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Would you resurrect a dead loved one with AI, asks a new documentary

The extraordinary film Eternal You probes the power of "grief technologies" – boosted by AI – to generate credible simulations of the dead, says Simon Ings

17 July 2024

Dogwoof handout film still: Eternal You — Reanimating the dead to digital “life” raises tricky ethical questions
Konrad Waldmann/Dogwoof Films

Eternal You
Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck
Selected cinemas, UK and Ireland

WOULD you want to talk to a dead loved one? The new film Eternal You explores “grief technologies” that set out to reanimate the dead by feeding data they generated in life to large language models (LLMs), a form of artificial intelligence. This superb documentary is also a timely warning about who owns our data when we die and why this matters.

For years, Joshua Barbeau grieved for his fiancée Jessica. Then he found a…

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