ChatGPT: Dystopia as marketing: why OpenAI thinks we want to fall in love with a robot | Technologies

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“Wow, that little outfit really suits you,” the new version of ChatGPT suddenly said to an OpenAI employee during the presentation. Officer, Barrett…

This article is part of the weekly Technology newsletter, published every Friday. If you’d like to sign up to receive it in its entirety, with similar topics but more varied and concise, You can do this using this link.

“Wow, that little outfit really suits you,” the new version of ChatGPT suddenly said to an OpenAI employee during the presentation. Employee Barrett Zof just wrote “I love ChatGPT” on a piece of paper after the machine helped him solve a problem. “You’re so cute,” ChatGPT responded.

This conversation lasted just a few seconds during the half-hour presentation of the ChatGPT-4o (o stands for “omni”) version last Monday. Its new features are primarily the elimination of latency, which gives more of a live chat feel, as well as the ability to “look”, understand and talk about what you see. This is still a language model similar to what we see in the web version of ChatGPT. But now he talks, laughs at his own jokes, speaks sarcastically and, of course, seems to flirt. This fragment was cut out in the OpenAI YouTube video.

A great example of flirting AI: Her, with the voice of Scarlett Johansson. I watched the movie again and find it hard to believe that OpenAI could boast of wanting such a future for humanity. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, tweeted: “her” during the presentation. Other researchers at the company tweeted along the same lines: “You’re all going to fall in love” (luckily he didn’t add “into her”), one of them said, followed by a tweet from a user who, along with the video, wrote: ” Is ChatGPT’s voice…sexy?”

Another employee wrote: “I saw again Her last weekend and I wanted to watch Infection in February 2020.” How Herthat is, since 2013, Infection is a 2011 film about the pandemic.

Movie Her So this is a kind of reference for the creators of ChatGPT-4o. Or at least a topic they discussed internally. It’s hard not to. As specialist journalist Brian Merchant recalls in his book NewsletterReferences to dystopian science fiction are a common resource in Silicon Valley. The most likely explanation is marketing. Easier to advertise “Her” than “a never-before-seen model of spoken language.”

On Tuesday, Google unveiled its Project Astra, which is similar to ChatGPT-4o but with a more aseptic voice and tone. Putting down her cell phone, the Google employee used her glasses to chat with her model. Google is more careful in its marketing, but its founder Sergey Brin, in an apparently casual conversation with reporters, noted that Google Glasses appeared too early. In Google’s demo, the camera looked out the window and said: “I’d say this is King’s Cross.” They’re not that far removed from the Terminator’s vision.

At one time, Elon Musk showed off his new Cybertruck, similar to the one they would drive. blade runner. Or perhaps a better example is the metaverse used by the Meta, which comes from Ready first player. Dystopias have become references. It is worth emphasizing how marketing he deliberately forgets the details of the film:

1. The film ends badly. Samantha, a robot voiced by Scarlett Johansson, disappears at the end because the company shuts it down. Shortly before this, the main character discovered that he was not the only guy: “I’m in love with 641 people,” he told him. He spoke to more than 8,000 people at the same time. This is a business, and like almost everything in the digital world, we only rent it out.

To have real sex, the robot sends a woman to act as the body. The machine denies that this is prostitution, and the main character believes it. In the end, everything goes wrong, but the power of his conviction is invincible.

2. Humanizing this technology has real problems. That’s the big problem with this technology: a voice that seems human, that laughs, talks about what it sees, and can convince us of many things. At the end of April, more than two dozen Google researchers published a scientific paper entitled Ethics of advanced AI assistants. They said: “Empirical results show that when a digital virtual assistant uses a realistic voice rather than a synthetic one, people tend to be more emotionally trusting and create a greater impression of social presence. Additionally, assistants who speak more like people convey a sense of intelligence and competence, making it more likely that people will trust them with more tasks.”

For OpenAI, it is better for its assistant to look like a real person. Let’s use it more. But we’re also going to give him more love, which we don’t have much of.

3. This is always a sensual female voice. One of the memes that appeared at the OpenAI presentation was the decline in the value of the word “girlfriend.” If a robot will play the role of a cheerful, kind and sensual girl, then why a real one?

This is the same problem as the main character of the story. Although he also manages to disappoint Samantha, his robot.

The female voice is also interesting. The main character’s friend also has a virtual boyfriend, but his voice never comes out. And there’s little talk in the debate about these human helpers becoming “the guys.”

An article by Google researchers on stereotyping states the following: “When the simulated voice of a digital virtual assistant imitates the tone femalepeople assign gender stereotypes when there is no point in applying gender concepts to an entity that does not have them.”

4. These are all tricks to make money. It makes sense that none of this would have happened if OpenAI had not been caught up in the race to dominate the AI ​​agent sector, and soon the search engine. OpenAI will consider that it would be more profitable to put Her and its sensual tone to attract attention and make Google appear to be a responsible company.

Another article on the humanity of these systems, published in October 2023, strongly recommends against doing this: “We recommend that future efforts to develop conversational systems take special care in their design, development, release, and description; and pay attention to the many linguistic cues that can cause users to humanize them.”

Sam Altman posted a short post praising ChatGpt-4o. This is what made his realism stand out. “The new voice mode is the best interface I’ve ever used. It’s like the AI ​​in the movies.” Of course, it seems so, and the consequences of this are difficult to foresee.

5. Big mistake of the film. The film has one of those wonderful missteps due to lack of imagination. The main character works in a company that writes letters by hand. Your website BeautifulHandwritten Letters, which is free today. ChatGPT already had this ability before she could become his girlfriend.

Indeed, the merit of letter writers (except for copying handwriting) lies in knowing the data of the members of the couple. But it is still easy to repair.

6. It’s hard to believe that we will talk in private. Although ChatGPT-4o talks like a human, I have a hard time imagining an entire subway car whispering into its headphones, as shown in the movie. Or dozens of people talking to themselves on the street.

Perhaps it’s a generational thing, and 10-year-olds will end up interacting with their devices (and today’s parents are obsessed with screens).

Altman says it will soon become natural: “Talking to a computer never felt natural to me, but now it does.” But we don’t know whether Altman is sincere. Your business also depends on our emotions.

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