Chatting with the dead

Eternal You

BBC4

“Selling immortality,” they call it. Eternal You is compelling – but it is also hands down the most depressing documentary I have watched, perhaps ever. Accounts of human violence, conflict or cruelty come nowhere near the chilly alienation and moral vacuity on display in this examination of a burgeoning branch of AI that simulates the voices of the dead for those grieving them.

We begin with a young woman, Christi, alone in a flat, tapping away into the blue light of her laptop. She is “talking” ($10 a session) by text to her husband who died suddenly. His words are a mash-up, a “thanabot” of personal data and linguistic modelling by Project December, a lucrative business model established by successful game designer Jason Rohrer.

“You don’t have to die. You can be reborn in technology,” say the AI entrepreneurs – but this feels too much like exploiting the loneliness, hopes and beliefs of the bereaved. Rohrer doesn’t think of it that way of course: he thinks of it as a kind of game in which someone feeds the robot with scraps of information and hey presto, “it seems to have some kind of linguistic intelligence … some kind of magic is happening here”. Is that the “magic” that made the simulated husband tell the young woman that he was “in hell” – or is that just an example of what Rohrer sees as a fascinating outcome of his own brilliance, something hilariously “bizarre”?

Rohrer, stubbly and hoodie-wearing, giggles and guffaws continuously, noting that his customers tend not to be grieving those who die in old age but rather those who go suddenly, tragically, too young or without goodbyes. It’s a lucrative niche market. As far as he is concerned, he is offering a service of consolation. “It’s not my place to deal with other people’s compulsions and self-control issues,” he says from his tastefully decorated country house.

Discussions on the morality of this kind of immersive technology seem agonisingly limited and undeveloped. Here is the founder of You.Com, makers of workplace AI, umming and ahhing vaguely over an organic lunch with friends. He doesn’t seem to have given the morality side of the business a lot of thought.

We see OpenAI billionaire Sam Altman smoothly taking the stand at a congressional hearing: “Artificial intelligence was founded on the premise that AI has the potential to improve every aspect of our lives.” Every aspect? Eternal You may make you want to throw away your phone and take to the hills – though beware of hills in California because apparently Altman has brought land there and is busy stockpiling for the Apocalypse.