Eternal You, a new documentary premiering at Sundance about the creepy new world of digital afterlife, opens with a woman, Christi Angel, staring at a computer screen. She is talking to a dead loved one and tears are streaming down her face.
“That experience… It was terrifying,” he says. “There were things that scared me. And a lot of things I didn't want to hear [and] I wasn't ready to listen.”
We soon learn that Angel – the name, given this strange venture – is a New Yorker who uses the Project December program, which allows users to talk to virtual approximations of their dead loved ones via an AI chatbot that simulates their speech patterns. and thinks, to meet with Cameron, her first love. But when he asks Cameron where he is, Cameron replies that he is “in hell” surrounded by addicts. He then “haunts a treatment center.”
“And then he said, 'I'm going to haunt you.' And I just pushed the computer back because that scared me,” Angel recalled.
When Jason Rohrer, the founder of Project December, is asked about this troubling episode, he dismisses it. He's not responsible for the technology he's unleashed, he says, while admitting he doesn't even fully understand how it works.
“I'm also interested in the scarier aspect of it,” he admits. “When I read a transcript like this and it gives me chills, I like creepy.”
Filmmakers Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck have created an expansive portrait of the emerging enterprise that is digital afterlife, interviewing everyone from technology founders and users to AI psychologists and ethicists to examine whether there are potential benefits of that related to helping people process grief. , and of course, the potential downsides.
With popular AI programs like ChatGPT creating “thanobots” made up of loved ones' digital communications that let you talk to them after they've left this mortal coil, and Microsoft and Amazon filing patents for digital services after death of life powered by AI, it is important to evaluate this technology before it is too late.
“These big language models take the history of the Internet, they throw in scanned books, files, and kind of modeling language and frequency and word structure — just the way we speak and the likelihood of speaking,” explains tech critic Sara M. Watson. “So imagine texting your deceased relative and asking, 'How was your weekend?' The system will go back and imagine how every person in the entire history of the world has talked about weekends and filter it through how that deceased relative has previously talked about weekends to give you that person's result could they said if they were still alive.'
We meet Joshua Barbeau, a young man in Ontario, Canada, who is devastated by the tragic loss of his girlfriend, Jessica.
“The hardest thing I had to do in my life was to stand there in that room full of people who loved her and watch as the machines that kept her alive were turned off,” she recalled. “I held her hand as she died.”
So he started communicating with her using Project December and the first conversation he had with Jessica's simulation lasted all night.
“It really felt like a gift,” she says. “Like a weight I'd been carrying for a long time had been lifted.”
He adds, “Some people thought what I was doing was unhealthy—that it wasn't mourning, that I was holding on to the past and refusing to move on… We have a very unhealthy relationship with grief. It is something we treat as taboo. Everyone experiences it, yet no one is allowed to talk about it in public.”
Detroit native Stephenie Oney uses the HereAfterAI program to contact her dead parents — much to her family's confusion and dismay.
“I feel like sometimes technology is great, but I don't want to play God,” says Patricia, the sister of Stephenie's late father. “And I think your father, Bill, is in heaven, at peace. I don't want his soul — or any part of him — to be imitated by technology. I feel like sometimes we could go too far with technology. I would just like to remember him as a wonderful person.”
We learn that all of the film's subjects hold some form of guilt over their loved one's death, from not taking the time to respond to the last text they sent to not being able to save them.
In one particularly disturbing vignette, a grieving mother in Korea, Jang Ji-sung, encounters a digital representation of her dead young daughter, Na-yeon, in VR — and the material is transmitted as a TV special.
We learn that all of the film's subjects hold some form of guilt for their loved one's death, from not taking the time to respond to the last text they sent or not being able to save them.
The technology is becoming “increasingly immersive” and hasn't been tested rigorously enough before it goes to market, warns digital researcher Carl Öhman in the film. It leads to an “increasingly morbid” digital afterlife industry that uses people's digital footprints in an attempt to sell “digital immortality” to people.
And when we meet the founders of these digital businesses afterlife in the film, you can see why there is cause for serious concern. There's Mark Sagar, co-founder of Soul Machines, who created a digital avatar of his own newborn baby that spends time training instead of, you know, spending time with him. real baby. Justin Harrison, the founder of digital afterlife start-up YOV, says his company's process can involve recording all of your conversations with your loved one while they're still alive, in order to recreate their conversation patterns after they pass. But Harrison, whose passion for YOV cost him his wife and his home, seems far more interested in cheating death than helping others come to terms with their grief, as well as moral and ethical issues. consequences of what it seeks. In fact, all of these male founders seem mostly in love with their technological creations (people, less so).
One of Eternal YouThe most telling sequences see Rohrer, the founder of Project December, giggling as she looks at chat logs from a disgruntled user whose “deadbeat dad” berated her when she called him a fraud, repeatedly calling her a “fucking bitch.”
Furthermore, who owns the data? And what will these companies do with your dead loved ones avatars next you mold?
“I have very little faith in tech companies keeping their promises,” says Watson. “I just have no control over where I end up? Imagine all the different people who could have a claim to continue my virtual self? My brain, the way I think, the way I interpret things – trusting a company to manage that in perpetuity just seems impossible to me.”
from our partners at https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/eternal-you-doc-sundance-ai-digital-afterlife-death-chatgpt-technology-1234950589/