Eternal You
I’m already a bit late to the game on this AI doc given that it’s a year old and the field is moving at breakneck speed, but there’s still something here worth watching.
It tells the story of people who choose to ‘immortalise’ a deceased loved one using AI, and the companies that enable this - be it through a chat bot, audio or even a VR model of the person.
If you are even slightly interested in AI there are no technical developments to be seen here, but it’s a good illustration of how the uncanny valley is a real thing. That is to say, the closer we reach ‘reality’ the more disturbing a computer generated avatar can be.
The most satisfied customers seem to be the ones simply typing into a chat box and getting messages back. It’s almost as if the harder we try to recreate someone, the further away we get.
Even the text-messagers are let down in the end though. One lady’s “father” calls her a bitch from beyond the grave. One woman’s boyfriend says that he is currently burning in hell, not in heaven. But the techbros don’t seem to give a shit about the harm it’s causing people, and fall back on the “even we don’t know how it works dude” argument.
This is a pretty level-headed film though and provides lots of nay-sayers to balance it out. Interestingly enough the concerned parties seem to be mostly women, who all present valid philosophical rebuttals to the notion that you can talk to someone from beyond the grave based on what they wrote on their phone. Meanwhile on the other side it’s guys in gilets saying things like “fuck death” (didn’t they see Tuck Everlasting1?).
The final scenes of a woman ‘reuniting’ with her daughter through a VR headset were eye-opening, heartbreaking and hard to process. It strikes me as a cruel exploitation of someone’s grief, but perhaps I’m just a stick in the mud and I’m looking at the future of healing.