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 “grief technologies” 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 fiancée Jessica. Then he found a website run by a company called Project December, which uses data collected mostly from social media to simulate an individual’s conversational style. Creating and talking to “Jessica” lifted a weight from Barbeau’s heart – “a weight that I had been carrying for a long time”, 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 “I am in Hell” and threatened to haunt her.
“Whoa,” says Project December’s Tom Bailey later while looking at a transcript from a client’s simulated husband. The platform has tipped into paranoia, and needs silencing before it spouts more swear words at the dead man’s 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 “down to me” that, when I see you and listen to you, I assume, from what I see and hear, that you are human too?
Angel isn’t stupid. She just loves Cameroun enough to entertain the presence of his abiding spirit. What’s 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 “some aspects of consciousness can be achieved digitally”. The word “aspects” is doing some heavy lifting there…
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 child’s simulacrum.
Asked if he felt his work was exploitative, Kim genuinely doesn’t know. He didn’t mean any harm. After her tearful “reunion” with her daughter Na-yeon, Jang praised the project. She does so again in Eternal You – but she says she hasn’t dreamed of Na-yeon since the series was filmed.
The point isn’t 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: “It’s how to lose them better, not how to pretend they’re still here.”
Simon also recommends…
Carl Öhman (University of Chicago Press)
One of Eternal You’s interviewees wrote this disconcerting analysis of the commercial incentives behind grief tech
Charlie Brooker
Netflix
Black Mirror reached a high point with “Be Right Back”, 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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