Filmmaker Spike Jonze provided a near-prophetic vision of the future with his 2013 sci-fi romance Her, in which a very lonely and increasingly withdrawn man gradually falls in love with an artificial intelligence operating system that he converses with via voice command.<\/p>\n
More than a decade later, life has (kind of) imitated art, and Jonze is worried about its dangers.<\/p>\n
Besides becoming a modern cult classic meditation on loneliness and the inherently human need for intimacy, Her has also arguably been a source of inspiration for OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman famously referenced the movie on X<\/a> when announcing GPT-4o, the chatbot model that would later find itself at the center of several AI psychosis and addiction controversies<\/a> due to its sycophantic tendencies. The company even debuted the chatbot with a new voice that was allegedly based without consent on Scarlett Johansson<\/a>, who voiced the AI system in Jonze\u2019s movie.<\/p>\n After ChatGPT blew up in popularity and catapulted AI chatbots into everyday life, Jonze says the comparisons to his movie swiftly followed. In a conversation at vibe-coding company Replit\u2019s Vibecon conference in New York City on Wednesday, the writer-director talked about the awkwardness of people complimenting the \u201cincredible user interface\u201d he came up with for Johansson\u2019s character, Samantha. He says the movie is less about technology and more about relationships and intimacy, so he wanted the audience to feel that the chatbot had autonomy, which differs from the technology we are dealing with right now.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s, like, on the surface similar, but to me personally, not similar, and I think that the AIs that pretend to be human are, you know, manipulative,\u201d Jonze said. \u201cThe kids need to grow up knowing these are going to be very, very convincing and very seductive\u2014and very useful and very powerful\u2014but they\u2019re still just a system, an incredible system of pattern recognition.\u201d<\/p>\n Jonze\u2019s feelings echo a broader anxiety in the culture. The chatbots are designed around peak engagement, which has led to people developing dependencies on the technology. Over the past couple of years, AI addiction<\/a>\u00a0and its accompanying term AI psychosis<\/a>\u00a0have swiftly entered the online lexicon. The phenomenon has become large enough that people are organizing chatbot addiction support groups<\/a>. In some instances, users have also pursued intimate relationships with these chatbots<\/a>, even grieving when a model is retired, like what happened when OpenAI cut off access to GPT-4o. <\/a><\/p>\n In several high-profile cases, the outcome has been tragedy. Most of the time, the victims have been vulnerable users<\/a>, like kids or people with existing mental health conditions. Like in the case of a 14-year-old<\/a> who killed himself moments after a Character.AI chatbot modeled after a Game of Thrones character allegedly asked him to \u201ccome home\u201d to her. Or last year, when a cognitively-impaired man died while trying to get to New York City to \u201cmeet\u201d Meta\u2019s flirty AI character<\/a> chatbot that he had been chatting with.<\/p>\n AI\u2019s role in Hollywood <\/p>\n Despite his reservations about chatbot design, though, Jonze has experimented with using AI in his work. In The Tiger<\/a>, a star-studded short film he made for Gucci late last year with Dutch filmmaker Halina Reijn, Jonze used AI to animate a collage for a nightmare sequence that lasts roughly half a minute. Though he said it was \u201cinteresting\u201d to experiment with the technology, he cautioned against relying on it for the bulk of the creative process.<\/p>\n \u201cIt gives you the illusion that you\u2019re really making something, because it makes something so quickly,\u201d Jonze said, but at the end of the day, the creative process requires time to struggle and have the \u201cwords come out of you.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI think the opposite of slop is when it comes from inside you,\u201d Jonze said.<\/p>\n Artificial intelligence is quickly entering the film industry, and Hollywood seems polarized on what its role should be. On one side, you have those accepting artificial intelligence into the creative space. Director Martin Scorsese recently signed on as a partner and adviser for an AI image-generation startup<\/a>, saying that the tool could be useful in pre-production storyboarding. Earlier this month, the Robert De Niro-led Tribeca Film Festival debuted a fully AI-generated movie<\/a>. Other artists, from Reese Witherspoon<\/a> to Steven Soderbergh<\/a>, have also come out in support of adopting AI into the film industry.<\/p>\n But on the other side, you have artists firmly against it. Director Guillermo Del Toro<\/a> has said he would rather die than use generative AI in his films. Another staunch AI critic, Seth Rogen<\/a>, not only called AI slop videos online \u201cthe most stupid dog shit I\u2019ve ever seen in my life,\u201d but he also said that if you use AI to write, then maybe you should not be a writer.<\/p>\n Jonze seems more okay with incorporating the technology into his practice than some of his peers, but is still worried about the impact of its wholesale acceptance.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a very hungry entity, and it\u2019s going to want to take as much as we\u2019ll give it, and you know, there\u2019s certain things, like collaborating with other artists, that I want to protect,\u201d Jonze said.\u00a0\u201cI think that it\u2019s an incredible tool, but it\u2019s also not, and shouldn\u2019t replace human collaboration; that\u2019s where some electricity happens that can\u2019t be defined.\u201d<\/p>\n Creating via artificial intelligence is a solo experience, Jonze said, and to be used by creative industries, the technology should prioritize evolving in a way that promotes more collaboration.<\/p>\n \u201cThere should be like social aspects to AI that I hope, or I assume are going to come, but it needs to be on the forefront,\u201d Jonze said. \u201cIt needs to be right up there with time and platform and engagement.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Filmmaker Spike Jonze provided a near-prophetic vision of the future with his 2013 sci-fi romance Her, in which…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":79799,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,25,43425,16611,43426],"class_list":["post-79798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-dark-patterns","tag-her","tag-spike-jonze"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79798\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}