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.”
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