Letting AI Resurrect Your Loved Ones? Exploring People's Intention to Adopt Digital Resurrection Technology

ABSTRACT Digital resurrection technology, which uses artificial intelligence and multimodal synthesis to recreate the likeness, voice, and behaviors of deceased individuals, has attracted growing attention for its potential value in commemoration, emotional healing, cultural preservation, and education. However, ethical, privacy, and moral concerns may hinder consumer adoption, making it important to understand the psychological mechanisms underlying adoption intention. Grounded in the dual factor model of technology usage, this study examines both enablers and inhibitors of consumers' intention to adopt digital resurrection technology. Using survey data from 470 participants, we tested the proposed model through partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS‐SEM) and necessary condition analysis (NCA). The PLS‐SEM results show that form realism and behavioral realism significantly enhance perceived authenticity, which in turn increases perceived relief. Unexpectedly, perceived authenticity significantly reduces, rather than increases, perceived threat, suggesting that authenticity may alleviate threat perceptions when digital resurrection concerns emotionally familiar loved ones. Privacy invasion concern increases perceived threat, which further strengthens distrust. Perceived relief positively influences adoption intention, whereas distrust negatively influences adoption intention. Perceived desecration does not significantly affect adoption intention. The NCA results further reveal that form realism, behavioral realism, perceived authenticity, and perceived relief are necessary conditions for achieving high adoption intention, whereas privacy invasion concern, perceived desecration, perceived threat, and distrust are not strict bottlenecks. These findings enrich research on digital resurrection and consumer technology adoption by revealing the asymmetric roles of enablers and inhibitors, and provide practical implications for designing emotionally meaningful, authentic, and trustworthy digital resurrection services.