Once something to be imagined in your favorite sci-fi tale, artificial intelligence (A.I.) is now being forced into everything from your smartphone to your toaster. Instead of being used to expand human consciousness through exploratory play like Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Holodeck or companionship like Blade Runner 2049’s Joi (2017 release with Ana de Armas in the role), humanity is currently using it for the droll tasks of sending emails and constructing images they lack the skills to make themselves. Instead of exercising and strengthening critical thinking skills through the act of crafting written works or enhancing one’s ability to create art, users are relying on A.I. to do it for them, either unaware of or uncaring about the environmental toll or the active theft they are engaging in. And they should care because the industry that has come for your intellectual property now wants to own you, too, but not your current corporeal form in its limited-time capacity, but your undying digital self, by taking your entire life and transforming it into a dataset that their systems can use to create everything from text-based experiences to virtual reality (VR) interactions to full-on A.I.-driven digital avatars. In their sophomore feature, co-directors Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck (The Cleaners) invite audiences to hear two-sides of a complex issue that meets at the crossroads of science, ethics, morality, and faith as business owners, users, and various experts examine the current state of A.I. use to prolong someone’s life in their documentary Eternal You.
A scene from documentary ETERNAL YOU. Photo courtesy of Film Movement.
Block and Riesewieck split their non-fiction film into three distinct parts — the users, the creators, and the contextualizers – using some truly lovely cinematography from Tom Bergmann (The King) and Konrad Waldmann (Merkel) that uses the natural world to visually bridge the thematic gap between the digital and the real between the parts. The filmmakers don’t appear to take a specific stance on the issue, preferring instead to let what they show and what the interviewees tell do the work for them. In that vein, if you come to this hoping for some kind of environmental perspective, exploration of the exploitive nature of A.I. in its current form, or any other issue item that plagues the comparatively new technology, you won’t find it. This isn’t to suggest that these issues aren’t important, so much as that it’s not the intent of the filmmakers. They are interested more in what drives users to seek out the types of companies who would profit from a supposed transfer of consciousness from the real world into the digital realm and providing a social, psychological, and technical perspective to express limitations, concerns, and possibilities. By splitting up the film into these three interlocking portions and bouncing between them through each differing technology that’s introduced (or revisiting one), Block and Riesewieck lay out a compelling story, even if it’s not a convincing reason to sell off one’s likeness, identity, or legacy for the sake of longevity.
The general format is simplistic, but effective. Start with a user who tells us their story (a lost love or loved one), observe them using the tool, listen to them talk about how it makes them feel, and potentially talk to someone else or a gathering of relatives about the process itself. By centering the users, audiences are given a chance to see several differing situations in which someone might be compelled — via extreme emotional states — to use a product that would generate a facsimile interaction. None of the featured participants are presented in a negative light, each one struggling in unique ways to their loss and seeing the respective technologies that they use as a means to remain connected to that person. One can easily sympathize with an individual struggling with the loss of a child, a fiancée, or a parent, and can see the allure of a digital replacement. Considering the sheer quantity of Frankenstein-esque tales that caution the creation of digital life (AfrAId, being a recent example) or that utilize simulated lifeforms as a new minority class stand-in (The Animatrix; Mars Express), the creation of a subclass of existence via A.I. feels like tempting fate by those who should know better; yet, despite all this, there’s something soft in the presentation of the users so that the audience doesn’t condemn anyone who might make use of this tech. Based on what we see in the film, there are plenty of individuals for whom this tech is not only alluring but is tech that they’re actively using, an indication that whatever one might think of A.I. currently, its use far extends that what we imagine or think we know.
A scene from documentary ETERNAL YOU. Photo courtesy of Film Movement.
From these users’ experiences, the filmmakers then transition to the companies and their representatives. Project December, we learn, is a text-based interaction program that enables a user to talk with the dead; HereAfter.ai, another service, introduces users to a virtual biographer who then takes the prompt answers and constructs an interactive A.I. with a digitally-constructed voice to sound like the person being replicated; and You, Only Virtual (YOV) that incorporates text, video, and audio to manifest a loved one within your life. These are only three of the companies and their representatives (Project December co-founder Jason Rohrer, HereAfter.ai founder Zahaib Ahmed, and YOV founder Justin Harrison) with more included, their words and snippets of their work intercut with portions of ChatGPT founder Sam Altman’s 2023 congressional testimony with a U.S. Senate committee. These segments are meant to give audiences insight into the intentions, often altruistic, of these engineers and developers, their desire to fix something within themselves combining with their technological knowhow to create their respective works. We spend the least amount of time with Ahmed and HereAfter.ai compared to Project December, YOV, and other companies presented in the doc, but one thing becomes clear as these individuals speak. They are passionate and committed to crossing the divide between life and death via the digital space. The filmmakers don’t dive deeply into the negative space of the founders’ words, examining the dangers of giving the rights of one’s entire life over to a private company, of one turning a person into product, but it’s brought up enough by the contextualizers that hesitation should form as to what’s at stake when humanity tries to transcend the mortal coil by opting for a life of ones and zeros.
If the sense that Block and Riesewieck want audiences thinking about their own feelings on possibly entertaining the digital space wasn’t clear from these two parts, the cinematography absolutely will. Rather than using standard landscape shots with titles to let audiences know where exactly they are in the world, the filmmakers leave off any specific title cards and merely enable Bergmann and Waldmann’s work to set the scene instead. Sometimes it’s a wide shot of a metropolitan city during the day or a midrange shot of a leafless tree in a dry area with the night sky as the backdrop, each one placed before us in such a manner as to question whether what we see is grounded in reality or given so much clarity in the image as to blur into hyperreality. If the visual language isn’t clear enough for you, there’s not only an overheard drone shot that transforms a cemetery with its headstones and plot markers into a green-backed set of em dashes and spaces akin to morse code or, if you will, ones and zeroes in programming. Later, in what one can presume is Korea based on the user and business, the extended look at the series of repeated complexes implies a mechanical-like repetition that the user already resides within. In this way, the breaks between users, creators, and Altman testimony carry forward the thematic bridges of natural and digital by capturing the ways in which the world appears to already function in such a manner where a bridge exists and is ready to carry users over. However, despite this visual element working handily to support the conversation taking place between user and creator, the filmmakers incorporate a final component that solidifies the dangers of A.I. as discussed within the film.
A scene from documentary ETERNAL YOU. Photo courtesy of Film Movement.
Again, the filmmakers don’t pass judgements directly, enabling the words that each interviewee/subject provide to stand on their own, leaving the only questions or challenges occurring from the various experts gathered to create modern context for the tech, as well as current social-norms. This matters because the contextualizers are experts in the fields of technology, sociology, psychology, and history — elements often chided for being part of the humanities programs that are currently being devalued within the U.S. but are instrumental in critical thinking. It’s not enough to know that technology exists, we need to know how it’s going to impact things, as well. Block and Riesewieck don’t get into the environmental concerns, power needs, or anything else, opting instead to use the contextualizers to address what might not seem obvious to those whose grief inspired the creation of or the use of an A.I.-based life: does it help someone move on or does it hold them in place? Additionally, from the capitalist side of things, the issue of emotional manipulation of such a program/service is addressed, for what happens when the avatar of your child, lover, parent, or friend tells you that if you don’t keep subscribing, they’re going to be lost forever? This speaks to the ways in which grief never really goes away, but subsides in strength over time, yet would be unable to do so in a world where death isn’t the final destination but the first transition point to a digital existence. By providing context for the seemingly altruistic beliefs of the creators, the audience is offered a much-needed perspective regarding the dangers of this new horizon and why one should reconsider what it means to hand yourself — your words, your voice, your visage — to a company when some things are meant to be lost to time.
In terms of achievable goals, it’s hard to tell if Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck are in favor of or against this use of A.I.. That the film doesn’t get into the issue of intellectual property theft as it relates to all A.I. datasets (glibly glossed over by the Project December founder as “using the internet”) who skim the internet to create words and images for use in a variety of text- and video-based projects that are constructed via prompts is a massive frustration, but it’s not a deal-breaker because that’s an audience issue, not a filmmaker one. Specifically, their intent seems to be information sharing, to make one aware of what this burgeoning use of A.I. is, what it can do, and what it means to use it. On that, it’s a successful and engaging feature. From this reviewer’s perspective, let’s hope it serves as a cautionary tale rather than an encouraging one. Signing over the likeness of your loved one just so you can engage with them again — is that the best way to keep their memory alive? To sign them over to a private organization who simply sees them as a new dataset to improve their product? That’s not a real legacy or tangible memorial, no matter how alive its programming may seem.
Available on VOD and digital January 24th, 2025.
For more information, head to the official Film Movement Eternal You webpage.
Final Score: 4 out of 5.
Leave a Reply