Acts of Configuration: Rethinking Provenance, Temporality and Legitimacy in Post-Mortem Agents

2026-04-15

AI Summary

Current designs of posthumous AI agents are largely constrained by a binary framework of life and death, overlooking the need for delegation during the period when individuals still retain decision-making capacity. This study investigates how users configure AI agents for advance care planning while cognitively capable, through participatory workshops, agent training, and reflective discussions. Introducing the concept of “configuring acts,” the work reveals that agents should dynamically evolve during the user’s capacity-preserving phase and transition to a static yet “adjacent-use”-supporting form after capacity loss, thereby reconfiguring their provenance, temporality, and legitimacy. Findings indicate a user preference for bounded agents grounded in first-person authorization and representational fidelity, and uncover novel temporal usage patterns, offering a new paradigm for ethically grounded AI agent design.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Intelligent User Interfaces
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Agent Architectures
• Multiagent Systems: Modeling other Agents

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Agentic search

Abstract

Work on persona-persistent post-mortem agents typically frames design around a life/death binary. This framing neglects a consequential yet under-theorised condition: when individuals remain alive but have impaired decisional capacity. Drawing on a multi-phase workshop in which participants trained and reflected on an AI agent for Advance Care Planning, we examined how people reason about agentic delegation post-capacity loss. Initially, participants favoured bounded agents grounded in first-party authorship and representational fidelity over autonomous or evolving stand-ins. However, temporality introduced novel ideas like adjacent use driven by persona persistence over functional expansion: agents should evolve while users retain capacity, remain static once capacity is lost, but somehow inform adjacent post-mortem uses. We discuss the implications of these findings and propose that the configuration of agents for post-capacity use reshapes our understanding of provenance, temporality, and legitimacy for post-mortem agents.

Problem

• post-mortem agents
• decisional capacity
• provenance
• temporality
• legitimacy

Innovation

• post-mortem agents
• decisional capacity
• temporality
• agent configuration
• advance care planning