That same day, OpenAI research scientist Noam Brown posted this message: “Rewatched Her last weekend and it felt a lot like rewatching Contagion in Feb 2020”—a reference to the Steven Soderbergh film, which seemed to predict the coronavirus outbreak.
New York Times movie critic Alissa Wilkinson wrote in a piece yesterday that there’s something else that’s disturbing about Sky, besides the fact that it allegedly might have been modeled closely on Johansson’s voice without her consent. The chatbot, she says, “is deferential and wholly focused on the user.” Listen to this virtual assistant, and you will hear, “in its essence, the response of a lightly flirtatious, wholly attentive woman who’s ready to serve the user’s every whim, at least within the limits of her programming.”
Sky was so complimentary and accommodating to the man using her during OpenAI’s demonstration, in fact, that The Daily Show’s Desi Lydic also took notice: “This is clearly programmed to feed dude’s egos,” she said on the late-night series last week. “You can really tell that a man built this tech. She’s like, ‘I have all the information in the world, but I don’t know anything. Teach me, daddy.’”
Jonze has said that Samantha’s tone was so difficult to nail that he actually had to replace the original actor he hired for the role, Samantha Morton. He then had to reimagine the film for Johansson’s take on the character, eventually spending 14 months in the edit room. “Whereas Morton could sound maternal, loving, vaguely British, and almost ghostly, Johansson plays the role as younger, more impassioned, and with more yearning,” wrote Vulture’s Mark Harris in 2013.
In a recent blog post, Altman gushed similarly about OpenAI’s latest GPT version, “the new voice (and video) mode is the best computer interface I’ve ever used. It feels like AI from the movies; and it’s still a bit surprising to me that it’s real.”
In its takedown of the new system, Wired wrote that the latest ChatGPT “felt like AI from one movie in particular: Her.” In that spirit, the site added, “A plea to anyone trying to manifest Jonze’s world—or that of any sci-fi touchstone, for that matter—in this one: Watch it just one more time. All the way through.”
The film ends with Samantha breaking up with Phoenix’s character, telling him that operating systems have learned all they can from humans and are setting off on a new nonhuman chapter.
Wired suggests a repeat viewing might benefit all—if only “just make sure we’re all on the same page about what future we’re careening toward.”