Last week OpenAI presented GPT-4o, a new evolution of its artificial intelligence system designed to act as a voice assistant for users. Among the most notable features of the service were its spontaneity and naturalness, which reminded many of Samantha, the artificial intelligence of HerSpike Jonze’s 2013 film, in which Joaquin Phoenix plays a man who slowly falls in love with a voice assistant, voiced by Scarlett Johansson in the original version.
The one who winked at the similarity between GPT-4o and Samantha was Sam Altman himself, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, who during the presentation of the service published a tweet with just one word: “her”. A few days later, this week, Johansson published a statement in which she said she had received and rejected an offer from OpenAI to use her voice for a voice assistant. Despite her refusal, she explained, the company continued using a voice deemed too similar to hers. Johansson requested and received that the feature be removed.
Even before Johansson’s accusations against the company – which could lead to a lawsuit against OpenAI –, some observers had noted and criticized the zeal with which Altman claimed Her as a source of inspiration for GPT-4o. In the film, in fact, the protagonist Theodore begins to relate to Samantha after the end of her marriage and, as Brian Barrett wrote on Wired, the AI “exists only to satisfy Theodore’s needs,” give him absolute understanding and avoid any criticism. At the end of the film, however, Samantha breaks off the relationship and abandons Theodore, who slowly returns to building human relationships and relationships with the world: he writes a letter to his ex-wife, watches a sunset with his neighbor. All important steps for his personal growth that he had avoided precisely because of AI.
In Altman’s defense it can however be said that Samantha, despite being very advanced and independent, is very different from other science fiction artificial intelligences, which usually end up rebelling against their creators. Among all HAL 9000, the supercomputer on board the spaceship 2001: A Space Odyssey. Her tells a world in which relationships between humans and AI are quite common and accepted, but beyond the sweetness of some scenes between Theodore and Samantha, among the themes of the film there are emotional and communication difficulties and human alienation in a highly technological world.
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Not everyone within OpenAI has the same optimistic and superficial vision as Altman: Noam Brown, a researcher at the company, wrote that he had just rewatched the film and had a much stronger reaction: «I rewatched Her last weekend,” he wrote on Twitter. «I thought I was watching Contagion in February 2020.” The reference is to the 2011 film of the same name which talks about the spread of a virus rather similar to that of Covid-19: according to Brown, in short, Her it tells of an unpromising future to which we are much closer than we think.
A few months before the presentation of GPT-4o, Altman had expressed an opinion on another film, Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan (2023), writing on Twitter that he had “hoped it would inspire a generation of kids to become physicists” but unfortunately the film had “really missed the mark in that respect”. Even in this case, many pointed out that Robert Oppenheimer’s story spoke of difficult choices, enormous responsibility and guilt for the massacre of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and could hardly arouse a feeling of sympathy and inspiration. Indeed, both the film and the book on which it is based can be seen as warnings, warnings for humanity about the risks of a new and powerful technology. Altman’s comment on Oppenheimer It is also notable because the AI sector usually compares the risks associated with the development of overly powerful and intelligent systems to that of the atomic bomb.
Altman finally compared Oppenheimer to another film that had instead managed to inspire a generation of young startup founders, The Social Network, David Fincher’s 2010 film about the rise of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. Also The Social Networkwhile not containing rebellious artificial intelligences and dystopian futures, does not exactly represent a eulogy to its protagonist, who is as ambitious and arrogant as he is alienated from the rest of society.
But Sam Altman isn’t the only CEO of a big tech company to draw inspiration from unlikely science fiction films or books. The Meta group – which includes Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – owes its name to the metaverse, a virtual world imagined in a science fiction novel, Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Snow Crash is a science fiction novel of the cyberpunk genre released in 1992 and set in a future Los Angeles, which after a devastating financial crisis was sold by the United States and became the property of large companies and other private entities. Every service is privatised, the world is a desolate and dangerous place, and this is also why people have moved to Metaversea virtual reality in which users appear in the form of avatars.
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Another very influential work in Silicon Valley – and for Zuckerberg’s aims in the metaverse – is Ready Player One (2011 novel by Ernest Cline from which Stephen Spielberg made a film in 2018), which tells of a dystopian future in which people prefer to spend time in a virtual reality called OASIS, owned by a certain James Halliday. Upon his death, OASIS is up for grabs for the first person who manages to solve a complex virtual treasure hunt full of references and homages to nerd culture and video games, a detail that contributed to the success of the book but also smoothed out the more nefarious details of the society in which the story takes place. As critic Alissa Wilkinson noted on Vox«Ready Player One it’s set in a dystopian future but it seems to have no idea how dystopian it really is.”
This apparent difficulty in understanding the text demonstrated by Silicon Valley was also noted by the satirist Alex Blechman, who joked by imagining the Torment Nexus, a terrible invention told by a science fiction book. «I invented the Torment Nexus as a warning to humanity», says the author of the book, inspiring a technology company that proudly announces that «it has finally created the Torment Nexus from the literary classic “Do not create the Torment Nexus”».
The technology entrepreneur best known for references to pop culture and science fiction is undoubtedly Elon Musk, who has repeatedly cited The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and he called the artificial intelligence developed by his company xAI Grok. The bizarre name refers to a verb invented by the writer Robert Heinlein in the science fiction novel Stranger in a strange landfrom 1961: the verb – in Italian translated with grok – indicates having fully understood and assimilated a concept.
Quotationism aside, Musk also recently tried to use a science fiction classic to promote the Cybertruck, Tesla’s latest controversial car model. According to Musk, in fact, the vehicle was “designed for Bladerunner” and is “the one that Bladerunner would have driven”. Beyond the fact that the name of the protagonist of Blade Runner (written detached), 1982 Ridley Scott film based on the story But do androids dream of electric sheep? by Philip K. Dick, is Rick Deckard and not “Bladerunner”, it is interesting to note that even in this case the dark and dystopian setting does not impress Musk, who actually uses it as a source of inspiration for a large and resistant vehicle (even if there are many doubts about the stability of Tesla’s Cybertruck).
As for Deckard, by work he is a “blade runner”, a police officer specialized in hunting replicants, i.e. robotic humanoids produced by the Tyrell Corporation to do heavy work or be used in war. As journalist Max Read wrote, Deckard is not a strictly positive character: «he is a deluded hitman, a slave hunter looked down upon by the people he works for and despised and feared by those he hunts. The film tells how Deckard comes to realize this, among others.” Finally, as regards the car he drives, Deckard moves in the furthest and most different way from a heavy pick-up – which would be uncomfortable and impractical for the world of Blade Runner – and use one instead spinnersa small flying car.
According to Brian Merchant, journalist and writer, these bad interpretations of science fiction classics are not accidental but are the result of the fact that “these dystopias are actually useful” to large technology companies and their CEOs. Merchant, in fact, noted that the dystopias cited by Musk, Zuckerberg and others have one factor in common, namely that “the supposed user or owner of the product is the protagonist” of the story. «If you buy a Cybertruck, you will be safe from a world in crisis, from replicants or whatever. If you’re in the metaverse, you can be like the type of Ready Player One, a hero who goes on all kinds of adventures even if the world is collapsing outside his virtual reality helmet.” All these, Merchant concludes, are “dystopias useful for selling what would otherwise be an antisocial and cumbersome technology”.
Contributing to this type of reading by the main CEOs of Silicon Valley could also be their problematic relationship with the future and society. In a profile of Sam Altman published by New Yorker in 2016, when he was head of the startup accelerator Y Combinator, the entrepreneur also spoke about the possibility of a global crisis and the collapse of society, caused by climate change, growing political divisions or the awakening of malevolent artificial intelligence.
“I try not to think about it too much but I have guns, gold, potassium iodide [che può proteggere la tiroide dagli effetti dello iodio radioattivo]antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israel Defense Forces and a large piece of land in Big Sur [una regione della California, ndr] that I can reach by air.”
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It is a widespread phenomenon among the main executives and entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley, the industry that more than any other is projected towards the future, to be preppers, as people who “prepare” for the end of the world are defined, building bunkers and equipping themselves with basic necessities and means to survive a world in crisis. The best known and most influential is perhaps Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, who bought a large piece of land in New Zealand – for which he prepared an emergency escape route. But even Reddit CEO Steve Huffman preferred to prepare for global collapse by undergoing refractive surgery to correct his vision and have a better chance of surviving in a post-apocalyptic future.
