Everyone has moments when they encounter something so unbelievable that they can’t help but exclaim, “You can’t make this stuff up.” If i said one of those quotes in front of Sam Altman, one thing I guarantee is that he will try to prove me wrong. Saying “But it is here and I can prove it.” What is here you may ask?
her
— Sam Altman (@sama) May 13, 2024
This was a tweet that the all too worried AGI godfather made to hype up the then release of the recently revealed GPT-4o model which eerily sounded like Scarlett Johannson who played a flirty ai that made a man date her though his phone in that same film. But this wasnt a “honest mistake” but moreso a fire waiting to catch the right wind. See, the voice, “sky” has been there since OpenAI added voice functionality to both Mobile apps. Even then, if you were keen eared, you wouldve heard the similarities. In Late 2023 though, this guy did, and has been in a tango standoff of “Catching ScarJo out” ever since.
Granted, the reason why this is such a public quarrel is mainly because it was used to flex the models vocal capabilities, especially in intonation and cadence, with it being able to sing, whisper and vary it’s vocal tone. and given the awkward demos held by the male developers, who frequently interupted it to “de-hallucinate the demo. made it feel like a sterile reddit thread. Presentation in focus, with the vocal model being used (sky) so publicly and with such a big event, it was bound to turn from a cheeky easter egg to an public affiliation.
So obviously when she was invited into the tech bro discourse on how she was a part of the event, she was shocked and angered, given the fact that OpenAI approached her offering to partner withher to voice the model and when she declined 9 months before, Sam reverted to his old Y Combinator mantra of moving fast and breaking things. Besides to take and ask for forgiveness has been a time-tested silicon valley method. And now she has been rightly and publicly critizising that decision even with a assumed threat of legal litigation. But after accounting for the SAG-Aftra Strikes, caused by emboldened C-Suites with the technology Silcon valley has developed to extract more from the worker and less from the shareholder by trying to own and appropriate an actor/actress’ likeness via AI, its unsurprising he did it anyway.
You would think that this is just a crass one off and but the thing is, silicon valley has a prophetic love with fiction and reimagining it into reality. After science fiction has been the surrogate mothers of nerds and techies; the visions of Issac Asimov, Arthur C Clark, Philip K Dick and countless techno-optimist peices have depicted technology evolving to a place not too disimilar from today. With archival footage of narrators envisioning a world where you can order clothes from your home, robots that could replace the traditional housewife and automatons that can let teachers teach their students from anywhere using a radio. To say that fiction manifests reality would be an understatement.
That and computers starting to transform for special purpose enigmas to general but niche purpose machines, the grandfathers of modern computing of Gordon Moore, Alan Turing and Steve Wozniak, given their foundational knowledge allowed them to tap into the future with their works and predicitons. Which more often than not reaffirmed in some form. Moore’s Law or Arthur’s Vision of computers.
With this subject bound clairvoyancy, it seems like tech now more than ever has the capacity to predict and manifest the future. Which is why futurism has now become a strangely large pilar of the space, with “changemaker” ceos and Lex Friedman worthy “thinkers” are trying to target and mark the future. With everyone having their own Steve Jobs vision of how their 7 days would look like. From connecting the world, empowering the cloud, or decentralizing horseshit - everyones got something.
But on the other side of this precognitive capability, siloed futurists and doomers have taken note of this state of play and have decided to continue on that path while cowering in fear of it. Being both the slave and the masters of the “AI/AGI” and “alignment problem” with Effective Alturism. Portraying this as a cold war tehcnical arms race to play god or as a threat to the common man with a employment fallout. So when their best interests tried to work against captialism with “Ethical Governance” and “AI Treaties” to be signed, nothing came from it. Being an imagined slave and master has its benefits when you can pick and choose which is appropriate.
If these individuals were young teens inspired by their favorite films, it would be understandable to be a little cutout within making or including art to their work. But these are grown adults, who have cited The Social Network as the main reason to be an “Entrepreneur” and while ignoring the films cautionary tale. And with such a responsiblity of working in the most recently influential tech companies so far,they are driven to make a dystopian film a reality because “it would bring people closer together to AI.” Which is honestly tasteless. With it being ironic within consumer AI as it’s portraying the notion that our culture, art and ideas are so dry, than to try and make something new, we will just refrence the old as if it’s a MCU post-credits scene. If they still do those.
But thats Silicon Valley’s thing. Calling a food supplement company Soylent, named without regard to its unsettling cinematic namesake. Or the misguided complaints of Oppenheimer “missed the mark” and not was encouraging for physicists on THE nuclear physicists biography is about as out of touch as it can get.
It comes to show that maturity, taste and responsiblity are tenets that the industry lacks and as tech becomes more engrained, this will become a glaring issue.
At least Apple hasnt released anything as culurally obtuse since the 1984 advert of yore.
Nevermind. They crushed it with that one.