THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: It Would Be Easier to Stop Worrying about AI If Its Apostles Weren’t So Creepy.
First of all, I want to salute [Scarlett] Johansson for saying no to Sam Altman and Open AI. I am certain that, given how flush with cash they are, they offered her more money for the use of her voice than most actresses will make in an entire career. She said no despite how buzzy and glamorous an emergent technology AI is among movers and shakers. This would have been the easiest paycheck to earn in the world: Sit down in a booth and let someone sample your voice for a few days.
Why did she decline? (Leave aside for a moment just how sleazy it was that Open AI tried to use Johansson’s voice, or its style, even after being rejected — for those suspicious of Silicon Valley business ethics, this was fine vindication.) This brings us to what most unnerves me about Silicon Valley’s proselytization for AI: Its most vociferous apostles seem for all the world to be driven by psychologically bizarre, socially damaged desires. In Johansson’s statement, she says she declined the offer to recreate her character from Her “after much consideration and for personal reasons.” That strikes me as a polite way of saying, “Did you actually watch this film? Did you understand the point of this film?”
For Her is not a love story — it is a cautionary tale. Set in the near future (really just an excuse to dress everyone in awkward ties), it stars Joaquin Phoenix as a lonely and embittered soon-to-be divorcé. As part of his unfulfilling job, he gets a “virtual assistant” with his newest operating-system upgrade: “Samantha,” a learning AI voiced by Johansson that exhibits such naïvely ingenuous lovability as an algorithm new to the world that the alienated and unhappy Phoenix begins to fall in love with it. And, seemingly, “she” with him as well.
It is a marvelous and memorable film — Spike Jonze’s best work by far as both director and writer, with a truly humane, beating heart at its core — so I will not spoil the plot for you from there. But, as those who have seen it know, the film is designed to make you uncomfortable with AI, not more welcoming of it — for AI is incapable of loving you, or even truly befriending you, at least not in the way that people crave and require. Her makes a direct appeal to its viewers to take their heads out of the clouds (and, by analogy, drop the smartphone from their hands) and re-engage with the human reality of the world around them, rather than getting lost in a world of artificial intelligence and pleasures both ultimately illusory and inevitably heartbreaking.
So how the hell could Sam Altman have gotten all of this so wrong? Go back to the “Torment Nexus” joke I opened with. What kind of an utterly dense brick of a person could watch Her and think, “Yeah, I definitely want my AI to remind me of the algorithmic plague that seduced society away from everything except their earbuds before cruelly ghosting planet Earth.” One presumes Open AI has already moved on to option No. 2: getting Hugo Weaving to reprise his role as “Agent Smith” from The Matrix.
To be fair, Weaving portrayed Agent Smith 11 years ago in ad for GE to promote their hospital networking technology. As I wrote in a post back then headlined, “No, That’s Not Creepy At All,” “GE takes the notion of human capital seriously.”