Premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, “Eternal You” is a documentary that explores the emerging (and slightly unsettling) business of “thanabots” (thanatology meets robotics), where AI models are trained to resurrect those who’ve shuffled off this mortal coil.
In the movie, Christi Angel uses Project December, an AI chatbot, to communicate with a significant other who had passed away. Where is this person? The AI answered: “In hell.” This, as you can imagine, was not the response she was expecting.
Jason Rohrer, the brain behind Project December, seems to have a taste for the macabre. He says AI’s narrative possibilities – especially ones that “give you goosebumps” – intrigue him because he “likes goosebumps.”
However, experts are waving red flags about the psychological impact of these digital séances. It turns out that chatting with an AI version of your late loved one might be more harmful than healing.
That said, I can easily imagine the educational potential here. I’ve built a few GPTs that embody the knowledge (and assumed personality) of famous scientists, philosophers, and historical figures for my students to explore. It would be fascinating to create an AI version of Stephen Hawking and discuss theoretical physics with it, but you’d have to deeply understand (and communicate) such an app’s limitations to the users. It’s one thing to build an edutainment app; resurrecting a loved one is something else entirely.
Are you ready to create and interact with a thanabot of a deceased loved one?
Author’s note: This is not a sponsored post. I am the author of this article and it expresses my own opinions. I am not, nor is my company, receiving compensation for it. This work was created with the assistance of various generative AI models.