Tracing OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s Love for Scarlett Johansson’s AI Romance Her

In September 2023, OpenAI cofounder and CEO Sam Altman was asked to name his favorite movie about artificial intelligence. It was two months before Altman would be pushed out of his company because, according to his board of directors, Altman was “not consistently candid in his communications” with the board. (VF’s Nick Bilton reported that there were “safety concerns around the speed with which he was ushering the company into the AI future” as well. Days later, Altman would be reinstated.) But onstage at Dreamforce 2023 in San Francisco, with a fake waterfall backdrop frozen behind him, Altman said that Spike Jonze’s 2013 film Her resonated with him more than other sci-fi films about AI.

Specifically, he cited the way in which Scarlett Johansson’s AI personal assistant interacted with the human commanding her, played by Joaquin Phoenix—a connection that would come back to haunt Altman this week, when Johansson claimed his company used a soundalike for its new chatbot after failing to get her to voice the product.

Often, movies don’t get sci-fi right. But Her was different, according to Altman: “The number of things that I think Her got right, that were not obvious at the time, like the whole interaction model with how humans are gonna use an AI—this idea that it is going to be this conversational language interface, that was incredibly prophetic, and certainly more than a little bit inspired us,” he said. “So it’s not just like a prophecy, it’s like an influenced shot or whatever.”

He explained that most movies focused on the topic theorize that if humans interact with AI, “it was gonna be like robots shooting us or something.” (See: Jennifer Lopez’s new Netflix movie Atlas.) Jonze provided a rosier outlook on AI than many of the dystopian sci-fi renderings—in his version, Johansson’s Samantha was so alluring and unthreatening that she became a confidant to and love interest of Phoenix’s character.

Altman thought that was on point. “This idea that we all have a personalized agent trying to help us, and we talk to it like we talk to ChatGPT, that was actually not what most movies [thought]…. But yeah, I think Her got something deeply right on the interface, and that is no small feat.”

The Oscar-winning script for 2013’s Her was not written by scientists, but by Spike Jonze, who has said he came up with the concept in the early aughts. “I saw some article linking to a website where you could IM with an artificial intelligence,” Jonze told The Guardian the year it was released. “For the first, maybe, 20 seconds of it, it had this real buzz—I’d say ‘Hey, hello,’ and it would say ‘Hey, how are you?,’ and it was like whoa…this is trippy. After 20 seconds, it quickly fell apart and you realized how it actually works, and it wasn’t that impressive. But it was still, for 20 seconds, really exciting.”

In the film, Jonze imagined that his AI character Samantha would acclimate to the person she is assisting as she gets to know him. “I evolve, just like you,” Samantha says.

Like Samantha, the new ChatGPT can detect a person’s emotions by analyzing their tone of voice or facial expressions, according to OpenAI. Until Monday, users could opt for their new ChatGPT virtual assistant to be voiced by “Sky,” a breathy, coquette-ish female that many, including Johansson herself, have said sounds similar to her AI character, Samantha. OpenAI pulled Sky as a voice option on Monday after hearing from Johansson’s representatives, the actor said in a statement.

In the decade since Her premiered, AI has become an everyday reality. Deepfakes pose real political danger, and AI is gaining rapid momentum without regulations to keep it in check. Citing this perspective shift, last year, Wired crowned Her “a fairy tale” in the era of actual AI—an “optimistic time capsule” from an age when the technology didn’t seem like it could be the ruin of all humanity. “The sweetness of the human-robot relationship portrayed by Her comes across as quaint right now,” wrote Wired staffer Katie Knibbs.

Perhaps Samantha’s nonthreatening nature is one reason Altman hoped Johansson might voice his company’s conversation function.

“He told me that he felt that by my voicing the system, I could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and AI,” Johansson said in her statement. “He said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people.” She added, “I declined the offer.”

Altman has responded to Johansson’s allegations, claiming in a statement that “the voice of Sky is not Scarlett Johansson’s, and it was never intended to resemble hers. We cast the voice actor behind Sky’s voice before any outreach to Ms. Johansson.”

But days earlier, Altman celebrated the availability of OpenAI’s voice assistant by posting a single word:

That same day, OpenAI research scientist Noam Brown posted this message: “Rewatched Her last weekend and it felt a lot like rewatching Contagion in Feb 2020”—a reference to the Steven Soderbergh film, which seemed to predict the coronavirus outbreak.

New York Times movie critic Alissa Wilkinson wrote in a piece yesterday that there’s something else that’s disturbing about Sky, besides the fact that it allegedly might have been modeled closely on Johansson’s voice without her consent. The chatbot, she says, “is deferential and wholly focused on the user.” Listen to this virtual assistant, and you will hear, “in its essence, the response of a lightly flirtatious, wholly attentive woman who’s ready to serve the user’s every whim, at least within the limits of her programming.”

Sky was so complimentary and accommodating to the man using her during OpenAI’s demonstration, in fact, that The Daily Show’s Desi Lydic also took notice: “This is clearly programmed to feed dude’s egos,” she said on the late-night series last week. “You can really tell that a man built this tech. She’s like, ‘I have all the information in the world, but I don’t know anything. Teach me, daddy.’”

Jonze has said that Samantha’s tone was so difficult to nail that he actually had to replace the original actor he hired for the role, Samantha Morton. He then had to reimagine the film for Johansson’s take on the character, eventually spending 14 months in the edit room. “Whereas Morton could sound maternal, loving, vaguely British, and almost ghostly, Johansson plays the role as younger, more impassioned, and with more yearning,” wrote Vulture’s Mark Harris in 2013.

In a recent blog post, Altman gushed similarly about OpenAI’s latest GPT version, “the new voice (and video) mode is the best computer interface I’ve ever used. It feels like AI from the movies; and it’s still a bit surprising to me that it’s real.”

In its takedown of the new system, Wired wrote that the latest ChatGPT “felt like AI from one movie in particular: Her.” In that spirit, the site added, “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.”

The film ends with Samantha breaking up with Phoenix’s character, telling him that operating systems have learned all they can from humans and are setting off on a new nonhuman chapter.

Wired suggests a repeat viewing might benefit all—if only “just make sure we’re all on the same page about what future we’re careening toward.”

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