to make these decisions?

What we cover

• Digital estate planning: Why books, podcasts, photographs, recordings and online accounts belong in the planning conversation.
• Instructions, not just an inventory: What an executor needs to know about the assets, the platforms and what you want done with each account.
• Deepfake fraud: Why a familiar face or voice should not replace verification when money or sensitive information is involved.
• AI after death: The questions raised by avatars, simulated social media activity and the reuse of a person’s creative work.
• Fiduciary judgment: How executors and trustees may have to weigh commercial value against reputation and the emotional impact on a family.
• A technology component: Why Natalia and Tatyana argue that technology planning belongs alongside wealth, tax and estate planning.

Episode timestamps

Timestamps refer to the supplied episode audio, including the opening preview and introduction.

00:00 Preview and introduction
00:52 Why AI belongs in the estate-planning conversation
03:36 Name, image and likeness beyond celebrities
04:56 Platform access, ownership and closing accounts
06:54 Deepfake fraud and verifying money transfers
08:48 Building a digital defense strategy
10:22 Digital-asset inventories and consent to AI recreation
13:15 Facebook, posthumous posting and the ethics of AI
15:46 Avatar businesses and the digital afterlife
18:50 Robin Williams and restrictions on likeness
21:02 Executors, trustees and the emotional cost to families
23:10 Adding a technology component to the estate plan
23:53 Where to find DEXIT and closing thoughts

About the guests

Natalia Parker and Tatyana Thurston are the co-founders of DEXIT, a digital succession-planning business. DEXIT works with clients, wealth advisors and estate planners on plans for online assets and accounts. (DEXIT founder profile; DEXIT)

Resources and related episodes

• DEXIT: Learn about the guests’ work at dexitplan.com.
• Our earlier conversation: Digital Assets Estate Planning with Natalia Parker and Tatyana Thurston covers digital inheritance, account access and planning for executors.
• Related Wealth Actually episode: Technology and Estate Planning explores digital tools for estate-planning work.

Questions from the episode

What should a digital-asset inventory include?

In this conversation, we discuss online accounts, publishing platforms, books, podcasts, images, recordings and intellectual property. The emphasis is on pairing the inventory with instructions about what should be preserved, closed or considered for continued use.

What should I decide about an AI version of myself?

The guests suggest documenting whether you want your voice, image or recordings used to recreate you digitally after death. They also discuss the tension between those wishes, an executor’s decisions and the family’s reaction to the result.

Why is this an issue for people who are not celebrities?

Our discussion includes family photographs, personal accounts, recordings and unpublished creative work. Their importance may be emotional rather than commercial, which is why the conversation extends beyond celebrity estates.

What is the first planning conversation to have?

Start with what exists, what matters to you and what you want done with it. The next question is who will have to carry out those instructions and whether they have a usable roadmap.

Clarification on the Meta discussion

The opening preview and the discussion around 13:15 refer to Meta’s patent for simulating a user’s social media activity, including after death. In February 2026, a Meta spokesperson told Business Insider, “We have no plans to move forward with this example”; the report distinguishes the patent from a decision to implement the technology. (Business Insider)

The transcript below preserves the conversation as recorded. This clarification is separate from the speakers’ remarks.

Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability, removing filler words and repeated starts while preserving the substance of the conversation. Speaker timestamps are approximate navigation aids; examples and legal or technical statements reflect the discussion, not independently verified advice.

[00:00] Tatyana Thurston: Facebook in 2060, they’ll have way more deceased user accounts than live user accounts. And Facebook needs to monetize that. It takes up space in their servers, and they’ve actually recently patented the right to use the content that has been posted by deceased users. And they will be reposting as if they were still around.

[00:26] Announcer: Welcome back to the Wealth Actually podcast, the show that features experts, entrepreneurs, and commentators that will give you the right knowledge, planning, and guidance so you can preserve your assets and enjoy your wealth. Learn more and subscribe today at wealthactually.com. This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not investment, legal, nor tax advice. It does not represent the opinions of the employers of the host or the guests.

[00:52] Frazer Rice: Natalia, Tatyana, welcome back.

[00:54] Natalia Parker: Thank you for having us.

[00:55] Tatyana Thurston: Thanks for having us.

[00:56] Frazer Rice: Well, our last discussion actually engendered a lot of feedback from people who, if they were stuck in the executor role or in the trustee role, I thought it was very helpful in terms of laying out the roles and responsibilities and what you have to do to keep yourself and the estates safe. I thought we’d talk a little bit today about the intersection of technology, which hits close to home to me. I’m a big user of AI and really helped move things along for clients that way. But for me, I have a lot of IP as well.

[01:29] Frazer Rice: I’ve got podcasts, I’ve got books, I’ve got all sorts of images, et cetera. And there’s an AI component to some of that as well. Maybe take us through a little bit about how you think about preparing someone who has to preside over somebody else’s IP, their name, image, likeness, and that type of thing as a broader scope of issues as they get prepared going on this journey.

[01:57] Natalia Parker: Yes. First of all, yes, you do have a lot. And right now, your executors will have to know which platforms you’re using. And they have to know what you would like to do with those accounts. Do you want to keep your book open for readers and keep collecting money? Do you want your podcast to stop podcasting? Everything has to be written down somewhere. And then you have to have a plan for each one of them. We had a case where we had to close their Amazon book account. That was difficult because there were several authors.

[02:37] Frazer Rice: Oh, yikes. So a lot of cooks in the kitchen, and all of them have an opinion on what they want to do with it.

[02:45] Natalia Parker: Yes. So that’s where the DEXIT plan comes in.

[02:52] Frazer Rice: In terms of getting your arms around what it means to have digital assets nowadays, a lot of people, we talked before about social media accounts, images, maybe even voice recordings, et cetera, that may not be commercial, but they’re personal and important to them. And as we all know, AI is using every bit of data to train their LLMs and all the other things that they have at play to make their AI agents more effective. What is the state of the art as far as either using or protecting your own digital presence if you don’t want to be a part of AI, or how do you responsibly be engaged with it?

[03:36] Tatyana Thurston: I think it depends on where the name, image, and likeness is being used and in what capacity. For example, we have kids today as young as in high school, and they have a social media presence. They’re gaining followers in their teens, and maybe their goal is to be a professional football player. All those platforms hold their data and their videos and their name. And maybe they’re making money from it even at a young age.

[04:07] Tatyana Thurston: So even estate planning isn’t just for folks who are older. It could even start as early as young kids because they’re on platforms. Those are platforms which are public. The public platforms is a ripe source for scammers to take your name, image, and likeness and capitalize it in another way. So there’s a source of truth that some people are trying to do, especially celebrities. A lot of celebrities now are actually creating avatars of themselves so that the true representation of themselves is on record. It’s actually really interesting, but that’s part of preserving their digital presence online.

[04:56] Frazer Rice: And to circle back a little bit to what we were talking about in the previous episode, when you’re intersecting with these platforms, usually the social media platforms, the Facebooks, the Twitters, the Instagrams, et cetera. Step one, obviously, is to catalog exactly where you are, which is its own full-time job in many ways. But then what exactly do you have on there? It’s images, it’s quotes, it’s things like that. How do you intersect with these companies to not only get the terms of service figured out and get things pointed in the right direction ownership-wise, but even establishing what it is that you own or what they own or how things are held?

[05:37] Natalia Parker: Yes, it’s very difficult because with Meta especially, they will hold the data to death. You cannot erase everything from Meta permanently. You can close the account and delete samples, but everything, it’s almost impossible. And you are not even talking to customer service, there’s no real person, you’re talking to AI.

[06:01] Frazer Rice: Right.

[06:02] Natalia Parker: Which doesn’t really care.

[06:05] Frazer Rice: No, there’s no human element when you’re talking to Meta. I dealt with something where we had to deal with them, and it was like a hostage exchange. You had to hold up a piece of paper with the person to say that you exist and that there’s identification. And essentially I had to use back channels to get to somebody to try to move it up the line to fix the issue, and it was not a pleasing experience. So I’m sure magnified times a hundred, you kind of get to it where an executor has to do all of that, it just gets that much more complicated.

[06:36] Natalia Parker: Yes, but at the same time, it’s very easy to create a new account and post something which will harm the family. And extort and use the account for scamming people out of money and information, everything.

[06:54] Tatyana Thurston: I just have a story to go with that. There’s a company, Arup, it’s an engineering firm. And this is just to show you that deepfakes have come a long way. And they’re very professional looking. Arup is a company, and out of their Hong Kong office, there was a Zoom call just like this. The call was from the CFO in the UK. And the person in Hong Kong thought indeed that that was the CFO of the company. Unfortunately, a wire of 25.6 million dollars was made and lost right out of the company account because it was not being able to be verified through the online exchanges.

[07:39] Tatyana Thurston: So it’s so realistic, AI has accelerated all the technology that it looks so real that the real thing for families is that they really need to have a code word, or they need to actually be sure who they’re talking to online is who they’re actually talking to, even though they may sound like someone from their family or look like someone they know.

[08:02] Frazer Rice: Working for a financial group here, we get clients occasionally who complain about two-factor authentication and callbacks and making sure that we deal with real people and so on. And anytime I hear anybody complain that it’s not quite as convenient as they’d like it to be, I said, I’ll tell you what’s a lot less convenient. And that is to see minus 25 million in your bank account and somehow it made its way to Montenegro or Nigeria, and tracking that down, that’ll be inconvenient. So point taken on that, where good processes around movements of money, movements of information, et cetera, are a really good idea.

[08:46] Tatyana Thurston: Absolutely.

[08:47] Natalia Parker: Yes, I agree.

[08:49] Frazer Rice: So from a defense strategy perspective for name, image, likeness, or dealing with AI, or this broader implication of an electronic world out there, what are the component parts that you think are important?

[09:03] Tatyana Thurston: So I think there’s a part of it that is the educational part for clients, that there is this ability for scamming, and especially high net worth clients. The education piece I think is really important that they understand that when they are on social media, they are training those LLMs and they are in public view.

[09:26] Tatyana Thurston: So closing out those accounts and making that conversation happen so that they understand that the risk is minimized as long as they’re not out there in public, having a plan of action is important. And of course categorizing those accounts because it’s very easy to open them, it’s a lot harder to close them. And then you also have to remember what’s on there.

[09:48] Tatyana Thurston: If it’s something you use all the time, it’s very easily remembered. But if it’s something you opened once, probably is not that important to you. So it’s a very individualized plan that needs to happen to protect the identity. And some families, just like those in Hollywood, are trying to establish a ground zero. This is who I am, this is what I’ve done, this is what I’ve accomplished, this is my life. They can record these things so that there is a ground level of to who that person was originally.

[10:22] Frazer Rice: From my perspective, we have a playbook for clients that really lists out a balance sheet of assets, financial assets, property, maybe if they have collectibles of a certain heft, that’s listed there. So maybe what you’re suggesting too, and maybe Natalia, you can talk to this, is the idea of putting together the same type of inventory or playbook of these different digital assets either at the copyright level or ownership level, but also at the account level so that there’s a bit of a roadmap for the people who have to make decisions about these things well after you’re gone.

[10:54] Natalia Parker: Yes, you are correct because right now right of publicity laws exist just in a few states. And what we do in the DEXIT plan, we ask specifically, do you give a permission for your AI resurrection after your death, basically, to use your name and likeness, and to use your voice memos, your audio, your videos, to recreate you as a digital avatar. And if it is written down somewhere in a will, at least the executor will know if it is possible or not. It doesn’t mean that it will go all well because with the Scott Adams case, you know that he gave a permission that he could be used as an AI avatar. Yet his estate objected after some accounts started posting.

[11:49] Frazer Rice: What was the resolution of that? Or is it still ongoing?

[11:52] Natalia Parker: It’s still ongoing.

[11:53] Frazer Rice: So in your opinion, you’ve got the wishes of the person who died, and then you’ve got the executor and then the trustees. You’ve got somebody who had a really monetizable presence. So I guess the issue would be something in the neighborhood of, on one hand you’ve got his wishes, on the other hand you’ve got the economically intelligent way to steward this asset so that you reduce risk of besmirchment or something like that. Any ideas on how that’s going to go? And maybe that’s just such an interesting point of law that we’ll follow that with great interest.

[12:30] Natalia Parker: Yes, we don’t know yet because it depends. I know that New York has right of publicity, but again, it protects just economic kind of side, not the emotional or dignitary side of estate and the family life. So for them they felt that avatar didn’t represent him specifically the way he was. And I don’t know if it is true or not. I cannot tell you. I didn’t know the guy.

[13:02] Frazer Rice: I’m sure whatever avatar I think is pleasing to me would probably, for everybody who knows me, it’s probably quite a bit different from what they think too. So point taken there. And Tatyana, your point.

[13:15] Tatyana Thurston: Circling back with social media, Facebook has, in 2060 they’ll have way more deceased user accounts than live user accounts. And Facebook needs to monetize that. It takes up space in their servers, and they’ve actually recently patented the right to use the content that has been posted by deceased users, and they will be reposting as if they were still around. So there are some ethics questions that come up with that. But the fact that they even patented it should make somebody think twice about what’s going to happen in the future and what do you want to do with these accounts.

[14:00] Frazer Rice: So let me think this through here. So they patented essentially probably some predictive model of what the deceased person would have posted based on past posts, and then the data that they have would allow them to engage with news that’s come out recently. And so then they could create additional media based on an algorithm that was built now sometime in the future. Scary stuff.

[14:28] Tatyana Thurston: Yep. Precisely.

[14:29] Natalia Parker: Yes, but it is changing, and the AI, we do not build AI with ethics in mind. So AI doesn’t care. AI has a goal to fulfill, it will fulfill that purpose and to get to his goal in any case, it doesn’t have consciousness like we do.

[14:49] Frazer Rice: I guess I saw something where I remember it was one of Bill Simmons’s, and he’s a sports media person, but he also has a podcast called The Rewatchables around movies. And basically they took Roger Ebert and all of his different movie reviews, and they predict and say what he would have reviewed, he’s been dead for a long time, what he would think about The Avengers or certain movies that came out after he died. And that’s embroiled a lot of different people on things.

[15:24] Frazer Rice: So that’s probably an immediate example of something right there where he’s dead, we don’t know what he would have thought of it or if he would have changed his mind or anything like that. But there’s a whole new concept of media and data coming out that has the label or moniker of somebody with credibility, but we’ll have no way of knowing whether they would have been a part of it or not.

[15:47] Tatyana Thurston: Yeah, there’s a death marketplace that’s emerging, and people are monetizing what it could be, such as the band ABBA or even Kiss, the metallic heavy metal band. So they’ve got these avatar concerts that you can go to, and they had everything measured and they wore sensors and they went through the whole science spiel to have that done so that they can continue singing forever. So it’s an interesting time. And there’s also some companies, I can let Natalia talk about it, but these companies are also basically helping people create avatars so that they can be used forever by family members down the road.

[16:34] Natalia Parker: Not even family members, anybody can create avatar from any amount of data set. So it’s just amazing, we have Replika, we have Hereafter, we have Chinese company Super Brain, which is very popular in China. It’s like 30 million, I think, to 40 million users. We have My Heritage, Israeli company, which actually they tried to do it right, where they will use digital avatar just for movement. They do not have a voice, just to avoid the scamming, but it still can be done. There’s numbers of companies.

[17:19] Frazer Rice: And so if you’re advising a family, let’s say, around someone who’s passed away, who lived a normal life but had a hobby that maybe they were a painter or they wrote poetry or something like that. And the idea of commercializing that or creating a marketable persona out of a crazy uncle who passed away or something like that as they remember it.

[17:48] Frazer Rice: Are we going to start seeing celebrities that are dead that never were? That type of thing, where someone in an executor role goes in and says, this person was more than they were commercially present during their lifetime, but there is so much more here. How do you advise someone, if they’re going to go the route of trying to create a business around it, how do you protect or build moats around it so it works well?

[18:19] Natalia Parker: I don’t really know how you can do it effectively right now, because there is no laws on AI, none. Especially on a federal level. So it’s all patchwork and depending on the state they are in and depending on which platform they’re using, but hey, copyright still exist. There is kind of, I don’t know, it’s like an onion, just…

[18:47] Frazer Rice: Right.

[18:48] Natalia Parker: Peeling the layers.

[18:50] Tatyana Thurston: There is the case of Robin Williams, though. He had a very, from what we understand, a complicated will. He for sure made comments that he did not want any part of his avatar created for the next 25 years. And when he passed away, people were using his images online, and then his daughter came out and said, stop. This is hurting the family. And so I think he was very forward-thinking to have put in part of his wishes that he wanted a 25-year pause. I think that’s really interesting.

[19:32] Natalia Parker: Yeah, he put his right of publicity into a trust for 25 years, and then it goes into charity trust. So…

[19:41] Frazer Rice: Interesting. And so the charity too, they don’t want Robin Williams turned into a negative image. So they’ll have a way of stewarding that asset in a way that not only comports with his wishes, but also the philanthropic mission of the institution that in essence owns it going forward.

[20:05] Natalia Parker: Yes, and we’re not tax attorneys or anything. I guess people do it mostly for tax purposes to put your right of publicity and name and likeness into trust. Perhaps to try to prevent it going crazy everywhere and people using it to gain something.

[20:24] Frazer Rice: I mean, I think if I’m putting my mad scientist hat on, I’d say if you put a, let’s call it a freeze on the right of publicity for 25 years, you reduce the value of it. And so if you’re trying to reduce the value of an estate from an estate tax perspective, that might be one way to do it by creating, and I’m not going to call it artificial, but by creating barriers to commerce that reduce the value of it for a little while, and then it unlocks after a certain period of time. Add on to that the charitable component that it’s a little bit less that the estate has to come up with in terms of an estate value to knock away.

[21:02] Frazer Rice: As we wander into finishing up here, the fiduciary duties of an executor and then ultimately a trustee, it sounds like that they are already going to get a little bit complicated, because if you’re trying to do well by the estate and maximize that in many ways for the beneficiaries, and then if it’s in a trust where you’re trying to manage current income needs versus growing things in the future.

[21:27] Frazer Rice: And then you have this other overarching idea of maintaining this qualitative image or credibility of the IP against the monetization component of it, that’s just a lot to handle. What other duties out there do you worry about for your clients from a fiduciary standpoint, aside from really marshaling the assets, making sure you have them, and then putting them in place going forward so that they’re productive?

[21:55] Natalia Parker: Emotional harm. That’s one of the most, because regular people, they might not get any financial harm, but emotional harm for the families, yes, because some people, they go off a deep end and they post something very hurtful to the family online. And family will have to deal with it for eternity.

[22:20] Frazer Rice: Right. Got it. And Tatyana, what are your thoughts on that?

[22:23] Tatyana Thurston: I will concur that the emotional aspect is really important. I think that even the most loving thing you can do for your family is to create a will and a trust and plan for your family. There’s a digital component to that planning that is of utmost care to ensure that, A, that the history of the family is properly documented, and then B, to clean up what accounts you have out there that don’t need to be out there. I think it’s important for families to plan ahead for that.

[22:58] Frazer Rice: That may not be in the will or the trust specifically. Is that something in a side letter of wishes, or is that something that you build into the document?

[23:07] Natalia Parker: Yes. We do it in the DEXIT plan.

[23:10] Tatyana Thurston: Yeah, consider it, if you could piece the world in a few pillars. You have a wealth pillar, you have your tax advisory pillar, you have an estate pillar. You need a tech pillar. One of the major things that you need to do is take a look at your technology, your data trail, because the one thing that we forget is that our data is sold to brokers.

[23:36] Tatyana Thurston: And those brokers continue to look at this data, and then it impacts your kids. Your insurance rates for your children are going to be documented based on perhaps the medical data that they have on you. So these are the kinds of things that impact generations down the line.

[23:53] Frazer Rice: Got it. Ladies, thank you so much for being on. How do we find DEXIT, how do we find you? Natalia, do you start first?

[24:01] Natalia Parker: Yes, we are very easy. We’re in North Carolina, and it’s www.dexitplan.com. Come and see us. We are on LinkedIn, we are on Facebook, we are on Instagram as the DEXIT Chicks. And Tatyana, who runs our social media, so she knows more about it.

[24:23] Tatyana Thurston: Yes, you can find us, the company is DEXIT, but our website is dexitplan.com. You can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook of course, and you can reach out to us on our website. We’re happy to answer any questions you may have. Feel free to reach out anytime.

[24:42] Frazer Rice: Terrific. Well, we’ll have you on as things pop up, which they likely will, with all these Hollywood cases and frankly, even regular schmoes like me that have IP kicking around, it’s definitely food for thought, having a tech pillar in the estate plan so that people understand where I think there might be something to use or not use. And I think that’s only going to proliferate. So thank you for being on, and thank you for your advice on this front.

[25:09] Natalia Parker: Thank you.

[25:10] Tatyana Thurston: Thank you so much.

Disclaimer

This episode is for educational and entertainment purposes only. It is not investment, legal or tax advice and does not represent the opinions of the employers of the host or guests.