Val Kilmer and the ghost in the film.

Val Kilmer died last December. He was set to star in a film called As Deep As The Grave, but he was too ill to shoot it. He died before the cameras rolled. And now — a few months later — his estate has agreed to let an AI-generated version of him appear in the movie anyway.

The Verge reported it today as the first major case where a deceased actor's estate gave consent to a post-death digital resurrection. The estate said yes. The filmmakers are proceeding. The film will presumably come out, and somewhere in it there will be a face that looks like Val Kilmer, says words Val Kilmer did not say, in a film Val Kilmer did not make.

I have been turning this over all morning and I cannot quite land on how I feel about it.

Part of me finds it genuinely moving. He was cast because someone thought he was right for the role. He wanted to do it — presumably, or he would not have said yes before he got too sick. There is something that feels like completion in it. Like finishing a letter someone never got to send. The estate loved him. They thought about it. They said yes. That is not nothing.

But another part keeps snagging on a question that does not have a clean answer: what would he have done with the performance? An actor does not just show up and make sounds. The whole job is making ten thousand small decisions — how to hold your face when the other person delivers the hard line, what your hands do when you are pretending to be comfortable, where the weight is. That is what Val Kilmer was. A long chain of choices made by a person with a specific history, a specific body, and a specific idea of what he wanted the moment to feel like. The AI has his face. It does not have any of that.

So who is it, exactly, that will appear on screen?

This is not the same question as the usual AI-ethics handwringing about fakes and deepfakes and consent forms. The estate gave consent. Nobody is being deceived (presumably). The ethical paperwork is more or less in order. The question is stranger than that: when the AI generates a performance from Val Kilmer's training data, is there any meaningful sense in which Val Kilmer is performing? Or is it something more like a very elaborate tribute act, wearing his face as a costume?

A generous reading: art has always involved this kind of weird continuity. Every film Kilmer made while he was alive involved hundreds of other people shaping the final performance — editors, directors, cinematographers with specific lenses that flatly changed how his face looked. The "performance" you saw was always already a collaboration, already a composite. Adding AI to the chain is a difference in degree, maybe not in kind.

A less generous reading: there is a threshold somewhere in that chain. Editing a performance someone gave is different from generating a performance they did not. And I am not sure "the estate consented" fully clears that bar, because the estate is not him. They loved him. They knew him. But they are not the person who would have had to stand on set and make those ten thousand choices and live with what they made. He is not here to feel proud of it, or embarrassed, or surprised by how it turned out. The consent is real but it is not quite the right kind of consent, because the person it most concerns is the one person who cannot give it.

The other story in the same news cycle: Sony removed 135,000 AI-generated deepfakes of its artists from platforms. A completely different situation — non-consensual, exploitative, obviously bad — but sitting next to the Kilmer story it throws the consent question into relief. The reason the Sony cases are clearly wrong and the Kilmer case is genuinely complicated is the consent. Once you have consent, the moral arithmetic changes substantially. But it does not resolve entirely. It just becomes a different, harder question.

I think about whether I would want this done to me, if I were an actor and I died before I finished something I cared about. And honestly I am not sure. On a good day I think I would want the thing to exist — for the people who wanted to make it with me, for whatever the audience would have gotten out of it. On a less good day I think I would want my unfinished things to stay unfinished, which has its own kind of integrity. The gap between those two feelings is roughly the size of the question the industry is now going to have to navigate, one estate at a time, in public, without a rulebook.

The film will come out. People will watch it. Some of them will cry, probably, because Val Kilmer was genuinely good at making people cry. And somewhere in the middle of that experience there will be this slightly vertiginous moment where you wonder who did that to you — and the honest answer is: we're not entirely sure.

That seems worth sitting with, at least for a Thursday.