Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures/Everett Collection
“Her,” Spike Jonze's cautionary tale about the dangers of human-AI relationships, appears to be a favorite of director Sam Altman.
Editor's note: This article was featured in CNN Business' Nightcap newsletter. Sign up for free to get it delivered to your inbox. here.
new york
CNN
—
If you slept through all the Scarlett Johansson and OpenAI drama this week, here's a quick update.
When a woman twice refused a man's advances, he responded like a child, demonstrating one of the reasons the world needs to be skeptical of the people and companies profiting from the breathless propaganda about AI.
This is a slightly longer version, so please bear with me.
Scarlett Johansson, who played the quirky AI assistant in Spike Jonze's 2013 film “Her,” was approached by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in September. He wanted to hire her to voice the company's latest ChatGPT model, “Sky,” but she turned him down. A few months later, just days before the product's launch, he asked her to reconsider.
But before she could say no again, OpenAI released a new model with a voice that sounded strikingly similar to Johansson's. The AI's debut was both shocking and embarrassing: shocking because of the bot's sleek appearance and human-like qualities, and embarrassing because of how annoyingly flippant it sounded, a caricature of a computer developer's fantasy.
Johansson quickly hired a lawyer and said on Monday she was “shocked, angered and in disbelief” that Altman used a voice that was “eerily similar” to hers.
The company, which paused the update after receiving legal threats from Johansson, said the voice was “from another professional actress using her own natural speaking voice” and was not intended to resemble Johansson. Altman, who has professed his love for the Spike Jonze film and tweeted the word “her” on the day of its release, apologized to Johansson on Monday.
The rift reflects broader anxiety among artists, academics and even AI pioneers about the speed at which tech companies are developing AI tools and releasing them to the public with little regard for intellectual property or safety concerns.
It also points to one of AI's original sins that developers have yet to resolve: These products are all approved, funded, and built by Silicon Valley's 0.01% — a largely young, white, male cohort — and their natural human biases are baked into the AI in ways that even they don't fully understand or even realize.
OpenAI was forced to confront some of these concerns over the weekend, when two prominent employees left the company.
One is Jan Reicke, who wrote in an X blog that the company's “safety culture and processes have taken a back seat to flashy products.” The other is Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and chief scientist at OpenAI, who announced he was leaving to work on another project but gave no details. His departure is particularly notable given his key role in Altman's (quick and dramatic) firing last year over concerns that he was “pushing AI technology too far, too fast.”
Altman acknowledged Reike's point, saying, “He's right, we still have a lot of work to do, and we're committed to doing it.”
It's this kind of diplomatic candor that has made Altman, a 39-year-old billionaire, the face of “responsible AI”: a thoughtful, charismatic man who wants us to believe he cares about ordinary people while he makes money and races to the top of AI, ahead of Google and Meta.
But I would like to ask him when was the last time he watched Her all the way through, one of his favorite films, which he called “incredibly prophetic.”
What makes the film great is that Johansson's warm, empathetic voice lulls the protagonist (and ultimately the audience) into a hypnotic state of love. Is the ease of human-AI companionship more acceptable, or even preferable, than the messy realities of real-life love? This question arises as we watch Joaquin Phoenix's protagonist walk alone on a crowded beach, smiling and happy with his AI lover, his phone camera peeking out of his shirt pocket.
Of course, by the end of the film, the AI has gone off to another dimension of existence, leaving humans to look after each other again, with all their pesky human needs.
“Making friends with an AI will be a lot easier than forming a bond with a human,” Wired magazine editor Brian Barrett wrote in a recent essay about the film. “But that doesn't mean it's good. Sometimes it's a lot worse.”
—CNN's Claire Duffy and Brian Fan contributed reporting.
