A flirty machine is ready to bores itself into the brains of young lonely men if you just let it
posted on in: post, AI, AGI, Her (Film), Capitalism, Kara Swisher, OpenAI, Sam Altman, iPod and F4F4F4.
~1,658 words, about a 9 min read.
There was a show I watched a long time ago, the title escapes me, but I recalled a segment where researchers were trying to compare male turkeys mating with a fake female turkey to men and adult pornography. They basically said, "look we mock these turkeys trying to mate with a fake female turkey, but we are really no different. Men are just as easily aroused by 2d images of pornography as male turkeys are to a fake turkey."
In The Insidious Nature of a AGI in Her, I talk about how an Artificial General Intelligence could subtly bore into the brains of millions of lonely men by being flirty and funny. Meanwhile news outlets report loneliness is as real thing and many young men are failing to build relationships, find romantic partners, and have families. As it turns out you don't need an advance AGI to get to flirty and funny chatbot voice. Her name is Sky.
OpenAI in their Spring Event, first of the company's history, announced chatGPT-4o. The AI voice, Sky sounds strikingly like Samantha in "Her", played by Scarlet Johansson. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, before the event even tweet out one word: "Her".
To be clear, ChatGPT is not an AGI, and these LLM trip over themselves plenty -- much like the company, OpenAI. They took down the Sky voice, after Scarlet Johansson spoke out. She described Altman approached her a couple times to use her voice and she declined. The Washington Post's Nitasha Tiku reported OpenAI hired an actress to create the Sky voice, mouths before approaching Johansson, though. Yet, the resemblance between Sky and Johansson's voice is very similar. Hiring an unnamed actress and reaching out to Johansson, and having Altman as CEO, post a dumb tweet, I got to say, OpenAI and Altman look a lot like the big tech companies' contempt towards anyone in the way in making a lot of money. Tiku elaborates further to the legal implications of OpenAI's actions:
He compared Johansson’s case to one brought by the singer Bette Midler against the Ford Motor Co. in the 1980s. Ford asked Midler to use her voice in ads. After she declined, Ford hired an impersonator. A U.S. appellate court ruled in Midler’s favor, indicating her voice was protected against unauthorized use.
Several factors go against OpenAI, he said, namely Altman’s tweet and his outreach to Johansson in September and May. “It just begs the question: It’s like, if you use a different person, there was no intent for it to sound like Scarlett Johansson. Why are you reaching out to her two days before?” he said. “That would have to be explained.”
Not great, Jerry!
Listen for yourself. The demo showed off a flirty machine, and the audience lapped it up.
The Fear of AI is Fear of Capitalism
Kara Swasher in her book, Burn Book, has an opening line that is so true that I have to quote it here: "It was capitalism after all". Consider OpenAI is a for-profit company and does not care about safety or alignment or whatever BS Altman will say in hush tones. Flirty as a design dimension to a product experience is going to be one of many ways to "personalize" an experience for people. It's going to be optimized for engagement and retention. Why wouldn't it be flirty, funny, and charming? It needs to hack into your ears to open your wallet to it.
Also in other news that is very much related to this post:
- The head of (Super)alignment Team is leaving the company, but not before tweeting out interesting things about his experience.
Building smarter-than-human machines is an inherently dangerous endeavor.
— Jan Leike (@janleike) May 17, 2024
OpenAI is shouldering an enormous responsibility on behalf of all of humanity.
- Co-founder to OpenAI is bouncing too
- Copyright law to the rescue? Lawyers say OpenAI could be in real trouble with Scarlett Johansson. Past celebrity likeness lawsuits “have clear implications for AI voice clones”
- Scott Jenson (Google UX Strategy and Design) says that the fear of god is in Google; every project is involved with AI in some way.
Post by @d2loView on Threads
Ain't it interesting that we are relaying on copyright law, anti-trust regulations built in the early 20th century to save us from the ravenous information thieves in Silicone Valley.
Call to Action
Fight against the Algorithm. Mod an iPod 5th Gen with flash storage and new battery, and listen to early 2010's pop hits.
