Today OpenAI announced GPT-4o, a new AI model that will be available to free and paid users alike. Among its many upgrades—faster response times, enhanced memory capabilities, better parsing of images—is a conversational voice that tries its level best to sound like a real live human. It laughs, it jokes, it maybe flirts a little. “It feels like AI from the movies,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a Monday blog post. “It’s still a bit surprising to me that it’s real.”
To be honest, it felt like AI from one movie in particular: Her, the 2013 Spike Jonze sci-fi film that correctly foresaw a future in which AI relationships could handily substitute for human connection—well, it felt like and sounded like. In the demo, ChatGPT’s voice is remarkably similar to that of Her star Scarlett Johansson. In case there was any doubt as to the reference point, Altman tweeted “her”—just the one word—shortly after the event.
Her is a terrific movie. Its view of AI is surprisingly nuanced, and its depiction of the techno-human relationship at its core leans more utopian than knee-jerk skeptical. Still, 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. Just to make sure we’re all on the same page about what future we’re careening toward.
As noted by my colleague Kate Knibbs, the AI assistant Samantha in Her isn’t malicious. It doesn’t revolt against humanity or cut people off from society; AI partners are so usual in Jonze’s envisioned future that nobody finds it strange when Theodore, Samantha’s user, brings it as his plus-one on a double-date.
Upon first look, Her seems to encapsulate all the perks of conversational artificial general intelligence with none of the drawbacks. As Knibbs mentions, no job displacement or economic disruption is evident. However, just because the inhabitants in Her are fine with AI companionship, doesn’t mean it’s entirely good. While the AI relationships are easy, they are also deceitful. Samantha is designed to cater to Theodore’s needs, a dynamic that enables him to take without giving, to continuously reassured that he is understood without making an effort to understand someone else himself.
It’s not until Samantha exits—where AIs in Her vanish to a higher existence level, something that would surely worry OpenAI’s investors—that Theodore confronts his own complicated, human relationships. He writes a letter to his ex-wife. He shares a sunrise with his neighbor. Simple acts of humanity that he had deferred due to an accommodating AI.
To be fair, at least Her presents a comparatively optimistic vision of the future, even if people disagree on its implications. It stands as one of the least objectionable versions of future yearning in the tech billionaire class. Elon Musk has talked about the Cybertruck being “designed for Bladerunner [sic]” and also as “what Bladerunner [sic] would have driven.” As Max Read observed, this is erroneous for countless reasons, not least of which is that no one should strive for the Blade Runner future.
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Take also the metaverse, famously coined by Neal Stephenson in his novel Snow Crash. Stephenson’s metaverse is dystopian, not aspirational. Certainly not worth burning more than $40 billion trying to build, no matter how hard Ready Player One tried to make it look cool.
I’m missing lots of examples, I’m sure, but suffice it to say that misreadings of sci-fi are endemic to Silicon Valley. No doubt an upcoming Y Combinator class will include a startup with designs on acquiring a real live xenomorph.
This is not an original point. Respect to this 2021 tweet that nails it. And maybe media literacy is low on the wish list for Big Tech CEO attributes. But as long as this keeps happening, it’s worth calling out. If we’re building toward a certain vision of the future, it’s worth understanding which sci-fi sacred texts are guidebooks and which are cautionary tales. Being friends with AI will be so much easier than forging bonds with human beings. That doesn’t mean it’s better. Sometimes it’s much worse.
To the company’s credit, at least one OpenAI employee watched Her recently. “Rewatched Her last weekend,” wrote research scientist Noam Brown on X today, “and it felt a lot like rewatching Contagion in Feb 2020.”
Presumably Brown was referencing the prescience, not the pandemic. But rewatch Contagion, too. Watch it all the way to the end. It’s a flashback: Deforestation displaces bats from their habitat; a bat drops a bite of banana near some pigs; a pig eats the banana and gets sold to a restaurant; the chef prepares the pig carcass without wearing gloves; Gwyneth Paltrow’s character shakes the chef’s hands. It’s the origin story of an outbreak, and also a warning about cause and effect, and unintended consequences, and how you often don’t see where things went so wrong until it’s too late to change course.
