The centenary of Marilyn Monroe’s birth has been marked by an army of lookalikes descending on London, but the real spectacle lies in the vaults of the British Film Institute. Rare footage, some unseen for decades, offers a digital ghost of the woman behind the icon. As a Silicon Valley expat who trades in tomorrow’s tech, I find this fascinating yet unsettling.
We are resurrecting Monroe through algorithms and archive dust, but what does it mean when a hologram outlasts the person? The BFI’s restoration team has used AI to upscale 16mm film to 4K, smoothing away grain and flicker. The results are mesmerising: her smile sharpens, her dress rustles in high definition.
Yet each pixel is a reconstruction, a guess made by machine learning trained on thousands of photographs. We are creating a simulacrum, a Monroe that never existed. The lookalikes on the red carpet are human, flawed, breathing.
They sweat under wigs and false lashes. The digital Monroe does not sweat. She is immortal, frozen at 36.
This is the Black Mirror underbelly of our obsession with digital preservation. We must ask: are we preserving history or manufacturing it? The BFI insists the technique is peer-reviewed, that every frame is verified by historians.
But the algorithm does not know the difference between a smudge and a beauty mark. As we march towards quantum computing, such questions will only intensify. For now, the lookalikes wave, the cameras flash, and a digital ghost smiles on.
The user experience of society today is a tension between authenticity and simulation. Which Monroe do we remember? The one we saw, or the one we computed?
