“NOLI me tangere” — “Don’t touch me.” Our risen Lord’s injunction to Mary Magdalene was appallingly parodied in Eternal You: Storyville (BBC4, Tuesday of last week). Not least among the hubristic excesses of artificial intelligence (AI) are the attempts to recreate the departed, enabling grieving loved ones to “reconnect” with them across the barrier of death.
Just take a relatively small amount of actual material — recordings, phone messages, the record of online preferences which nowadays we leave with every email and purchase — from the deceased. Stir it into the mix of the database of common human interaction already amassed by AI, available for whatever purpose it requires, to produce a simulacrum of an individual adequate enough to fool mourners into thinking that they are having an online conversation with them. For a fee, of course: it’s a 21st-century way to make money from grief.
The “conversations” are banal in the extreme: “Are you happy?” “Yes.” Unsurprisingly, they add nothing to our theological understanding of life beyond the grave. How could they, because, for all the protestations of the tech wizards who invent them, these programs are human constructs, and the algorithms that run the software, however subtle, are tainted by both the inventors’ presuppositions and the kind of thing that they know that their clients will pay good money to read.
More complex (more expensive) versions can now simulate the very voice of the deceased. But, worst of all, Korean TV broadcast a mother, Jang Ji-sung, reaching out to embrace the AI-constructed avatar — apparently three-dimensional, moving, talking just as she did — of her beloved dead little daughter. Of course, in her grief and love, she was clawing desperately at empty air. AI seriously blurs distinctions of what is “real”; and yet, despite our brilliance, we can’t create people to hold on to.
Does the Hallowe’entide drama Generation Z (Channel 4, Sundays from 27 October) cheat death? A top-secret chemical spillage infects care-home residents, reviving their adolescent vigour and lusts — as long as they devour living flesh and drink fresh blood. The young, far less affected, are particularly prized victims. Despite invoking significant themes — society’s disdain for the elderly, malign government cover-ups — it’s a deeply unpleasant gorefest, pushing all the wrong buttons.
The many plotlines of the crime series Showtrial (BBC1, Sundays from 13 October) are hopelessly over-egged, but its two central characters are extraordinarily powerful. Adeel Akhtar’s grief-stricken at-the-end-of-his-tether solicitor defends Michael Socha’s brilliant and infuriating anger-fuelled police officer accused of murdering a climate-change activist. Both offer performances of commanding depth and complexity.