You may not need another reason to feel unsettled by the waves generated by new AI technologies. All the same, here’s another: Several AI ventures aim to make people live forever. The new documentary film Eternal You explores the concept of immortality and the attempts of technology to achieve it. The film follows the experiences of several people who used these services to talk to loved ones who have already passed on.
Through the voices of experts, ethicists, and consumers, Eternal You examines the ethical dilemmas and implications of the pursuit of immortality. The film also considers philosophical dimensions, exploring the potential impact on human identity. Ultimately, Eternal You, which is directed by Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck, and produced by Christian Beetz and Georg Tschurtschenthaler, challenges viewers to contemplate the boundaries of mortality and the future of humanity in an age where technological advancements blur the line between science fiction and reality.
“Artificial intelligence promises much of what religion does,” MIT’s Sherry Turkle says at one moment in the film.
As a viewer, that statement feels most prominent in my mind as I think of, at least in this scenario, what creators and users are asking the technology to do.
One of the services highlighted in the film is Project December. From their website: “Using patent-pending technology, in conjunction with deep AI running on one of the world’s most sophisticated super-computers, we can now simulate a text-based conversation with anyone. Anyone. Including someone who is no longer living.” At projectdecember.net, you can begin to simulate the dead for just $10.
The way any AI technology works is by using data to develop skills and programs through algorithms at progressively deeper levels. This means that for any of these programs to function, including Project December, the technology needs data, and the quality and quantity of the data determines the abilities of the program. And this is where the humanness seems to end. The simulation is only as good as the data it has to start with.
If you are, for example, speaking with the AI avatar of someone you knew 20 years ago, wouldn’t you expect that person to have grown and changed? And isn’t that something that draws us closer to one another? Soul Machines Studios claims to have an answer — having created what they call “digital humans,” with the ability to develop autonomously. Soul Machines Studios’ product as advertised is an “AI assistant,” one that is “infinitely interactive” and “authentically emotive.”
So if AI promises much of what religion does, what do these services promise? Conversation, for starters. But also a mechanism for coping with grief, the responsible use of which can feel ethically ambiguous.
As you get to know the subjects of the documentary, their experiences seem to range eerie to tragic. For Jang Ji-sung, who wanted to reconnect with her 7-year-old daughter whom she recently lost, meeting the avatar of her daughter in virtual reality evidently offered a closure that helped her overcome nightmares, she said. For the rest of us — and the people watching her televised encounter — it might feel more like horror.
Ultimately, having shown both impulses to embrace and reject this kind of technology, Eternal You leaves space for us to decide. Turkle might agree that is the most pressing issue, as she has said before, “Technology challenges us to assert our human values, which means that first of all, we have to figure out what they are.”
Eternal You premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, in January 2024. As of this writing, the film is in distribution.