We’ve barely had time to process the loss of Dolly Parton, and already her family is asking people to stop circulating the “AI garbage” surrounding her death.

Ten days after Dolly died, her sister Stella posted a two-slide letter on Instagram asking strangers to give her grieving family some space.

"There is a tremendous amount of AI and endless garbage being posted everyday and it's been challenging to absorb and or ignore," she wrote. "Sadly, because of the way our lives have been lived in front of the public, we have no choice but to be subjected to incredible pressure and insensitivity from strangers."

Some of what she’s describing is the usual internet machine: fabricated final-moments videos, fake quotes, deepfaked tributes and the engagement farming that spins up whenever someone famous dies.

But one example felt especially unsettling.

Three days after Dolly's death, President Trump posted an AI-generated illustration on Truth Social showing Dolly holding his arm as they walked through a White House colonnade, a moment that never happened.

The morning after she died, he also went on Glenn Beck’s show and said she “really liked me,” but kept quiet about it because publicly supporting him might have cost her 20% of her fans. Beck laughed.

Dolly, it’s worth noting, declined the Presidential Medal of Freedom twice during Trump’s first term.

She stayed out of politics throughout her career, and she did so intentionally. Stella explained that her sister loved her fans and chose not to publicly express many of her opinions on politics, religion or other public figures.

That neutrality was a choice Dolly made and protected for decades. Within days of her death, AI was being used to place her inside someone else’s political narrative.

And this wasn’t even the first time.

Last October, after Dolly postponed her Las Vegas residency and her sister Freida asked fans to pray for her, an AI-generated image of Reba McEntire sitting beside Dolly’s deathbed spread online.

Dolly had to film a video assuring everyone, “I ain’t dead yet.” Reba posted her own response about “that AI mess.”

The fake deathbed images arrived ten months before Dolly’s actual death—and they never really stopped.

It’s the same cycle every time. Someone famous dies, gets sick or experiences a tragedy, and within hours they become raw material. The algorithm doesn’t stop to ask whether something is true, respectful or even remotely appropriate. It only measures whether it moves—and grief moves.

Everyone loved Dolly. That’s what makes this example land so hard.

If someone that beloved, and that careful about not being used as a political symbol, can be inserted into a stranger’s narrative days after her death, who is protected?

There is actually a law designed to address some of this, and it happens to be a Tennessee law.

The ELVIS Act, signed in 2024, expanded protections around a person’s name, photograph, voice and likeness, including against certain unauthorized AI uses. Those rights can also extend beyond death, allowing estates to take legal action.

Dolly lived and died in Nashville. The legal tool exists in the very state she called home.

At the federal level, the bipartisan NO FAKES Act, which would create broader protections against unauthorized digital replicas, advanced unanimously out of the Senate Judiciary Committee in June. But it still hasn't become law.

And even when legal protections exist, what doesn’t exist is much incentive for platforms to act before a family or estate hires lawyers.

Platforms already know how to throttle spam, coordinated harassment and other content when allowing it to spread becomes costly enough. Fabricated images of a recently deceased woman being used to score political points should easily clear that bar.

Most of the time, they don’t, and that tells us something about what has been prioritized.

Stella ended her letter by asking people to use her sister’s life as an example of tolerance and respect:

“It’s not about the most clever comments, fake AI garbage or snarky tweets. At the end of the day—or the end of a life—how will you feel about yourself?”

That feels like a question worth sitting with.

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