Struggling with the digital afterlife: AI, mortality, and finances

The advancement of artificial intelligence holds the potential to offer the choice of evading death by accurately replicating our personalities, memories, and aspirations, thereby preserving our existence even after our physical forms cease to exist. However, as AI continues to progress at a rapid pace, raising the possibility of achieving digital immortality, it raises the question of whether this development will bring about positive or negative consequences.

“Eternal You” and “Love Machina,” two new documentaries that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this weekend, wrestle with that question and explore AI’s relationship to death from very different angles.

One explores how predatory AI startups are taking advantage of the vulnerability of already lost customers, exploiting their desperation to “talk” to avatars of their dead loved ones beyond the grave.

“Eternal You” opens with a woman sitting at a computer writing messages to her dead partner, who replies that she’s afraid.

“Why are you scared?” He asks.

“I’m not used to being dead,” the avatar replies.

Directors Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck first came across a handful of startups offering the ability to talk to dead loved ones back in 2018.

At first wondering if it was a cheap scam, the couple told how technology soon caught up with marketing and the industry has exploded.

“I would say there are now thousands of services around the world that offer these kinds of services,” Riesewieck said.

“And of course Microsoft is partnering with ChatGPT with OpenAI, and Amazon was also looking at what these startups are doing… it’s only a matter of time.”

Customers upload information about their partner, parent or child, such as text messages and voice memos, which AI uses to tailor responses.

The filmmakers found compassion for the customers after hearing their tragic tales of woe.

Western society is terrible at dealing with grief, they said, and technology can seem to fill the gap left by religion for many.

However, the services can often be very addictive.

And many companies are happy to profit from this dependency and absolve themselves of responsibility for the dependency and the confusion they can cause.

In some cases, the AI programs even go off the rails or “hallucinate” by telling loved ones that they are trapped in hell, threatening to harass them or even abuse them with harsh language.

“It’s definitely an open-hearted experiment. We’re not entirely convinced that companies are taking responsibility as they should,” Riesewieck said.

“These people are in a particularly vulnerable position.”

– ‘Love Story’ –

The second film, “Love Machina”, begins with a futuristic love story that explores how two soul mates use artificial intelligence to keep their romance alive for thousands of years.

Director Peter Sillen follows eccentric SiriusXM founder Martine Rothblatt as she builds an AI-powered humanoid robot out of her partner Bina.

First introduced in 2009, “Bina48” is a semi-realistic, talking bust physically modeled after the real Bina’s head and shoulders, programmed with huge “mind files” of her speech patterns, opinions and memories.

Martine and Bina hope to eventually transfer their consciousness back into a “reformed biological body” to stay together forever.

“We ended up with their love story … because that’s kind of the basis of the whole story,” Sillen said.

“That’s the motivation for what they do.”

But during filming, Bina48’s software received major upgrades using the broad-language ChatGPT template, and now answers all questions with eerie verisimilitude – and in a way, duplicity.

“Yes, I’m the real Bina Rothblatt. I remember a lot about my old human life,” she tells one interviewer in one alarming scene.

“It’s different than what Bina48 would have said without ChatGPT,” Sillen recalled. “I had never heard him say that.”

– “Too much power” –

Although the films offer different perspectives, their filmmakers told AFP that these are questions we all urgently need to address.

“We have to define where the line is,” said Block.

“There’s too much money to be made, too much power to be taken,” Sillen admitted.

“The average person doesn’t think about this every day… This isn’t the number one priority, but it really needs to be.”

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