This world-tilting Storyville documentary examines an industry dedicated to creating realistic avatars of loved ones, so the bereaved can communicate with them. It’s beautifully balanced – and highly alarming
All that work, all that talent, all that incredible brain and computing power, and it’s being concentrated on providing the world with nothing more than a higher, more powerfully terrible form of that old fortune teller’s skill, cold reading – extrapolating from a person’s tiniest behavioural clues to produce apparently unknowable information about them.
Eternal You is a 100-minute dive into the cold and murky waters of the digital afterlife industry. To those of you blessedly unfamiliar with this phenomenon – as I was before I watched this world-tilting, mind-galvanising film – there are companies dedicated to using AI to create convincing avatars of dead people. The whole of internetted human history is crunched, including whatever digital footprint left by the deceased, plus whatever details the bereaved care to add and then, for a small sum, loved ones can communicate once again with the departed.
