Dingus of the week: Sam Altman
Siri, what is gaslighting?
Silicon Valley seems obsessed with finding ways to replace women. Grocery delivery. Food delivery. Laundry. Managing administrative tasks. All the things that Silicon Valley seeks to disrupt are roles that for a long time, and probably still for many of the tech bros, were done by mothers and wives.
Need sex? No need to know how to like women or talk to them if you have dating apps!
Need a sandwich but you can’t tell a woman to make you a sandwich anymore because of “woke”? Use GrubHub!
You don’t need a girlfriend or a mommy; you just need an app.
Enter OpenAI, a service that is supposed to be reliable, pleasant, tirelessly fulfilling all your desires, and never bored of your stupid irritating questions, Trevor!
Kate Crawford, a scholar of artificial intelligence, pointed out on Twitter, “AI assistants invoke gendered traditions of the secretary, a figure of administrative and emotional support, often sexualized. Underpaid and undervalued, secretaries still had a lot of insight into private and commercially sensitive dealings. They had power through information. But just as secretaries were taught to hide their knowledge, AI agents are designed to make us to forget their power as they are made to fit within non-threatening, retrograde feminine tropes. These are powerful data extraction engines, sold as frictionless convenience.”
Anyway, cool world you are building, bros. Be a shame if women had autonomy or agency in it.
Crawford also co-authored an article about the ways in which industry has always relied on the open, easy, pleasing, and sexually desirable voices of white women, to make their dystopian visions more appealing.
You don’t even have to be a secretary to be treated like one. How often has a woman been asked a question by a man that was so easily Googlable? Every damn day is the answer.
OpenAI was developed by a lot of tech guys who didn’t go to college because no one needs that anymore. But they did read a couple of dystopian sci-fi novels and, instead of seeing them as warnings about what technology might do to society, got some really cool ideas.
Yeah, Margaret Atwood, what if women were nothing but rigidly controlled baby-making machines? GREAT IDEA. Sounds perfect. No notes, queen.
Hell yeah, Anthony Burgess. Doing mind experiments on petty criminals, then releasing them, defenseless, into the world will have no repercussions whatsoever.
What’s that, George Orwell? Animals inventing fascism? Sounds great — let’s make it happen! That’s our guy Orwell, the great farmyard disruptor.
Ray Bradbury, you lil genius, what if we DID eliminate all sources of complexity, nuance, and confusion, and got rid of all the books so people’s minds could just be blissfully happy, smooth brain, no thoughts. There are famously no problems with this.
And for the guys who couldn’t be bothered to read a book, enter the 2013 movie Her, where Joaquin Phoenix plays an unhappy divorced man who falls in love with a virtual assistant voiced by Scarlett Johanssen. The movie depicts a sad dystopia. But sad dystopia made real seems to be the tagline for Silicon Valley innovation these days.
Brian Barrett, writing for Wired, discussed this dystopian-to-cool-new-tech-innovation trend in a piece published earlier this month, noted, “And maybe media literacy is low on the wish list for Big Tech CEO attributes. But as long as this keeps happening, it’s worth calling out. If we’re building toward a certain vision of the future, it’s worth understanding which sci-fi sacred texts are guidebooks and which are cautionary tales. Being friends with AI will be so much easier than forging bonds with human beings. That doesn’t mean it’s better. Sometimes it’s much worse.”
Surprising no one, the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, is obsessed with Her. And he apparently really wanted Scarlett Johansson to be the voice of OpenAI. But when he first approached the actress, she said “No.” Much like many of the men I have dated, Altman, undeterred by rejection or the wants and needs of a woman, pushed forth in pursuit of his own desires. Altman released OpenAI with a voice that really sounds a lot like Scarlett Johansson. So much so that the actress released a statement outlining the timeline of her talks with Altman and threatening to sue the company.
Altman, who launched the product by tweeting “her,” has denied he used her voice, saying it’s the voice of another actress. Like, you idiots, hahaha why would this voice that sounds like the actress I am obsessed with and wanted to do this project sound like her?
It’s not like AI has some well-documented problems with using information without the consent of the creators.
Listen, it wouldn’t be the first time a man has taken something from a woman and pretended like it was his to use all along.
Brian Merchant (have tech writers considered not being named Brian?), writing in his fabulous newsletter, pointed out that maybe dystopia is the point, explaining, “Lots of people, especially lonely men, would like to be surrounded full-time by a Scarlett Johansson bot that acts like it cares deeply about them and thinks they’re funny. Who cares if ultimately it is revealed in the film that the AI was not actually engaging in a personal loving relationship with the protagonist but a simulation of one, and that simulation was keeping him — and humans everywhere — from enjoying basic human experiences and depriving them of lasting connection with other people? It’s a personal 24/7 Scarlett Johansson AI companion.”
Despite Altman’s protestations, OpenAI shut down its voice feature after the threat of the lawsuit.
Anyway, cool world you are building, bros. Be a shame if women had autonomy or agency in it.
Vox also had a great article about the whole thing. The best part was when writer Sigal Samuel asked Chat GPT what it’s called when a man casts doubt on a woman’s clear concerns and well-documented issues with your behavior.
And now for something good
Your girl is being honored at the Iowa author awards in October at the Des Moines Public Library.
The Twin’s good luck sausage continues to spread luck and not giardia.
The bar is so low that men saying, “Hey, radical thought, but maybe saying that women should just be wives and mothers kinda sucks” makes them heroes. But okay, Eddie Vedder did it and can be a hero.
As for me and my house? We love Four Seasons baby.
Kerry Kennedy is fighting back against her brother. If it was me fighting my brother I’d simply be telling the world that he’s stupid and smelly and once thought he could remember his ACTUAL birth but when I asked him, “What color was the carpet?” and he said “Green” I was like “Hahaha you dummy hospital birthing rooms don’t have carpet!” Also he was 10 then. Anyway, the Kennedys seem to be doing this with a little more panache.
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What I am drinking
This week, after a chance encounter on an airplane, I took a new friend out to some of my favorite spots in town and we drank old fashioneds and talked about all the meals we’ve ever loved, played pool, and had a footrace in the streets. It was a wonderful 48 hours. And it’s a reminder that the world is big and beautiful and full of coincidence and old fashioneds and joy and meaning, even in the middle of all this mess.
The serendipity of the meeting and the brief friendship, reminded me of my favorite novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, where Milan Kundera writes so movingly about people furiously finding love, connection, and desire in the flat face of fascism. In the book, Kundera writes, “Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.”
He’s talking about our desire to find signs to make meaning from our lives. In the very next paragraph, Kundera continues, writing about Anna Karenina and the characters in his own novel, “It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and the death or meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.”
This week, for me, a simple old fashioned, jokes about Einstein and ducks were enough beauty. I hope you find beauty this week as well. Cheers.
Altman's denial of what he so clearly did reminds me of how toddlers will sometimes close their eyes and think you can't see them.
I grew up in Silicon Valley and happen to be here visiting my parents right now. My mom volunteers at a blood bank. She says all the young tech bros that come in all ask her help finding girlfriends, not for sex but for cooking when their office cafeterias are closed on the weekend. SMH....This is a long way of offering an anecdote to say how right you and your analysis is, Lyz.