Important questions are raised around not just the ethics but the ownership of feeding your deep, intimate conversations and interactions with a loved one to a company like Project December – who owns this ‘data’ when you’re dead? How can you be sure your loved one isn’t being exploited to build the model for hundreds of others, too? “Eternal You” is now showing in select cinemas nationwide.
How far would you go to speak to a deceased loved one again? That is the question that multiple interviewees in Eternal You grapple with as directors Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck plant us deep within their long, winding explorations of grief. Their conversations are possible thanks to Project December, a machine learning company set up by slightly eerie founder Jason Rohrer, who explains that the conversations are possible through the AI being fed mountains of media across lifetimes, with a surprisingly small amount of actual individualised ‘data’ from the deceased loved one to enact the virtual link.
It’s clear that Block and Riesewieck consider it essential to get a helicopter view of this industry, as several grievers are interspersed with AI founders, ethicists, MIT experts and more. Eternal You is at its best, and most heart-breaking, when it simply focuses on the emotionally complicated and psychologically knotty implications of these people ‘talking’ to their loved ones once more – watching one interviewee mention to the virtual inhabitation of his deceased high-school sweetheart that a past relationship broke down because of the feeling of ‘her shadow’ hanging over them is a real knife twist.
Whereas participants like Joshua seem to function within the odd dynamics of Project December just fine, another interviewee’s experience demonstrates the potential for emotional harm and trauma that could arise from AI’s chaotic unpredictability. A devout Christian, Christi asks her boyfriend where he is – only for him to reply, ‘I’m in hell.’ Despite trying to change its mind, the AI merely doubles down, pushing this idea that Christi’s beloved is burning in hell with others who deserve it. It’s a sobering reminder that this technology is a scientific snowball, and even its creators can’t fully begin to understand or reason with it, let alone control it.
Important questions are raised around not just the ethics but the ownership of feeding your deep, intimate conversations and interactions with a loved one to a company like Project December – who owns this ‘data’ when you’re dead? How can you be sure your loved one isn’t being exploited to build the model for hundreds of others, too? It is here where Eternal You shines brightest, beginning to pull back the curtain on the perversity of what one interviewee’s friend labels’ death capitalism‘. It’s a remarkably apt phrase for what we see unfold. There is an undeniable level of exploitation of someone’s grief and loss to create a financially viable and commercially appealing business.
These opportunities are inherently ‘opt-in’, but in another sense, they merely feel like the scientific equivalent of consulting a fortune teller or a psychic to speak with someone who has passed on. The difficulty with Eternal You’s helicopter view is that, by doing so, they gain access to many of the significant figures in these spaces, such as Project December’s Jason Rohrer and VOV founder Justin Harrison, but seem to sacrifice direct confrontation of the motives and ethics behind their pursuits as a result. We do get a glimpse into the strange, slightly disconnected attitudes of figures like Rohrer and Harrison. There is almost a sense of superiority from them toward their customers, as if they are playfully shocked that people are so willing to buy into the belief that their loved one is really on the other end of the line.
While on the surface, their rationale and their directive seem to be humanitarian, both Harrison and Rohrer lack the warmth or empathetic follow-through to make you feel like their motives were ever altruistic in any form – Rohrer even shares an anecdote where his wife avoided telling him about the potential idea she’d heard months prior, lest he jump on it. Harrison even mentions at one point having to choose between his entire family or continuing YOV as a company – the bitter comedic undertone of his divorce discussions in the very next sentence seems to suggest that these men themselves aren’t too dissimilar from their customers – turning away from flesh-and-blood life to dedicate themselves to cold, synthetic machines.
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