You can barely go a block in my neighborhood without seeing a glowing neon hand in a window, surrounded by tarot cards, gemstones and various phases of the moon. Inside, palm readers, mediums and psychics continue a long tradition of spiritual stage magic, ready to pull all sorts of stunts to better sell their séances. If you need a knock on a table or a planchette moving across a Ouija board to convince you that your hard-earned dollars have actually brought your departed loved one back into the room with you, they’re happy to oblige. Thanks to AI, this illusion has been updated for the modern era. The tricks have just gotten a little more sophisticated. Rather than cold reading the desperately bereaved, making and then adjusting informed guesses based on common concerns, tech companies will simply ask you for all the data they need to blow your mind—and users are all too happy to provide. A counterpoint documentary to its festival companion Love Machina, Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck’s Eternal You observes the burgeoning industry around techno-spiritualism with wry skepticism.
It stands to reason that if there’s money to be made in biotech, there’s an equal amount to be made in necrotech. Eternal You explores the sectors of the artificial intelligence business that’s wasted no time adopting the psychological tricks of the spiritual trade and applying them to chatbots and CG models. Block and Riesewieck first introduce us to a woman IMing with a program whose function is to pretend to be her dead boyfriend. It texts like he used to, thanks to a model set of examples and a vast amount of data scraped from conversations across the internet. If you can get past the ghoulishness of simulating someone you once loved, users’ emotions make them quick to forget they’re talking to a machine—even if the machine constantly spits out the same kind of weird chatbot contradictions that never seem to bother the easily impressed. In the same digital breath, the bot will say “I’m living” and “I’m not used to being dead.” Then it’ll assure its conversational partner that “I’m in hell.” It’s so abrupt and direct that it’s hilarious, until you see how devastating that random coding misfire is to the person seeking solace.
While AI in general is currently being sold as a miracle do-it-all to the most credulous among us, this specific use of AI is targeted towards an even more vulnerable demographic: The credulous and grieving. And those working behind the scenes are used to grifting. As Eternal You listens to those in charge of these startups, like Project December founder Jason Rohrer, we hear self-assured PR exaggerations. It’s showmanship. It’s the crystal ball, the velvet curtains, the copious candles. It’s the stuff that gets you funded by the rich and attracts comfort-seekers to your website. And the language hasn’t even changed that much.
“There is essentially some kind of magic happening,” says the guy who programmed the magic, and whose professional reputation relies on his users and investors believing there is something magical happening.
“It has a mind of its own.” “How it behaves isn’t truly understood by anybody.” These just aren’t true. They’re mystique-building nonsense. These commercial catchphrases accompany vague explanations of technical function that also encompass breaches of privacy, if not actual crimes: “It’s been trained on loads of stuff—basically everything humans have ever written.” Many of the engineers that the filmmakers have access to are so engorged on their own Kool-Aid that they laugh off the horrible experiences people have with their products. One admits that his ex-wife gave him an ultimatum: His marriage or his company. It’s not hard to make libertarian tech guys look like evil personifications of Jurassic Park’s “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should” quote, but all Eternal You had to do was keep the cameras rolling.
The filmmakers then immediately rebut with people like Carl Öhman, who are willing to cut through the bullshit about this segment of the AI gold rush pursued by “the most skillful in turning the dead into a business.” Their straight talk is an oasis, especially when the topic involves one people are inclined to be too hurt to be anything but trusting around: Death. It’s also a gasp of air when intercut with CSPAN political hearings where ancient politicians nod, slack-jawed, at placating AI CEOs. Our lawmakers and regulators are buying everything they’re told with the same verve as end-users—the only difference is, the lawmakers are also probably investing in it.
It’s all existentially depressing, housed in a bleak aesthetic. A glitchy score from Gregor Keienburg and Raffael Seyfried harmonizes reversed and edited vocalizations in an aural replica of Eternal You’s central concept, its soothing inhumanity haunting cold drone shots. Block and Riesewieck aren’t afraid to show off a little style, which goes a long way when covering subject matter that inherently entails a lot of sitting at the keyboard, staring at a screen. Wide shots, giving a broader montaged context to human experience, go a long way to underscore the impossible concept of replicating consciousness. Balancing this is an icy off-handedness. Even cathartic, emotional moments are filtered through imperfect technological lenses: Reality TV, computer monitors, iPhone speakers, text on a screen.
A particularly moving scene highlights the soon-to-be transactional relationship between loneliness and exploitation that the tech in Eternal You portends. A clip of the Korean reality show Meeting You—where a mother is to be reunited with her dead child in VR—plays, broken up by pauses and fast-forwards. There’s an instinctual emotional response you get from watching the woman, nearly the same as her instant reaction to seeing her 3D-modeled child. But cutting back to the studio, an empty room where a woman in her VR gear, visor and controllers, sobs while a camera crew watches on, is a cruelty. Zooming another layer back, watching the producers mess with the edit, twists the knife further—a cruelty made for display.
But even if it weren’t being exploited, Eternal You eventually asks, is the mere potential behind these advancements dangerous enough to overshadow any brief serotonin hit? Are we delaying the grief process? Are we refusing to accept the inevitability of death? Are we further reducing our media literacy around what is real and what is not? There’s just not a lot of good that comes from deepfaking people—even dead ones. And when it comes to the dead ones, as Öhman explains, these avatars become the perfect salespeople for themselves. If you bought a replica of your dead child, you’re probably not going to ignore it when the child says, “Please authorize another payment or I’ll disappear forever. Don’t you love me?”
A third act pivot where we look beyond the death industry to other virtual beings—like Baby X, a creepy AI infant—loses a little steam and dilutes Eternal You’s focus, but adds a bit more context to the future of this tech, even if the industries differ. It also allows the filmmakers to display some of their most horrifying images; it turns out the motion-capture process can involve digital artistry that looks an awful lot like manipulating the face skin stretched over the cover of the Necronomicon.
Eternal You is a necessary warning klaxon for our culture’s increasing inability to accept death, just as it finds a techno-economic structure happy to oblige it. Our movies and TV shows are beginning to feature undead actors, conjured up through facial scans and CGI. Religion might make promises, but this is something you can see. And that’s how the séances get you. Watching so many hurt, scared people try to deny the realities of death—or have their denials monetized by parasitic capitalists—is heartbreaking in its futility. But, then, the best-case scenario they seek is almost worse: A digital zombie, forever preserved just before death, its image and ideas locked into place and denied the humanity of growth. It’s deeply sad, sort of like a techie version of Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused. “That’s what I love about my dead relatives’ avatars: I get older, they stay the same age.”
Director: Hans Block, Moritz Riesewieck
Release Date: January 20, 2024 (Sundance)
Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.
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