31.05.2024

By Silvia Gerlsbeck

With the unveiling of the latest versions of AI assistants over the last weeks, users have been surprised by some of their new features: listening and talking like real life humans, acting in a more playful and less unscripted way and seemingly capable of comprehending and expressing emotions, they have become indispensable in Open AI and Google’s aim to bind users even closer to their technology. Open AI’s latest version of the tech that underpins its AI chatbot ChatGPT – GPT-4o (the ‘o’ standing for ‘omni’) – was presented on May 13, conveniently a day before major competitor Google revealed its new developments at its annual conference. The new ChatGPT, which will be rolled out to all users in the coming weeks, seems to be faster and chattier than earlier models, thus mirroring human behaviour even more. Additionally, Open AI’s technology can be connected to the camera of your phone and thus ‘see’ as well as ‘hear’ and ‘talk’, that is, combine voice, image and text in its responses. With these new, more human-like features, a further technological paradigm shift seems now at hand. 

Yet it is not (just) these innovations which have surprised many test users. With OpenAI’s demo version ‘Sky’ featuring a voice highly reminiscent of that of Scarlett Johansson, comparisons to Spike Jonze’s 2013 film Her have been frequent. In Jonze’s film, Johansson ‘plays’ – that is, lends her voice to – Samantha, an AI assistant that functions as both secretary and love interest for the protagonist Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), a lonely writer in search of meaningful interpersonal connection. Like Samantha, users of GPT-4o have described the AI’s husky voice and its overall behaviour as flirty, coquettish, even seductive – and in this vein pointed to the gendered power hierarchies in tech, where a female-sounding voice assistant is programmed to act sympathetically and submissively and, in the words of Daily Show comedian Desi Lydic, seems to say “I have all the information in the world, but I don’t know anything.”

While none of this seems really new, given that the impact of voice assistants like Alexa and Siri on gender stereotypes is well-researched by now, the anthropomorphisation of AI and the goals of ambient computing raise further issues. Like a general ambience, AI is now striving to always ‘be there for you’ while you navigate your everyday life, a digital companion that you can also bond emotionally with. Yet these innovations come with some pitfalls: from privacy concerns, where users might share private data with corporations in their exchange with a trusted, human-like AI assistant, to the unknown ideologies influencing the ‘world view’ of the AI and potential aspects of manipulation, as well as the danger of social isolation and loneliness through the suggestion of human contact where there is none, these new human-machine relations show that there are plenty of ethical issues and considerations at stake.

Scarlett Johansson has meanwhile successfully protested the use of a voice resembling hers by OpenAI. Yet until GPT-4o becomes more common, it remains to be seen whether larger concerns of a “hyper-anthropomorphism” (Maynard 2024) that intentionally draws on our anthropomorphic bias – the tendency to ascribe human characteristics to non-human entities – are warranted: is the discourse surrounding it rather a case of techno-pessimism, or are these advanced AIs a real threat to our social fabric? In the ominous-sounding words of Her’s Samantha: “I can understand how the limited perspective of an un-artificial mind would perceive it that way. You'll get used to it.”

Links:

Gender Bias and Voice Assistants: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-ai-bots-and-voice-assistants-reinforce-gender-bias/

OpenAI’s GPT-4o and the Challenges of Hyper-Anthropomorphism: https://futureofbeinghuman.com/p/anthropomorphizing-gpt-4o

Scarlett Johansson and OpenAI: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/20/chatgpt-scarlett-johansson-voice

The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants: https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/DeepMind.com/Blog/ethics-of-advanced-ai-assistants/the-ethics-of-advanced-ai-assistants-2024-i.pdf