In the 1960s, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke has a useful aphorism: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” He was right, as evidenced by the ambiguous respect with which people tend to describe AI tools like ChatGPT. We know it’s just software. We even kind of understand how the software works. But because it’s so advanced that it seems alien – like her He knows I – We treat him with reverence and a little fear, as if he were a god and not a creature.
Increasingly, we are turning to artificial intelligence to answer the kinds of questions and fulfill the kinds of desires that religion once solved. And that’s the subject of the new documentary “You are eternal” (available upon request Directed by Hans Blok and Moritz Ryswick).
As the title suggests, “Eternal You” is mostly concerned with a very particular use of artificial intelligence: giving users the illusion of talking to dead loved ones. Large language models trained on the deceased’s speech patterns, chat logs, and more can be made to mimic that person’s way of communicating so well that grieving people feel as if they are crossing the border between life and death. These tools can be convenient, but they can also be big business. One of the themes of the film he calls “death capitalism.”
I first saw Eternal You a year ago during its screening at a festival, and when I rewatched it recently, I was struck by the realization of how much has changed in those short 12 months. We have learned about artificial intelligence, or adopted it wholesale friends And artificial intelligence partners. Our social media pages are now filled with “people” who are not people at all, and are meta Announced plans To create them systematically on their own platforms. The idea that there was a lot of money to be made by letting us chat with an imitation of a dead person would have been a fringe idea to me a year ago, but I’m pretty sure now that I was wrong.
The subjects of “Eternal You” range from the bereaved to skeptics to software creators. Some people like to experiment. Others find it very annoying. But what’s even more interesting are the questions that drive the documentary: not whether it’s ethical to try to talk to the dead, but whether it’s ethical for a software company to sell that “ability.” As Sheri Turkle, the film’s lead sociologist, notes, AI is “an amazing machine that knows how to trick you into thinking there’s… there there.”
“Eternal You” isn’t really about overcoming death, as it turns out. In a wide-ranging and somewhat disconcerting way, it’s about humans’ desperation to find meaning in life wherever they can, and how companies are rushing to fill that gap and inspire an almost religious devotion, even in the professionals who make the tools. But it also feels like a warning: This isn’t your loved one on the other end at all—and it’s not magic, either.
