…During a livestream demonstration on Monday, OpenAI engineers and CTO Mira Murati gathered around a phone to show the new capabilities [of ChatGPT-4o]. They encouraged the assistant to be more expressive while making up a bedtime story, then abruptly requested it to switch to a robotic voice, before finally asking it to conclude the story with a singing voice. Later, they asked the assistant to look at what the phone’s camera is seeing and have it respond to what’s visible on-screen. The assistant was also able to be interrupted while speaking and respond without continued prompting while acting as a translator.
The assistant’s voice response bore a striking resemblance to the character Scarlett Johansson plays in the movie Her, where a man forms a relationship with a sophisticated AI assistant. After the event, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman cryptically posted just one word on Twitter: “her”. He has also expressed that Her is his favorite movie. The film explores themes of loneliness and human-AI relationships; it seems unlikely that director Spike Jonze intended for the world to precisely replicate that sense of robotic isolation.
In a briefing with The Verge, Murati said that the assistant is not actually designed to sound like Johansson and emphasized that OpenAI has had these voices for a while. “Someone asked me in the audience this exact same question, and then she said, ’Ah, maybe the reason I didn’t recognize it from ChatGPT is because the voice has so much personality and tonality’”, Murati said.