William Shatner

William Shatner (born 1931) is a Canadian actor whose portrayal of Captain James T. Kirk in Star Trek made him one of the most recognizable science-fiction figures of the twentieth century. Across seven decades he has also been an author, recording artist, and, at 90, the oldest person to fly to space — a man who has repeatedly turned science fiction into lived experience.

A living record at age 90

In 2021, around his 90th birthday, Shatner became the brand ambassador and first user of StoryFile Life, an AI platform for interactive conversational video. Over four days in front of a greenscreen at StoryFile’s Los Angeles studio, he answered roughly 600 questions about flying, acting, dying, and family. The company’s Conversa software uses natural-language processing to match a visitor’s spoken question to Shatner’s prerecorded answers — letting anyone hold a lifelike conversation with him, now and after he is gone.

Shatner framed the project as democratized legacy-keeping: the same technology that preserved his story lets anyone record their own “living record” for their descendants. He said the process itself surprised him, forcing him to examine parts of his life he had never thought carried meaning.

The experiment placed the man who played Kirk at the forefront of one of AI’s most emotionally charged frontiers — digital afterlives — years before grief tech became a mainstream debate. Skeptics of such “AI immortality” question whether a scripted conversational double preserves a person or merely a performance; Shatner, characteristically, answered by being as extravagant and honest on camera as he could.