A Narrative Understanding of Privacy and the Problem of Digital Duplicates for Narrative Identity [PRE-PRINT]

This is a pre-print of the following chapter: Hayes, P. and Fitzpatrick, N., ‘A Narrative Understanding of Privacy and the Problem of Digital Duplicates for Narrative Identity’, published in The Palgrave Handbook on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, edited by S.S. Gouveia, 2026, Palgrave Macmillan, reproduced with permission of Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2026. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-15112-4_9.

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This document is a pre-print (submitted version) which contains uncorrected errors.

Abstract

A significant and burgeoning problem associated with artificial intelligence is its capacity to generate mirrors of ourselves, or digital duplicates of varying complexity consisting of our likeness and (perhaps ostensibly) behaviours, using our personal information. This chapter will explore how digital duplicates impact our narrative identity, relying upon Paul Ricouer’s narrative philosophy to argue that digital duplicates undermine or challenge the construction of personal identity through narrative in appropriating elements of the idem (sameness) and interfering with our ipse (selfhood). This challenge is generated and exacerbated by, and compounds, breaks in the contextual integrity of our personal information, and therefore causes a rupture in narrative privacy itself, where narrative privacy is a state of being able to narrate our lives without arbitrary or unjust efforts to read or co-author those narratives by third parties.

We argue that there are two key sources of harm to the narrative self and privacy in the case of digital duplicates: the other or corporation responsible for constructing the duplicate (with or without consent), and the digital duplicate itself, which can transmit both true and untrue information about its subject with little regard to the appropriateness of the receivers of the information. This occurs through a mixture of abuse of the idem self, and possibly an imitation of the ipse by duplicates that can represent changes in disposition over time. The result is constrained capacity to narrate and become who we wish to be.

Keywords: Narrative identity; ipse; idem; privacy; digital duplicates