This year's Sundance played host to the premiere of the new documentary by German directors Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck. Eternal You [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Hans Block, Moritz Riesewi…
scheda film] talks about a whole evolving branch of software using artificial intelligence to create programs that deal with the afterlife. We spoke to the directors about the opportunities and the perils of it.

Cineuropa: How did the journey of this film begin?
Hans Block: It's a long journey that started six years ago, in 2018. We found a webpage that offered users the chance to become virtually immortal. We tried to find out who the guy behind it was, and he was a fellow at MIT. The idea was to use all of our social-media data and our WhatsApp conversations, compile it all and use it to create a digital avatar of ourselves that would live on after we pass away. At that time, we were on a waiting list with thousands of other people, and there was no finished product at the end. So he played with the hopes, the desires and the longings of thousands of people, but the technology wasn't even ready yet. But of course, it was a serious tech trend, as startups all around the world were offering such services. One huge market, the market of digital immortality, was their goal. We knew we needed to track that.

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Moritz Riesewieck: At the same time, we also found studies stating that, especially in Western Europe, people are tending to turn away from religion. That, of course, also had consequences for the idea of an afterlife. Because when people are not religious any more, they don't believe in an afterlife with God. Does that mean that people are ok with the fact that if you die, you just disappear? We found that's not the case. People have a strong need for a new story of salvation. This story of salvation is now delivered in a more secular way, by tech companies. And they found the perfect entity for that: artificial intelligence. Because it's sort of an entity you can project so much onto that it sometimes becomes kind of godlike. We don't quite get how it works. It's bigger than us humans. This is a rhetoric you usually get from religion, with gods and superpowers.

While you were working on this film, did your opinion of the character and the use of technology change?
HB: Our perspective changed a lot. When we started, we were very critical and thought this was another way of exploiting real people through industry. And of course, there is something in that. But after we met a lot of users of these new technologies, we understood that many people had a serious longing: they are looking for something that is not there in our culture any more. We don't know how to deal with death. Maybe at some point, we will be in the same situation, looking for something like that. But on the other hand, of course, we need the right framework for all these services. They do not take the proper responsibility for all the consequences that the use of this service could entail.

MR: In the beginning, we couldn't have imagined that an intelligent person could actually fall for it, because you know where the data stems from, you know more or less how it works, and you know that it's only a computer, a simulation – and so on. How can anybody believe that there is a living being on the other side? I think that was something that surprised us: that people with this clear way of thinking, still at the moment they were pulled into the conversation, really fell for it. And we always believed that could never happen to us. The AI knows how to trick you.

Responsibility is a key word in this context. There is one character in your film who declines all responsibility for his software. Was it difficult to face these kinds of statements?
MR: It was interesting for us to have a very open discussion with him.

HB: We say in our film that we don't think it is right. There are real people out there using that kind of service. Some may feel tricked by the machine. We included all of the moral and ethical implications that we came across during the research for the film. Still, we think it's important to show people like our protagonist, who declines all responsibility, since he is not the only one with this responsibility. And some of these people are very powerful, creating things and bringing them onto the market without testing them rigorously enough. And that's dangerous.