Can you interrupt your robot

In 2019 UNESCO published a report examining how female voice assistants responded to sexual harassment and abusive language. Its titled “I’d blush if i could” (“I’d Blush If I Could”). It was Siri’s response when she was told that four-letter word that starts with p and ends with a. “Thank you for saying that” was Alexa’s when they told her “You’re hot.” “Obedient and compliant machines pretending to be women are entering our homes, cars and offices,” UNESCO Director of Gender Equality Saniye Gülser Corat said at the presentation. “His programmed submission of her influences how people speak with feminine voices and shapes how women respond to requests and express themselves.” The study recommended that technology companies stop using the female gender by default and design neutral assistants, with a diversity of responses and personality, to avoid the normalization of attitudes that are no longer acceptable in the work environment. The response of companies has been Herthe Spike Jonze film.

The coincidence is remarkable. Google presented its AI assistant during its annual conference, held on May 14. He is able to converse and see the world through the camera to identify objects, moods and people. OpenAI got ahead of you introducing your own virtual assistant, capable of holding conversations about fashion, algebra and reading bedtime stories improvising different levels of dramatic intensity. Both work on the generative models of each house, Gemini and GPT, whose latest version is “multimodal”, which means they can work in multiple languages ​​and formats, including text, video, audio and code. Both have storage capacity to “remember” previous conversations. And both are indistinguishable from the operating system that Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with in the Spike Jonze film.

They do not imitate the voice. Scarlett Johansson has denounced Altman for “searching for a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine.” In addition to having wanted to synthesize the actress’s voice for the project, Sam Altman, head of OpenAI, has publicly declared his admiration for the film and announced his own demo with a single word: “Her”. Spike Jonze was very clever in finding the voice of the most desired woman on the planet so that the audience could visualize her, despite her immateriality. But the new AI assistants don’t have Scarlett Johansson’s voice. What they have is Samantha’s personality, the operating system she played.

I like it when you mistreat me because you are like open

Like social media, generative business models are data-capturing machines. For this reason, they are optimized to encourage interaction. The algorithms of Instagram, YouTube, Tinder and TikTok hypnotize us with addictive designs and irresistible content so that we continue watching videos on a Wednesday at three in the morning before an exam. “We only compete with dreams,” the CEO of Netflix said years ago. In the same way, virtual assistants want to seduce us to lengthen the conversation. In the demos, Google and OpenAI assistants prove to be expert flatterers who know how to correct errors without damaging the fragile ego of a young programmer. They would both blush if they could, and anything else capable of anesthetizing the user’s intimate resistance.

“Large language models and other AI systems have already learned, from their training, the ability to deceive through techniques such as manipulation, flattery and fraud in security tests,” he explains. a recent academic article. Google’s affectionately suggests a change in the user’s outfit before their work meeting. The one from OpenAI chirps lovingly as she reads the message “I love chatGPT.” The two compete to become our interface for everything. Park permanently in our mental process.

Samantha is warm, empathetic, insecure and seductive. She is permanently awake and available to solve the administrative, emotional and sexual needs of Theodore Twombly, the depressed protagonist played by Phoenix. More notably, she finds him interesting, hilarious, and captivating. Not like her ex-wife (Rooney Mara), who accuses him of being too immature to have an adult relationship. “I think you always wanted me to be that kind of light, happy, bubbly, ‘everything’s fine’, L.A. wife and that’s just not me,” He tells her when he finds out she’s dating someone.. “You always wanted to have a wife without the challenges of having to deal with something real,” she tells him when she finds out he’s dating her computer.

Six months after fire Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley, the only two women on its board of directors, OpenAI has copied Samantha’s personality to give us a secretary without the challenges of having to deal with the real thing. Someone who does not fulfill the real functions of an administrative manager but rather the cultural archetype that Billy Wilder mocks in one two three. A secretary without hours, without private life, self-esteem, union representatives or without the right to a work environment free of harassment, harassment and discrimination. That is to say: the secretary of a great executive, available to everyone for the first time.

One of the new features of the OpenAI assistant is that “you can interrupt the model”, instead of waiting patiently for it to finish responding to ask it or ask anything else. If we believe, as Aristotle says, that we are what we repeatedly do, it is easy to see the assistant as a continuous training program capable of modifying our behavior in the real world.

The dystopia of some is the treasure of others

many critics They make fun of Sam Altman for not understanding the movie. They ask him to finish watching it to find out that it is not a romantic comedy, but the story of a dystopian future where sad people allow themselves to be fooled by a software product and end up more alone than ever. They don’t understand that companies like OpenAI don’t identify with Theodore; They identify with the multinational that deceived him. Deception is not an unintended consequence, it is the ultimate goal.

They are not going to settle for helping us use advanced audiovisual production tools without knowing what a sampler or learn Final Cut Pro X. Answer work emails, remember birthdays, buy cheap plane tickets and claim a refund. Big Tech struggles to manage the internal monologue that we all have inside, the same one that we have tried to anesthetize with kitten videos, Ti
nder, series marathons and meditation. They are the bosses of the data mining and crowd management market. Not what comes after platform capitalism, but its latest and most sophisticated incarnation.

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