From sci-fi to reality: ‘Eternal You’ shows AI’s impact on death and grief
The haunting documentary at SF Film Festival shows programmers’ attempts to revisit our dead loved ones.
By Laura Stein
If you could talk to the dead, would you? What if those dead were simulations generated by AI systems and the digital remnants of the deceased?
We’re asked this by Eternal You, which premiered at the SF Film Festival this week. I’ve heard it called a horrifying documentary and a blueprint for death capitalism: We monetize everything nowadays, so why not spend money resurrecting a loved one?
It sounds haunting but the future is already here. The Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back” begins with Martha texting an AI chatbot of her dead boyfriend, with progressive interactions becoming much more lifelike. In 2021, the SF Chronicle walked through doing this in real life.
These are often dystopian portrayals, but we get an unbiased walkthrough with Eternal You, which describes how different companies around the world are conceptualizing this technology right now, how early users are interacting with it, and expert views on the ethical problems raised by the business of simulating the dead. The film’s participants speak for themselves as witnesses to their own experience as developers, users, or critics of the technology.
I found the film timely and illuminating. Public conversations on the abilities and dangers of AI have felt abstract and hard to visualize so far. Eternal You gave me tangible examples of how AI may mediate and monetize our experience of death, and I hope we consider what guardrails should be put in place before allowing a new industry to mine our afterlife.
Eternal You asks us: Is this technology legitimately fulfilling a need or simply misleading vulnerable, grief-stricken individuals? We also wonder whether its emotional power is somehow bound with the psychological power of grief or with its mimicry of our most intimate interpersonal communications. Co-director Hans Block, who was present at the screening, said that many of the users featured were initially reluctant to share their experiences. We can see the users’ hesitation in the film.
“Most people felt shy or guilty to talk about their experiences. It took time to build trust,” Block said.
In Eternal You, people turn to the technology to assuage guilt, find comfort, ease regrets, provide a legacy, and otherwise converse with the departed. Several users seem willing to suspend disbelief in these AI simulations and see them as reflecting the consciousness or presence of a former lover, child, or parent.
There are already many ways to simulate the dead. We see a large language model program recklessly engage in text-based conversation, which is sometimes convincing but often wildly dark and creepy. There’s more hype on a virtual reality company that produces an avatar of a dead child for a bereaved parent; a little girl helps a grieving mother find solace. But then that begs the question: Just because we can talk to our dead children, should we?
Experts like Sherry Turkle and Carl Öhman tackle this dilemma head on, along with others surrounding respect for the dead, who controls these creations and how these services are marketed. I personally wanted more about how today’s technology fits in with traditional and historical ways we remember the dead. Millions of people die every year, surely how we memorialize them could provide us a roadmap for the future.
Eternal You isn’t a doomsday documentary, but rather strives to present the complex issues raised by these early experiments with digital reanimation. The choice to tell the story through a constellation of interviews and sublimate an editorial voice serves this effort. Eternal You surveys a nascent industry while there is still time for action and asserts that the issues are too important to be left purely to market forces.
Block hopes the film will spark conversations about how to deal with death and grief through technology and how to regulate such technologies to prevent harm.
Laura Stein is a San Francisco-based writer.
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