“If you had the chance to talk to someone that died, that you love, would you take it?” asks Christi Angel in this apprehensive documentary portrait of dead-raising digital capitalism. Angel is one of several users of Project December, an artificial intelligence (AI) application that creates digital avatars of lost loved ones.
Rival services include voice synthesising and 3D modelling. Angel’s interactions with her deceased lover Cameroun – generated from a few personal details and an AI database that can access vernacular from any period – are initially comforting but equally disconcerting.
How did the AI know that the couple loved to listen to Brian McKnight?
And then the digital approximation tells her that he’s “in hell”, surrounded by addicts.
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Project December founder Jason Rohrer dismisses these glitches. He later chuckles at the transcripts from a dissatisfied customer who writes off her AI-generated dad as the “biggest scam ever”. “Dad” escalates with: “f**king b*tch, you’re going to pay.”
Even when the tech works, this dark dive into the world of death-themed start-ups makes for troubling viewing. Joshua, a young Canadian who is mourning his girlfriend Jessica, stays up all night talking to her avatar by text message. He poignantly mentions a break-up with a recent girlfriend, citing Jessica’s “shadow”.
A Korean producer wonders about the ethics of his TV special, in which a grieving mother, Jang Ji-sung, sobs and hugs a VR re-creation of her dead daughter, Na-yeon. “She looks dreary,” he says of the young mum in the video edit. Jang claims that after the encounter her little girl no longer haunts her dreams. Images of the woman wearing a VR headset, grasping into nothingness, make one think of the table-knocking parlour tricks of Victorian spiritualists.
Microsoft and Amazon, we are told, have patents on digital afterlife applications. Their smaller rivals sound ruthless: “The services that will survive are the ones that are the most skilful at turning the dead into a business,” says Justin Harrison of You, Only Virtual, who divorced his wife to pursue his morbid tech ambitions.
The German documentarians Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck stick to talking heads for this unexpectedly profound reckoning with our increasingly queasy relationship with the virtual world. Who will own this data? And for how much?
Sherry Turkle of Massachusetts Institute of Technology sagely observes: “There is no other path for human beings; we are being offered something that diminishes us.”
Eternal You is at selected cinemas from Friday, June 28th
