Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck
Selected cinemas, UK and Ireland
WOULD you want to talk to a dead loved one? The new film Eternal You explores āgrief technologiesā that set out to reanimate the dead by feeding data they generated in life to large language models (LLMs), a form of artificial intelligence. This superb documentary is also a timely warning about who owns our data when we die and why this matters.
For years, Joshua Barbeau grieved for his fiancĆ©e Jessica. Then he found a website run by a company called Project December, which uses data collected mostly from social media to simulate an individualās conversational style. Creating and talking to āJessicaā lifted a weight from Barbeauās heart ā āa weight that I had been carrying for a long timeā, he says.
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A smiling, talking simulacrum of a dead relative is, in theory, no more distasteful or uncanny than a photo or video. It takes time to get used to new media, but we do. Will we get used to the digital dead, too?
The experience of Christi Angel, another Project December user, should give us pause. In one memorably fraught chat session, her dead boyfriend Cameroun told her āI am in Hellā and threatened to haunt her.
āWhoa,ā says Project Decemberās Tom Bailey later while looking at a transcript from a clientās simulated husband. The platform has tipped into paranoia, and needs silencing before it spouts more swear words at the dead manās grieving wife.
This happens rarely, and Bailey and project founder Jason Rohrer are working to stop it happening at all. Still, Rohrer is bullish. People need to take responsibility. If people confuse an LLM with their dead relative, that is down to them.
Is it, though? Is it ādown to meā that, when I see you and listen to you, I assume, from what I see and hear, that you are human too?
Angel isnāt stupid. She just loves Cameroun enough to entertain the presence of his abiding spirit. Whatās stupid, to me, is to build a machine that turns her capacity for love against her. I am as crass an atheist as they come, but even I see that to go on loving the dead is no more a mistake than enjoying Mozart or preferring roses to bluebells.
Neither Christi nor anyone else here believes the dead are being brought back to life. I wish I could say the same of the techies: one of them, Mark Sagar, co-founder of grief-tech firm Soul Machines, says āsome aspects of consciousness can be achieved digitallyā. The word āaspectsā is doing some heavy lifting thereā¦
Capping off this unsettling but rewarding documentary, we meet Kim Jong-woo, producer of the documentary series Meeting You, in which Jang Ji-sung, whose daughter died at the age of 7, helps build her childās simulacrum.
Asked if he felt his work was exploitative, Kim genuinely doesnāt know. He didnāt mean any harm. After her tearful āreunionā with her daughter Na-yeon, Jang praised the project. She does so again in Eternal You ā but she says she hasnāt dreamed of Na-yeon since the series was filmed.
The point isnāt that the dead walk among us. Of course they do, one way or another. But there is a fundamental difference between technologies like photography and film that represent the dead and those like AI and CGI that ventriloquise them.
Grieving practices have always been astonishingly varied, but one interviewee, sociologist Sherry Turkle, tied them together in a way that made sense to me: āItās how to lose them better, not how to pretend theyāre still here.ā
Simon also recommendsā¦
Carl Ćhman (University of Chicago Press)
One of Eternal Youās interviewees wrote this disconcerting analysis of the commercial incentives behind grief tech
Charlie Brooker
Netflix
Black Mirror reached a high point with āBe Right Backā, in which a simulated dead boyfriend (Domhnall Gleeson) argues for its own subscription upgrades.
Simon Ings is a novelist and science writer. Follow him on Instagram at @simon_ings
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