It is entirely possible that by next year’s Sundance someone will have taken what they saw at this year’s festival in “Eternal You” and turn it into the premise of a midnight movie, but Hans Block and Moritz Wiesewieck have made something that may be all the more chilling in showing a journalistic distance. After making “The Cleaners,” which profiled those with the thankless task of comment moderation on social media sites and the profit built on the backs of those exposed to the worst that the internet has to offer, the filmmakers threw themselves into similarly troubling territory over the past six years to make a film that now seems ready to meet the cultural moment. With concerns about how artificial intelligence will reshape society now being raised following the introduction of ChatGPT that put the world on notice about the most basic yet impressive abilities of the technology, Block and Wiesewieck already find a disturbing new marketplace with plenty of eager developers looking to capture a majority share with AI that can give clients the ability to reconnect with their deceased loved ones based on what personal data they left behind, whether in voice recordings or text-based communication that could reflect their voice.
At first, “Eternal You” appears to be telling a story in which the tech could make people’s lives easier, allowing the bereaved to come to terms with a death by opening up conversations with an avatar where nothing can be left unsaid. However, beyond the ethics of raising the dead virtually, they find that with tech that hasn’t yet been refined entirely, there is the devastating potential for the avatar of a loved one to send the grieving into a spiral of uncertainty if they say the wrong thing, recounting events they never actually experienced or sharing feelings that they have no basis to express. In taking just one potential AI based product, the co-directors raise major questions about the whole enterprise, meeting early clients and developers alike that only have the faintest idea of where the technology will lead, though already there are more and more sophisticated stand-ins for the dead, from conversations mined from old e-mail exchanges to virtual reality recreations that are all but tactile.
As unsettling as what “Eternal You” uncovers about the tech world governing themselves regarding AI, the film also becomes a revealing look at human nature when it considers what people will do to reconnect with those they miss dearly and what they will believe to give them any form of comfort. With the film making its premiere this week at Sundance, Block and Riesewieck graciously took the time to talk about catching a tiger by the tail for their bleeding edge documentary, figuring out what the technology might be capable of when its inventors might not yet know entirely and bringing the real world implications of a story taking place mostly inside computers into sharp relief.
How did this come about?
Moritz Riesewieck: In 2018, we discovered a website stating “[you could] become virtually immortal,” and we were like, “What?!?” First, we thought this is just a cheap scam. But we were curious enough to sign up for a waiting list and we got to meet the inventor of this technology, a fellow at MIT, so it seemed serious. But the technology wasn’t developed enough at that time, and he had disappointed his first clients. He told us he had a waiting list of about like 30,000 people, a lot of them in an existential crisis, [either] affected by death or had to die soon, and it was pretty disturbing to hear how he had to send them messages, [saying] “I promised too much, I’m not able to fulfill this dream yet.”
We kept on researching this industry, and it’s really an emerging technology. Now there are startups all around the globe. We found startups in Auckland, New Zealand, in the U.S., and in Europe and they all share a similar idea to make people digitally immortal by using their digital data. Obviously, we leave behind a lot of data nowadays — our text messages, our search data, our social media data, sending voice messages, and our visuals by using, for example, Zoom — so you can easily imagine how much data these companies can actually use with what customers provide them and we found it all the more fascinating how far they can go in simulating the personalities of people by simulating the communication of people. The last step in all of this was the huge progress in AI, which happened two years ago [which] started with GPT and it became so good in imitating words and humor and how people give empathy, so it’s really impressive now how much similarity it produces to real people.
As you allude to, it’s a sensitive moment for these tech companies when the products are quite impressive, but likely not where they need to be yet. Was it difficult to get as much access as you did?
Hans Block: That’s a very big plus of our film that we managed to accompany the first users of these completely new technologies, looking their first steps in using these kinds of technologies and in doing so, I think we have captured a historic moment. As Moritz mentioned, it’s really an epocal change that we are capturing, the age of artificial intelligence, which will continue to spread at rapid speed in the coming years and presents us with social challenges. That’s why we did the film — to raise the question what benefits, but also dangerous harm this technology can bring us. So it was hard to get in contact with some of these inventors because they are very skeptical about us and some of them knew that we did “The Cleaners,” [which was] also a very tech-critical film, so we needed to build a relationship of trust and come back to them again and again and ask them, “Hey, can we have an interview together?” In the end, it looks like it was easy, but it wasn’t. It took us six years to make the film and with some of them, we had a very long relationship to get to the point to film these intimate situations with them. But this is also what we could do with “The Cleaners.”
Speaking of looking easy now, but it probably wasn’t, the film has a very organic structure, starting out with a single user that grows to speak to all the companies in race to capture the market for this technology. Was it difficult to keep focus?
Moritz Riesewieck: That was exactly the challenge, and it was really important for us to observe the first users of this technology in the moments when when they [first] interact with the simulations of the loved ones because we were really curious to see the effects firsthand it has on them to hear the voice of a deceased person again first time or to learn something so disturbing, like [one person’s late partner telling them] “I’m in hell.” These are unbelievably existential moments of somebody, if you learn some something like this about a loved person [from an AI simulation]. So at the core of it, we really wanted to know what dramatic change it means to use this technology for us humans in terms of how we deal with death. It’s a massive change.
The promise behind this technology is you don’t actually have to deal with the fact that somebody is gone. You don’t have to accept that fact. You can still interact with that person. You can carry this person in your pocket. You can receive messages by this person from beyond. So how do deal how do people deal with this? It’s an open heart experiment we observed and it was always our goal to connect these very personal, very intimate, very direct observational moments with the discussion around it, and also the controversial positions of the makers in terms of what kind of responsibility they believe they have or not. We were proud, for example, about the connection between Jason Rohrer, the inventor of Project December and his point of view on the experiences of [those] using his platform, and how much he was convinced not to have any responsibility for the effects it has on them.
Hans Block: And it took us a while to find the right narrative. We had the privilege to work with two beautiful editors Lisa Geretschlager and Anne Jünemann and we had two teams editing [at the] same time on the same film, which made it possible to test a lot of different narratives for the film. To be honest, we started by believing in we had just one character and we filmed this character over a few years, so we’d have one story arc about one person. The film was called “Eternal Me” at the beginning and our focus was much more on the the people who’d like to become immortal themselves. But then after a while, this person didn’t feel strong enough [as a subject] to carry us through the whole film, and we [also] found it much more complex and interesting to capture the stories of the ones living on with the avatar [of the deceased where] maybe it’s not so narcissistic that “I want to live on forever. It’s much more we cannot say goodbye,” and we’d [identify] this problem many of us have to not let go. We also decided, “Okay, we need to also include the inventors of the technology, and after a while, we decided maybe we needed a third perspective, a more neutral, expert perspective commenting on what we are seeing. So it was really a process and we were surprised at the end at what we accomplished. We had enough time to do that. That is really a big privilege.
Like “The Cleaners,” this is quite dynamic visually in spire of a subject that doesn’t lend itself to that when unfolding on computers. It looks like you may have gotten some help from Jason, whose hobby of flying drones looks like it was folded into the picture, but what was it like to keep it lively in that sense?
Moritz Riesewieck: Yeah, we believe that [the drones are] such a good characterization of him. His main interest is to play around with this new technology and he was one of the first people to experiment with generative AI and he has a background in game development, so we actually tried to find an image that allows us to capture this personality while at the same time, also have a visual landscape where we could then add these more ethical or philosophical questions on top. This snow moment [where the drone ends up nearly flying in his face], and the fun they have with the drone was actually the perfect combination of both of this playfulness on one hand, but also the opportunity to reflect on the philosophical aspects of it.
Hans Block: On “The Cleaners,” we had the same challenges [because] the digital phenomena is often very difficult to observe [when a lot of it] seemingly doesn’t manifest itself physically. We don’t want to do a film with just people sitting in front of screens all the time, but we had two very talented [cinematographers] Tom Berkman and Conrad Waldman, [who] did a very good job in capturing all that.
This film is on the bleeding edge where you included congressional panels late last year and there’s seemingly a new development regarding AI on a weekly basis. How could you keep focus when the temptation must’ve been there to keep adding onto it?
Moritz Riesewieck: We were post-production and in color grading [when] we got the news Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI, and we [thought], “Oh no. Now we have to change all the inserts because it said CEO of OpenAI,” and maybe we need to include this news in the film because it’s actually quite interesting that somebody who was so straightforward with his ideas and his dreams about where to bring an autonomous AI was fired. But we decided, we actually would not include that and we were lucky because the next day, it was old news — he was CEO of this company again, so you can see the huge [changing] dynamics in this industry and how much money is in there, how important it is for these companies to be accepted by the general public and how important the image they have in the public and the narratives they want to spread are, so they can make profit of these narratives.
It’s our duty as filmmakers to always question those narratives, and we hope that we were able to, while observing the fascination towards this technology, always questioning whenever they use the term “sacrificing rhetoric,” for example, that it’s not a living being on the other side. It’s not human-like intelligence, it’s something else and we should never underestimate the impact it can have on our societies and on us as humans if we accept this narrative and if we diminish ourselves by believing all that.
Hans Block: And we hope to achieve what we did with “The Cleaners” with this film, [which is that it] will find its way to the politicians and that we open a discussion, not just for the audience here at the Sundance Film Festival, but all around the world and for policymakers to reflect on what harm this technology can bring to every one of us. Hopefully, this will open a debate about that and this is the power of filmmaking at the end, that a very abstract, very complicated topic can emerge into a very concrete and emotional human film and to really see what are the consequences.
“Eternal You” will screen again at the Sundance Film Festival on January 22nd at 5:45 pm at the Broadway Centre Cinemas 6 in Salt Lake City and January 25th at 1:45 pm at the Holiday Village Cinemas 1 in Park City. It will also be available to stream from January 25th through 28th.
