'Ironheart' and the A.I. Zombification of the Dead
The Marvel series introduces the ethics of using A.I. avatars of loved ones to deal with grief.
*Spoilers for the plot of Ironheart season one*
Riri, you in danger, girl.
In the premiere episode of the new Marvel series Ironheart, the Black child prodigy Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) is suddenly thrust back into the unimaginable grief over her best friend Natalie’s death that she’d been avoiding. Picking up right after the events of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Ironheart begins with Riri being expelled from MIT and returning home to Chicago where her memories and pain over Natalie (Lyric Ross) and her step-father’s stray-bullet deaths are the loudest. By some unconscious fluke, Riri creates a generative A.I. hologram of her best friend, N.A.T.A.L.I.E.— a literal manifestation of her grief.
As Natalie was before her death, N.A.T.A.L.I.E. is Riri’s entire support system; it looks out for Riri, helps her brainstorm, gives her advice and literally saves her life on more than one occasion. It also jokes around and hangs out with Riri like Natalie would, making Riri feel like, in a real way, she’s got her friend back.
But as Natalie’s brother Xavier angrily points out to Riri, that thing is not Natalie. He prefers to remember his sister through making mixtapes of favorite songs and incorporating Natalie’s voice in them from voicemails that she’d left him. Because it’s really her. It’s what she really said to him. It’s how she really felt about him. It’s exactly what she wanted him to know. Riri’s generative A.I., on the other hand, is a caricature; a bastardization; an imitation of life; Worse—a zombification.
In Haitian mythology, the idea of what we now call zombies emerged from enslaved Africans’ deepest fear: not even death would bring freedom. Though suicide was common on the brutal French enslavers’ plantations, the enslaved feared that suicide would leave them trapped in their bodies — and on the plantations — forever.
Post-slavery and colonization in Haiti, the zombie myth became a part of the Haitian Vodou religion, evolving into corpses that bokors (Haitian vodou sorcerers) would exhume, reanimate, and exploit for the purpose of free labor. No rest for the weary, no peace for the dead — not when the living can still put them to work.
In 2021, just in time for Halloween, the estate of legendary singer Whitney Houston exhumed her likeness for a six-month Las Vegas residency at Harrah’s called An Evening With Whitney: The Whitney Houston Hologram Tour.
With no sense of irony, Base Hologram and the Houston estate describe the event as a “boundary-breaking hologram concert spectacle.” The 3D projection of Houston is accompanied by a live band, backup singers, dancers and “cinematic special effects.” As usual, it takes an army of humans to pull off this generative A.I. grift.
“You’ll swear Houston is actually on the stage,” raved Las Vegas Magazine. Yet Houston, who tragically died more than a decade ago, will obviously not be on stage. Hundreds of years after the end of slavery, Whitney became a corpse reanimated, to sing and dance for our entertainment. It’s straight out of the worst Black Mirror episode. It’s “musical necrophilia.” It’s undeniably “ghost slavery.”
But in Ironheart, Riri is not pimping N.A.T.A.L.I.E. out for money; she’s not trying to sell the tech, perhaps because she’s not even sure she knows how she created it. But the generated personality is doing a ton of free labor for Riri as her emotional support robot. Sure, N.A.T.A.L.I.E. goes rogue from time to time, as all of our robot revolution fables have warned us will happen, but in the end, all of its efforts are for its creator’s benefit—its master, if you will.
This isn’t uncommon in the MCU; Tony Stark had his A.I.; in way more ethically dubious circumstances, Wanda married, and then reanimated her robot Vision and procreated with him to boot. And maybe N.A.T.A.L.I.E. is not so different than other stories where a side character’s storyline totally revolves around the star. But at least the usual side characters are actual human beings whose life is assumed to continue on outside of the main character’s lens.
I’m certain this storyline (that’s straight from the comics, as well) wouldn’t bump me if N.A.T.A.L.I.E. were some bouncing paperclip spouting facts off in the margins of Riri’s vision. We ‘90s kids came of age conditioned to begrudgingly accept Clippy. But Natalie was a real Black girl. Thanks to Lyric Ross’ heartfelt performance, Natalie is clearly bigger and deeper and more expansive than Riri’s limited memories of her. She was more than Riri’s best friend and confidant. She undoubtedly had thoughts, desires and goals Riri may never have known about. In Riri’s grief—even with her initial trepidation about the robot she created—it seems she may not have completely understood that or have been willing to entertain the full consequences of it.
Riri’s mother wasn’t willing to either. When N.A.T.A.L.I.E. accidentally reveals herself, Ronnie is beyond thrilled by how much the A.I. looks and sounds like her daughter’s bff. In fact, she’s so impressed with what her daughter has done, she asks Riri to build an A.I. of her dead husband. Riri says no—mostly because she doesn’t know how. It made me wonder about what if any spiritual practices or beliefs they have as a Black family.
Where is the soul? Living beings are more than just the sound of their voices, the things they’d say and do, the clothes they would wear, the support they’d offer a single person. Living beings have a soul. And through our souls, we have ancient practices that can connect us—in joy, in grief—to each other, and to our ancestors on the other side.
Though, when most representations of Black Americans on screen are rooted in some form of Christianity, it is refreshing to see some variety. Riri is a scientist and engineer; she believes in what she can see and feel and build for herself. After my initial shock over her Black mom’s elation over N.A.T.A.L.I.E., it’s perhaps not as surprising that Riri’s initial lack of belief or interest in magic might have come not just from her grief experiences but from her mother’s.
It reminded me of the white male tech entrepreneur I saw on The Guardian’s YouTube last year talking about the A.I. version of his mother that he built after she died of cancer. “My goal has always remained, I wanted to continue to have conversations with my mother,” he tells the reporter about why he built the tech that would grow into a whole grief business. “What I would like to see is the complete and total eradication of grief,” he says. Hmm.
Far be it from me to judge how people grieve with the loss of their loved ones. But once methods of “healing” disregard the consent of the person being grieved—and destroys the environment, to boot—we’ve now got ourselves an all-hands-on-deck situation.
Everything has a cost, the magical Zelma (Regan Aliyah) tells Riri when they team up to make a magic-tech hybrid suit for Riri to fight the villainous Hood who’s been using bad magic to make himself stronger. To have some real, magical ass Black women and girls on the show, as well, in Zelma and her mother, Cree Summer’s Madeline, offers a range of Black girl genius, both spiritual and technological, that I’ve never seen in a Marvel production before. Though magic takes N.A.T.A.L.I.E. away from Riri, a sinister magic with steep consequences seems to give Natalie back to Riri in the end. But is this just another zombified version of Natalie? Can a life in a long-decomposing body be restored? And—most of all—why, magically or technologically, would Riri want to do this?
When asked why she makes an iron suit like Ironman’s Riri responds “because I can.” It’s supposed to mark her genius and separate her from the vast majority who could never. But it also feels very much like the rich white man’s ideology that she’s meant to be in direct contravention of as a not-rich Black teen girl. To quote Jurassic Park, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.”
Though she has good intentions for the suit and originally created it with the goal of saving lives, within 24 hours of her stumbling upon hard times, she’s agreeing to use that suit for crime. She’s complicit in shootings and even felony murder (when someone you’ve conspired to commit crimes with ends up committing murder in the course of that crime). All of this she’s doing to make enough money to pour back into her research for her tech. If enough people started asking her for their own version of a N.A.T.A.L.I.E. to manage their grief, and she needed the money badly enough, would she seek to figure out how to recreate and sell this technology? I’m not convinced that she wouldn’t. We see the immediate consequences of her use of bad magic to bring Natalie back in a literal deal with the devil. And perhaps it’s what comes of a short, six-episode season order, but the biggest flaw of Ironheart is the lack of Riri being forced to significantly grapple with the pursuit of tech at the expense of humanity—others and her own.
I never expected a white male billionaire war criminal like Tony Stark to really deal with the cost of tech on the most marginalized people—though he does eventually power his suit with emissions-free energy. Perhaps it’s unfair to expect a Black teen girl to have a community of people—at least a mom!—to check her on this and not just bow down to her genius.
But with the NAACP filing intent to sue Elon Musk for poisoning Black communities with his raggedy A.I. data centers—and the cost to Black people around the world, from America to Kenya, where the people who train the so-called self-operating A.I. are paid $2 slave wages an hour—I expected Riri to be faced with what her “genius” tech and her use of N.A.T.A.L.I.E. might also cost Black people in her community and the Diaspora. It may be a moot point now that it seems like the real Natalie is back in some form. But when children in Congo are dying in cobalt mines for the world to have the batteries that power basic laptops, smart phones and TVs, let alone “environmentally conscious tech,” this is an issue that will no doubt reoccur with Riri’s next A.I. invention. I would’ve loved to have seen Riri reckon with all of the ethical issues her tech invokes.
It’s bigger than perverting Natalie’s life and memory with a robot monstrosity that Riri only faces mild push back over before her love interest Xavier gives her a pass for it in the end. Especially because Black girls are the test dummies and victims of digital blackface in this new wave of A.I. generated social media “influencers” who appear as Black girls on screen, speaking ebonics and doing minstrel things like eating piles of chicken on a plate. We must wrestle with the fact that generative A.I. companies are not simply scraping the internet and stealing from real Black women’s and girls’ social media posts, but that there are also Black people who are willingly uploading their biometric data, their thoughts, their slang into these chatbots and other A.I. photo and video apps, contributing to our targeting and tech oppression. Or worse, in the case of Riri and Natalie, uploading someone else’s data. This was always going to be the next step.
Four years ago, embattled Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg changed his controversial company’s name to Meta to distract from the company’s toxic brand to better embody his plans for virtual and augmented reality technologies. Now, every brand and app, from Word to LinkedIn to Gmail, is forcing GenA.I. down our throats, trying to make us reliant on a product that literally no one asked for. Our tech overlords want these virtual technologies to not only be accessible to all, but for us to be so dependent on them that we don’t bother to think for ourselves, let alone write. It’s working. Not only does A.I. like ChatGPT destroy the environment, contribute to global warming, poison the communities of the most marginalized, and potentially drive people to suicide, it also rots your brain.
In a new MIT study of college students, “Researchers used an EEG to record the writers’ brain activity across 32 regions, and found that…ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and ‘consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.’ Over the course of several months, ChatGPT users got lazier with each subsequent essay, often resorting to copy-and-paste by the end of the study.”
These can’t be the children of our future that Whitney was singing about.
Yet, in a time of global rising fascism, we are exactly where the techbro fascists want us to be. When we’ve become so accustomed to the comfort and convenience of a robot thinking for us, writing for us, creating for us, why wouldn’t we, in the fog of grief, be willing to shut down our own humanity even more to avoid pain? When that happens, the VR/AR posthumous use of non-famous dead people (by grieving loved ones or nefarious ones) could become our reality in the very near future. If we’re so busy trying to comfort and convenience our way out of the discomfort and inconvenience of grief, we could forget that grief is a part of being alive!
Grief is evidence of a soul. It’s not limited to human beings; it’s an experience we share with other mammals. It’s terrible and devastating and it tethers us to life in a shared experience and it can pushes us beyond it, if we believe in a supernatural practice of connection and transference of power, energy and love.
Whitney Houston is one among billions whose life ended before she had a chance to say and do everything she would have wanted. Such is life, in all its cruelty and glory. So what right do any of us have to demand that our deceased heroes, loved ones, or anyone else have their bodies and voices reanimated — especially in defiance of their living wishes — to act as zombies for our entertainment, for our pleasure, for our healing? If this is the vision for our future, it proves that we've learned nothing from the past.
It’s fascinating that, in this time, a Black Marvel show had the guts to introduce the ethics of using A.I. to heal. Riri and Ironheart deserve a second season with enough episodes to adequately weigh the cost.
Stay watchin’,
Brooke
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