25/04/2024 - German documentarians Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck survey a world where AI will bring your loved ones back to life

If you can dream it, can you will it to be? In this decade of the 2020s, defined by artificial intelligence’s looming influence on our lives, a bunch of tech boffins have acquired godlike powers of animation, specifically for imitating the deceased. With Eternal You [+see also:
interview: Hans Block, Moritz Riesewieck
film profile], Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck – who previously made The Cleaners [+see also:
trailer
film profile], another study of cutting-edge tech – have alighted on several of these potentially dangerous mavericks, notably all working in the Pacific locales of the San Francisco Bay Area, New Zealand and South Korea. It premiered in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at Sundance and is due to screen imminently at Hot Docs.

Akin to a visual transposition of a print feature, rather than being anything truly immersive, Eternal You is nonetheless quite rigorous and informative, even achieving some emotional resonance as it muses on the abiding question of how we cope with loss. Moral judgement and more-than-grey areas are happily at the forefront: the aforementioned founders and developers are united in their vision of AI’s socially beneficial and curative function, whilst still coldly dedicated to the breakthrough of manufacturing a synthetic, life-like new being. OpenAI’s ChatGPT (referenced here by way of founder Sam Altman’s recent appearance before US congress) has been prized for its credible tone of voice and stunningly informative answers; the likes of Project December’s Jason Rohrer and YOV’s Justin Harrison want to make their large language models, as they’re known, indistinguishable from a WhatsApp message exchange with a loved one, were they still with us.

Eschewing now doc-ubiquitous drone shots, Block and Riesewieck still make effective use of aerial and otherwise high angles in their establishing shots, or “setting the scene”-type footage, as wide perspectives on cityscapes and suburban sprawl, underscored with metallic-textured drone music, set an expectedly paranoid tone. In structural terms, each “creator” they follow is given a segment of the running time, following a crisp talking-head format where Rohrer and the like will outline their product and philosophy, in a friendly yet somehow suspicious manner, followed by testimonies from early adopters and trialists, themselves equally grieving and naive.

In one chat exchange, Christi, a devoutly Christian user of Project December, finds her late boyfriend Cameroun claiming, “I am in hell.” That cyber-Cameroun bears only the slightest resemblance to the real thing finally shatters the trust of this end user, similar to others like her; the viewer and the filmmakers themselves would be sceptical from the off, but we are allowed the space to be belatedly convinced and amazed by what this technology can do. The potential for exploitation is rife and fully accounted for by the film: it explores how these products can take advantage of the dead and the living, interlinking them but with the added barrier of a paywall and subscription fee.

The New Zealand-based Soul Machines and the Korean reality show Meeting You further prioritise the physical aspects, with the former’s founder, Mark Sagar, moving past mere language to create a “digital nervous system”, determining the somatic responses of his very creepy “Baby X” – who himself has the shiny skin and stuttering movement of video-game graphics. Eternal You will take the topical “AI” programme slot at many doc festivals to come, yet it’s eminently necessary, with ethical questions on the technology’s role in the film and TV industry already being overlooked.

Eternal You is a production by Germany and the USA, staged by Gebrüder Beetz Filmproduktion and Motto Pictures. Its international sales are handled by Dogwoof.