Canadian A.I. Girlfriend Unsubstantiated

On Sunday OpenAI announced it was removing its new horny robot girlfriend voice, explaining in a blog post that the voice was “not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson” at all (and frankly it’s weird of you even to think that???) but was actually the real human meat voice of a completely different actress who goes to another school, you wouldn’t know her. Also she’s from Canada.

Nevertheless yesterday the famously litigious Johansson gave NPR tech reporter Bobby Allyn a statement saying that OpenAI had asked her to sell them her voice for its obsequious new autocomplete and she said no, twice, so now she has “retained legal counsel.”

Recapping the imbroglio,¹  Casey Newton wrote that Sam Altman is full of shit [measured, respectful] and Ed Zitron wrote that Sam Altman is full of shit [angry diatribe]. But with the final departure of co-founder and actual technologist Ilya Sutskever, whose last-ditch effort to oust Altman failed last fall, OpenAI is now firmly under the control of Paul Graham / Marc Andreessen style technofascist incompetents, and this kind of clown show will increasingly be the norm.

If you don’t feel like reading any of the links above, you can always have Tripp Mickle’s report in the New York Times read to you by “an automated voice” that sounds… oddly familiar.

Also Today in A.I.: Jeremy White on warnings that “chatbots and other artificial intelligence tools can be easily manipulated to sow disinformation online on a remarkable scale.” Deepfake “Russian wife” accounts on Douyin “rally support for China-Russia ties, stoke patriotic fervor or make money — and sometimes all three at once.” Meanwhile it turns out that in 2021’s big Pennsylvania deepfake cheerleader mom case, nothing was fake at all. In Forbes, Alexandra S. Levine reports that A.I. is generating images of children for Instagram and Tiktok that are oddly popular with adult men. If crypto’s killer app was ransomware, it’s starting to look like A.I.’s might be considerably worse. And Microsoft announced “Recall for Copilot Plus PCs,” an A.I. powered search of “everything you see and do on your computer.” What could go wrong. In Indignity, T_H_E__M_A_C_H_I_N_E_S tested out Google‘s absolutely trash new A.I. overviews, but fortunately Ernie Smith figured out how to get rid of all the junk clogging up your Google results. You should go read the post, but the answer is “add &udm=14” to your search args. It’s actually magic.

Belle Delphine’s gamergirl bathwater profits were locked up in Paypal for five years. If you couldn’t tell from the summary, this is a Katie Notopoulos story. RIP the few remaining shreds of gaming media: “IGN Entertainment acquires Eurogamer, GI, VG247, Rock Paper Shotgun and more.”

Today in Books: Random Penguin will replace Knopf publisher Reagan Arthur and Pantheon publisher Lisa Lucas with no one.

Today in Dystopia: In Ars Technica Beth Mole writes, “Neuralink to implant 2nd human with brain chip as 85% of threads retract in 1st.” David Cronenberg-ass headline. You already know a headline that includes the phrase “‘doomsday’ glacier“ isn’t going to be good news. David Roth finally saw a cybertruck and the encounter inspired peak David Roth. And “Hims™ brand Ozempic” is one of those phrases that you don’t just read, you feel it deep in the crumbling remnants of your soul.

Today in PSAs: Don’t mess with moose.

Today’s Song: Billie Eilish, “L’AMOUR DE MA VIE”

It’s days like this that remind me of what Bill Murray told Scarlett Johansson at the end of “Lost in Translation”: “ᴵ ᵍᵘᵉˢˢ ᶦᵗ ʷᵃˢ ᵃˡˡ ʲᵘˢᵗ ˡᵒˢᵗ ᶦⁿ ᵗʳᵃⁿˢˡᵃᵗᶦᵒⁿ“

1  Which may yet rise the level of fracas.