“Beautifully balanced and highly alarming.” That’s how Lucy Magan from The Guardian described the 2024 documentary titled Eternal You.[i] The 86-minute film examines the emerging industry selling services that allow a person to communicate with a realistic avatar of a loved one following their death. Both industry and film critics think the documentary raises deep questions about ethics, beliefs, and what happens when the human hope of immortality becomes just one more commercial product.
How It Works
When a person signs up for one of the advertised services, the company requests information about the deceased. Lists of what the person liked and disliked, their favorite activities, emails, and audio files are welcomed. With those, the company creates an AI avatar, which can eventually chat and communicate with the bereaved person.
According to technology critic and industry analyst Sarah M. Watson, who was interviewed for Eternal You, if a person asks the system, “How was your weekend?” “the system is going to go back and imagine how every single person in the entire history of the world has talked about weekends.” Then, she added, “it’s going to filter that through, maybe, how this deceased relative has previously talked about weekends to give you the output of what that person might have said if they were still alive.”
There are now companies that have gone global, selling users full “digital afterlife” packages. Some of them allow you to send videos to your deceased loved ones, and some others create avatars of the dead person so they can talk and interact with their users.
Other companies offer making “a copy of you, so you can talk to your kids forever.” And major companies, including Microsoft and Amazon, have already filed patents related to digital afterlife. Investors in these kinds of ventures include Spotify, Zoom, and DeepMind, among many others. And then there are those who promise to humanize computers to achieve better humanity. The hope is that humans can eventually interact with “avatars, which may be autonomous, and whose memories are actually created through interaction with the world.”
“Technology is becoming increasingly immersive,” said Carl Öhman, researcher on the digital afterlife industry, when interviewed for Eternal You. “And just as it makes the emotional impact stronger, it also makes the moral implications stronger.”
“Conscious Entities Lurking”
Eternal You shares the experience of some of those who are using their “digital technology afterlife” services, telling what the users’ hopes and fears are.
Joshua is a young man who chats for hours with the digital simulation of his deceased first girlfriend. He shared how he was so impressed when in their first interaction she would “say things that were almost uncannily like her.” One time Joshua ended up falling asleep next to his laptop. When he woke up hours later, Jessica’s last comment was still there, patiently waiting for his reaction. “It really felt like a gift, like a weight had been lifted,” Joshua shared.
Joshua used software provided by Project December, which connects you to a computer system, said its founder, Jason Rohrer. “As you interact with it, you slowly discover that there are some conscious entities lurking in there, that you can talk to through text.”
Rohrer shared that in the model his project developed, they work with a very small amount of information. With a few quotes and analyzing the way Jessica used to text and talk, she suddenly “came to life,” he said. And when reading the transcripts, people make a shocking discovery. The system “seems to have linguistic intelligence about things that were not definitely in the text that it studied,” Rohrer said. He added, “There’s essentially some kind of magic happening here. . . . We crossed this threshold where suddenly this emergent behavior happens where we can’t really explain it anymore.”
The Experiment Goes Awry
Christi felt attracted to the technology as a way of connecting with her deceased best friend. “AI texts like him,” she shared after trying the product. “The vernacular, the shortened words. Why would they know that?”
But Christi’s experience began to unravel when she tried to know more about the “place” where her friend was, and his answers left her unsettled. “What’s it like where you are?” she asked him through the program.
“It’s dark and lonely,” he answered.
“What kind of people have you met?” she insisted.
“Mostly addicts,” he answered.
“In heaven?” she pressed on.
“Nope, in hell,” he answered.
This and other similar exchanges, where “her friend” told her he was still on earth, going around haunting people, and would eventually haunt her, left Christi deeply distressed. She felt even worse when, in the depth of her despair, the system alerted her that she had only three responses left unless she paid more. After her ordeal, Christi became so scared that she could not talk about her experience for months.
After the company presumably tweaked its algorithms, Christi, however, felt confident enough to try again.
“Are you still in hell?” she asked the machine.
“No, I am not in hell anymore. I am in a better place, now,” it answered.
“Yes!” she replied. “That’s what I needed to hear!”
Promise of an Afterlife
“Artificial intelligence promises us what religion does: You don’t have to die; you can be somehow reborn someplace else, in a different form,” explains psychologist and sociologist Sherry Turkle in the documentary. “There’s meaning in technology that people no longer feel in their religious beliefs or in their relationships with other people. . . . It has become a kind of modern form of transcendence.”
When interviewed for Eternal You, Justin Harrison, founder of a company focused on the digital afterlife, gives away the game (besides its obvious profit-making goal). “I want to be part of pushing human society to the place of, well, just because your body isn’t here anymore doesn’t mean you’re gone,” he said. “[Death] is a current reality, and I believe we can change that reality.”
A Biblical Answer
Someone who believes in the Bible would probably have a hard time choosing from so many verses that they could easily quote to respond to these new developments. There’s of course the first lie ever told on this earth by the serpent to Adam and Eve in Genesis 3, “You will not surely die” (verse 4), and God’s prohibition of calling up the dead (Deut. 18:11).
There’s also the tragic example of King Saul in 1 Samuel 28:3-25, as he tried to communicate with one whom he very well knew could never be the deceased prophet Samuel. (The way the apparition “went rogue” and ended up being the cause of profound distress for Saul is eerily similar to Christi’s experience described above.) And certainly the clear Bible teaching that “the dead know nothing” (Eccl. 9:5), that “in death there is no remembrance of [God]” (Ps. 6:5), and that a person who dies “shall never return to his house, nor shall his place know him anymore” (Job 7:10).
From the New Testament we could quote Jesus’ words in Matthew 24:5: “For many will come in My name, saying, ‘I am the Christ,’ and will deceive many.” Or even what Paul anticipated about the end of times, when some would “depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons” (1 Tim. 4:1), which certainly includes the idea that you can communicate with dead people in the first place.
Beyond the Obvious
At the same time, after watching the Eternal You documentary a couple of times—incidentally, a documentary that I found very balanced in reporting on alleged pros and cons of digital afterlife technologies—an additional insight came clearly into view. It is based on what I think is the utter foolishness of searching for enduring meaning in a technologically mediated human creation.
Even if machines could eventually develop their own consciousness and manage to express their own feelings, as some hope, they would never be fully independent from their creators, just as those of us who believe in the Bible acknowledge we are never fully independent from ours. And without a moral compass provided by Someone beyond us, the promises of digital afterlife could be just another iteration of a great human idea marred by our own brokenness and thus bound to facilitating our self-destruction (dynamite and atomic energy come to mind as forerunners of this pernicious trend).
At the end of the day, believing God and His promise that He will “swallow up death forever” (Isa. 25:8) requires faith in Someone who is not the creation of anyone else. But it’s a faith, the Bible tells us, that is firmly grounded. It’s a hope that, unlike the technological concoctions of the digital afterlife, “does not disappoint” (Rom. 5:5).
No other model—AI or not—can come even close.
[i] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2024/oct/29/storyville-eternal-you-review-film-dead. For information about the documentary, see https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30320493/.
