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When we play a game or fill in a form, are we training robots without knowing it - and would we consent if asked?
Remember Pokémon Go? The company behind it is repurposing the 30 billion images players captured to help robots navigate the real world. It’s the tip of a bigger trend: turning play into data collection. From CAPTCHAs to viral stunts like the Mannequin Challenge, our seemingly harmless online challenges are being quietly funnelled into AI training sets. It’s clever, but it raises awkward questions about consent, transparency, and who profits when our leisure becomes free labour for automation.
Also this week: the meme‑ification of war: games companies, anime producers and pop culture stars bristle at alleged use of their IP in pro‑war White House memes, we look at how politicians are using memes to lessen the severity of the war in Iran - and their role in a new kind of political campaigning. And the personality of AI: Alexa’s new “adult” mode isn’t sexy; it’s sassy. How tech firms craft voice, gender and tone for assistants - what feels inclusive, what feels exploitative, and what feels just downright weird?
The Interface is your weekly guide to the tech rewiring your week and our world. Hosted by journalists Thomas Germain, Karen Hao, and Nicky Woolf, each episode unpacks, week by week, the unfolding story of how technology is shaping all of our futures. No guests. No jargon. Just three sharp voices debating the tech stories that matter — whether they shook a government, broke the internet, or quietly tipped the balance of power.
New episodes drop every Thursday on BBC Sounds in the UK. Outside the UK, find us on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts, or watch the video version on YouTube (search “The Interface podcast”).
To get in touch with the team: [email protected] The Interface is a BBC Studios production. Producer: Natalia Rodriguez Ford Executive Editor: Philip Sellars
This BBC Podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.
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It turns out you were actually training robots.
These memes are being posted from official White House accounts.
Interacting with this thing like a person, that's not having no effects on you.
Welcome to the interface. The show that decodes how tech is rewiring your week and your world.
I'm Karen Howe.
I'm Thomas Germain, and I'm Nikki Wolf.
Today on the interface, we will be discussing how the White House is using memes
to sell the war in Iran.
Why Alexa's new voice is sassy, but not sexy?
And how you unwittingly trained robots while playing Pokemon Go.
Did you ever play Pokemon Go?
Hell yeah.
I think I tried it for like a day or two. It just didn't stick with me.
I don't know why.
I was obsessed with it for weeks.
Nikki, how do you even play Pokemon Go on your phone?
All right, so people who don't know, Pokemon Go,
are you mean on my phone?
Yes, on your phone.
And we should explain what Pokemon Go is.
Pokemon in general is a game about catching these small creatures and then making them fight.
Right. Pokemon Go is geolocated.
So you go out into the real world.
It's like kind of augmented reality.
You have your phone and it picks through the camera and then it shows
as if there's like Pokemon out on the street.
And then you can like capture them with, you know,
Pokeballs to the things you capture Pokemon with.
So you're like waving your phone around with the camera and it looks like
into whoever it is.
It's like on the subway with you.
Just on the subway.
And then they were they was a huge craze for a while.
It was massive in 2015, 2016, 2017.
Yeah, 2016 was I think peak Pokemon Go.
Yeah.
And there was a moment where a rare Pokemon appeared in Central Park.
And there was a almost a riot.
Like people rushed towards this thing.
I think a couple of people were injured in that.
Like people were taking risk.
People got really worse and it's still been going on.
People still play this game.
It turns out, Nikki.
And a little bit for you, Tom,
that you were actually training food delivery robots.
So what's happened is
why must you ruin everything?
That's my job.
I thought that's what I was doing on this show.
This is why we can't have nice things, guys.
Yes.
This was a story that was working my MIT technology room.
So apparently,
Niantic, which is a company that owned Pokemon Go,
last year they spun out into a new AI-focused company called Niantic Spatial.
And they are using the 30 billion images that hundreds of millions of users generated
while walking around the street with their phones,
pointed at different buildings to look for the Pokemon,
to create a visual positioning system,
which is basically an AMOLEDL that can tell robots
where they are based on what they're looking at.
And this is now what they are using to collaborate
with another company called Coco Robotics,
which is trying to build food delivery bots
to bring people up to eight extra large pizzas.
Direct to your home.
So this is a Pikachu to Pizza Pipeline.
This is a Pikachu to Pizza Pipeline.
The up to eight is really fascinating to me.
That's a really specific number of pizzas.
I know, that's why I thought it was so funny.
I'm flying with that.
As long as it's not being used to deliver nine pizzas.
That would be the right thing.
That would be that's gluttonous, I think.
That's just too much.
We got to draw the line somewhere.
This story is so representative
of so many things that are happening right now.
This is part of a growing trend in which
because AI companies just need so much data,
they are trying to find it in every possible corner.
And any company that has lots of data
is now offering it up for sale effectively.
And so I don't think Niantic in the beginning
when they developed Pokemon Go,
they were like, oh my god, this is going to be perfect
for creating data sets for training food delivery robots.
But now that there's this AI craze happening,
they're like, wait a minute, we can cash out further
on this rich data that we had.
And this is especially happening when it comes to robotics
because when you're training robots
to navigate the world, you need a whole lot of data.
And that's where companies get really creative
about where to actually look for that data.
And the thing that's so amazing about this
is like most of the maps of the world
that we have like Google maps and stuff like that,
it's taken from cars.
But because they could send little people,
little workers who think they're playing this game
out into places the cars can't go,
they have this incredible map of the world
that wasn't available before.
So right around the time they spun out this AI company,
the company was purchased by the Saudi Royal Wealth fund.
And immediately people started talking about like,
okay, they're not doing anything nefarious with the data now,
but this sure would be useful for weapons targeting systems
and things like that.
And the other thing that this data is good for,
so the data has the spatial data
that people are recording on their phones,
but also the data of exactly where people are
when they are playing the game.
And only just taken down,
there was, it turns out, a Pokey spot on Epstein's Island.
So for example, something that might be in this data set
is who was connecting to Pokemon Go on Epstein's Island.
That is now something that I guess
that Saudi, Southern, Wealth fund has in its data set.
Interesting.
That's right.
The thing to think about.
And what's so interesting is the fact
that this data was collected mostly in 2016.
So it's 10 years out of date.
And the world, the physical world changes a lot
on a year to year basis, especially over a decade.
And so like Cocoa Robotics has just deployed so far
around a thousand food delivery robots
and a few different cities to try and test out
essentially whether or not this model is working.
And 30 billion images to just a thousand robots
seems like disproportionate.
You know what I mean?
Like you would think that they would be able to get more
out of that data.
But I think it speaks to the fact that
you need an extraordinary amount of data
in order to get this stuff to work.
And also that the quality of the data is maybe not as high
as we would believe because it's 10 years out of date.
Right. Well, the robots are delivering food
but they're hungry too.
They need lots and lots of beautiful data.
We're talking about Pokemon Go.
Maybe you've never played this game.
Maybe your data wasn't involved.
But all over our digital lives now,
we are being put to work training AI systems
in ways that we don't realize.
My favorite example is captures.
You know, when they like ask you to prove
that you were a human being before you go to a website.
And you know, they give you that like image.
It's like, yeah, click every part of this
that has a tree in it or whatever it is.
They're not checking whether you clicked the right boxes
necessarily in order to prove you're human.
They're like watching the way you move your mouse and stuff.
But when you're clicking on the image
and identifying different parts of like, you know,
this picture saying this is a tree, that's a motorcycle.
You are helping train AI systems.
Like they've put all of us billions of us at a time
at work, like teaching robots how to see
because they're using our ability to pick out stuff
in these pictures.
And this, it's not just captures everywhere.
I mean, Karen, you've done a lot of reporting on this, right?
Yeah, I mean, the thing that's funny about captures
is it's like more explicit.
Like they intended from the beginning
and they designed it in this way to capture this data set.
But also regularly, researchers will just repurpose data
that was collected for a totally different reason.
So my favorite example is in 2019,
there was a research paper out of Google
talking about how they used YouTube videos
of people doing the mannequin challenge.
Do you remember the mannequin challenge?
This was also back in 2016.
It was when you would play music
and then everyone would freeze out of beat
and then someone would, with a camera,
what pans were so cool back then.
But things were so cool in 2016.
Yeah, Pokemon, we were still happy back then.
It was a more innocent time.
It was a more innocent time.
Except for our data.
Exactly, and they exploited the crap out of our naivete
with that innocence.
So yeah, like the Google researchers literally downloaded
all those YouTube videos of people doing the mannequin challenge,
which was not something Google designed
to collect that data, right?
They just found this data set and they were like,
oh, you know, it would be really useful
using this to train depth perception for robots as well.
Like robots, they see the world in 2D,
but they need to understand it in 3D.
So what's more useful than something
that looks like a 2D image because it's frozen people,
but then you get to explore the two dimensions in 3D.
And any trace that you leave online
or through your apps, your gaming, or whatever,
you don't really know how it's going to get repurposed,
especially in the US because Americans
don't have any federal data privacy law.
And the problem is that there's AI and robotics kind
of industries have a near bottomless need
for more and more data.
Like there's never going to be enough data
to train these robots and these data sets, right?
One of the things that I started noticing
that companies are now doing because they
realized that games in the past were such a good generator
of data is they're now gamifying the data collection process.
So opening, I had those viral trends
where they allowed people to turn their photos
into Miyazaki style images or into action figure packs.
And I was talking with a former open-air employee
at the time and he was like, oh, yeah,
that's basically just growth hacking.
Like they're just trying to get more data and more users.
They're just like using this enticing facade
to get more people.
You know, dance form and we'll turn it into data.
So should people be mad at Pikachu?
You still got to catch a mole, man.
That hasn't changed.
That's true.
I loved Pokemon Go.
It was around 2016, 2017.
I spent ages on this.
I was living in San Francisco at the time.
I would just wander around downtown,
looking for rap Pokemon.
And you would see other people across the street.
And you'd sort of look up from the phone
and look at someone be like, there's a blast host there.
Yeah, yeah, like it was great.
You were meeting people, you were getting out there.
I mean, yeah, 2016, I'm sure everyone remembers
there's this very famous Hillary Clinton quote
where Pokemon Go had gotten so big
that she was giving a speech and she said,
everyone's, I think the quote was,
everyone's talking about Pokemon Go.
I'm trying to figure out how to get people to Pokemon Go
to the polls.
Yeah, I was in, which I think is probably
the most famous thing she'll ever say.
I was in the room when she said that.
I was covering them in the campaign.
I was in the room and I remember so vividly thinking,
oh, she's gonna lose.
Like that, that was the moment.
What was the reaction in the room when she said that?
I have, I have never seen a room full of people
cringe that hard simultaneously.
It was just like, right.
Ooh, it's like looking into a crystal ball.
Yeah, I had such a clear vision of the future
in that moment and now we're living it.
This kind of speaks to politicians
rise and fall now based on their ability
to understand pop culture and especially internet culture
and then be able to tap into the meme culture.
And this was an instance where Hillary Clinton tried
to do that and it totally fell flat.
It goes back to the beginning, right?
Like, you know, Nixon saying, socket to me, right?
Well, yeah, politicians trying to dip into pop culture
as old as politics itself, right?
Except the difference is that now the pop culture
that's being referenced is the internet
and the culture that has developed organically
on the internet.
And that has led to something completely new
that we're seeing take place very vividly
in who I'm more.
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So the Pokemon company, the company that owns
the Intellectual Property and Max Pokemon Games,
has joined a bunch of other voices in condemning the White House
for using the images of Pokemon in memes to do with the Iran War.
This is something entirely new, what's going on during this war,
which is if you look at the TikTok accounts
and the social media accounts of the White House and the Pentagon,
they are using meme culture to sell this war in a way that is,
if you look at some of the content that's being put out,
it's kind of nutty stuff.
You've got actual clips of footage of strikes in Iran,
spliced in together with Trump speaking, spliced in with clips
from top gun clips from Pokemon, clips from American football games.
So there's a bunch of American football players
who've also joined it speaking out because they're,
I mean, it's really sick stuff.
There'll be a picture of a bomb strike hitting a target,
and then it'll like spliced in with a touchdown,
like it's really down on basketball.
Now this happened about four days into this war.
There was a kind of change in how the White House was
putting out this information.
Before then, they'd been quite straightforward,
clips and statements.
And then suddenly they started memeifying all of this.
The views of the White House's content jumped more than 60%
after they started doing this kind of thing.
So we're talking five, six million views
on their TikTok videos.
People are really getting this stuff in front of their faces.
It's very much putting forward a bombastic and uncaring face
on what is truly a horrible conflict.
And it's the White House defining the tone of what it's doing.
And speaking to its base and making a kind of campaigning
viewpoint out of it.
And it's pretty brand new in terms of how war is approaching.
I mean, if anything, something it reminded me of
is the kind of stuff you would see in World War I and World War II,
where you would get these posters or postcards
that would be the monstrous,
German, S-Tried, Europe, kind of thing.
That is an example of memeifying war.
Right, but it takes it to a different extreme, right?
Yeah.
But also it's this new form of communication that's available
because everything is so bifurcated, right?
That they can like, you wouldn't,
the White House is gonna put this together
in an ad that plays on CBS,
but they can appeal to a particular kind of like
very online young person.
There's this quote that a spokesperson
from the White House gave on this stuff,
which I'm gonna read this through engaging posts
and banger memes.
We are successfully communicating the president's
extremely popular agenda.
Oh my God.
So that statement was actually about meme videos
on ice recruitment about Minneapolis
rather than about the war,
but the White House has been using
exactly the same strategy for both of these things.
And it's trying, there are two separate things
that the White House is trying to do with this.
One is to build up support
among its terminally online base
for what is a historically unpopular war,
but it's also to troll the libs.
It's to make people upset with it.
They want to be either exciting people
and upsetting people at the same time.
Yeah, I mean, the rage bait is definitely working,
but is the first part of their goals actually working?
Like, is it in fact exciting the base?
It's hard to measure.
Certainly it's not changing the polling support
for the war that remains absolutely in the basement.
But all of this meme stuff is what Trump has done.
I mean, remember when they were protests in New York,
the White House released an AI-generated video
of Trump flying over them in a bomber,
dropping liquid feces on the protesters.
And on specific people, right?
Like specifically, we're leading the movement.
These memes are being posted from official White House
and Pentagon accounts.
And it is an astonishing sign of how far we've come
that to sort of take a step back
and look at this posting of this video game meme
about an actual war that the government has started.
Well, it's this discussion that's been happening
for a long time about the Trump administration's
communications strategy and the way that Trump talks,
that a lot of it is like lessons learned
from what works on the internet.
That like you don't have to have this like reasoned
analytical, finicky debate.
You can just make jokes.
You can just declare that you're correct.
You can charge forward.
It's been very effective.
And now it's becoming a little more literal
where it's not just the kind of thing
that works on the internet.
And now it's just like actual memes.
And isn't just the war in Iran, right?
Like they were using videos like this to recruit for ICE, right?
This has just now become like the mainstream way
that the government is communicating specifically
to young people.
And I think a sign of like a real serious like changing
of the guard where the Republican party
is shifting younger and younger
and it seems to be working really well.
Yeah, it's a different kind of style, ultimately.
And it's a style that has a whole load of nihilism to it.
The kind of idea that everything is funny.
And it's not just the US government doing it.
For example, and this kind of this goes back a little bit
to what we were talking earlier about captures.
The foreign minister of Lithuania a little while ago
when Finland joined NATO posted a capture meme
that was a split into a grid of nine picture
of just a snowy forest and the capture is asking
select all images with finished snipers.
That's, you know, international politicians
opposed to stuff.
Right, it's this bigger trend.
Like I've heard a lot of people complaining about this recently
just with like the, you know, the horrific images of war
that we've been seeing coming out of the Middle East.
You're on TikTok, you're on Instagram, you're like flooded
with like one of the most upsetting things you've ever seen.
And then you scroll and it's like, you know,
some guy streaming a video game
and then it's like a really stupid vulgar joke
and just it the whole all of human existence
is being flattened because it's all happening
on the same level with no context.
There's no like opportunity to process stuff.
We're all kind of it's scrolling.
You're flooded with all of this information and content
and it all starts to become meaningless.
But I think in the long term, this also weakens
the government's authority, right?
Because we're brave.
It used to be that like the government spoke
and it was like, you know, it was austere
and this is like serious important stuff.
And now it's like memes and jokes,
which like, you know, depending on your feelings
about the government, you could maybe you could say
that's a good thing.
But it definitely is like, it's a short term power move
but ultimately what will the effect be
that everything in our world is happening
on the exact same level, on the exact same, you know,
amount and magnitude of seriousness.
Yeah.
So we started with Pokemon and we got a little more serious.
Let's round it out on a gentler note here.
So last week, Amazon announced that if you pay
for Alexa Plus, which is like smarter Alexa,
you have some exciting new options.
So there's four different tones that you can choose
from for how Alexa is going to speak with you.
And one of them stands out to me in particular.
It's the new Alexa sassy mode,
which is for adults only.
So in order to get this new sassy Alexa,
you have to go through security checks,
you have to prove that you're an adult.
If you're on an iPhone,
then you have to do like a facial recognition scan
that shows that you're not a kid
because sassy mode uses explicit language.
And I was on warns that it might get a little adult
but it won't be sexy.
They said it's not gonna have sex with you.
It's not gonna talk be too explicit.
It won't do hate speech,
which like I guess thank you.
I wasn't expecting Alexa.
Yeah, I don't have to specify that it's not gonna do hate.
Reassuring, right?
But it's part of this very weird thing
that's happening with computers and our phones now,
which is now every app wants to talk to you.
So raises interesting questions.
What will it be like when it speaks?
What kind of voice is it gonna use?
So this isn't new, right?
Like Siri has been around forever
and for years and years and years.
You've been able to choose what voice you want Siri
to use when it talks to you.
And I think there's more like interesting stuff here going on
than you might think at first, right?
There's actually some very weird social questions
built into this.
I was an early adopter of Alexa until I got rid of it.
Which feels so contrary to your whole career.
I know.
Did you have a voice? Did you have a voice?
I just had the generic voice.
Yeah, like and I just, I call it Alexa
because you know, you can also switch the wake word
for different things.
But I never, I never just see it.
That's the thing you say it all the time.
You know, hey Siri, hey Alexa.
Yeah, exactly.
And of course now that we're all three saying it
in our different voices, for sure by now
if you have one we've triggered it, right?
We can't look at it somewhere.
One time I was talking with my friends
that we were having dinner in my apartment
and I was like, oh yeah.
And you know, like,
Alexa can be creepy sometimes
and sometimes it's listening
and it literally goes,
you could look at our Amazon privacy policy at da da da da da
and I was like, that's it.
That's it.
I'm like in this device.
Yeah, I have no power.
Have fun.
Let's look at some of the voices
that you can choose for Siri for example.
We don't have an Alexa here in the room
because, you know, privacy, right?
But hold on, let me turn this on.
All right, so I'm going to cycle through the different voices
that you could pick.
This is voice one for Siri.
The colors of the sky fade with the setting sun.
The colors of the sky fade with the setting sun.
The colors of the sky fade with the setting sun.
The colors of the sky fade.
And then of course we can change the accent.
The colors of the sky fade with the setting sun.
The colors of the sky fade with the setting sun.
It's interesting, right?
So you can choose the accents.
It's American, Australian, British, Indian, Irish
and South African.
the only accents in the whole world,
but when these voices were released, right,
when Apple started giving you more options,
a lot of people noticed that in one of these updates,
the voices that they're using sound
like they are coming from a black person.
This is a thing that people have picked up on.
It's not something that Apple or any of these companies
say explicitly, some people celebrated this.
They're like, this is fantastic, right?
We're like for the longest time,
computers always have one particular voice.
It's a white woman, right, for like the whole history
of artificial intelligence, even in sci-fi.
And some people saw this as like a win for inclusivity,
but then others are like, this is kind of strange
that these tech companies are like choosing to speak with us
in like a particularly like racialized voice.
There was a column earlier last year
that was talking about this from Karen Atia at,
she was a columnist at the Washington Post
before the Washington Post Philip Hart.
And she talked about how Meta had also tried to do this
with their AI avatars, where they were coding their avatars
with very specific types of personalities, personas,
whatever, a backstory, and also specific races.
And she felt that the character that Meta chose to make black
was a kind of digital blackface.
It's like you are saying that you're trying to be inclusive
to your users.
What you're really doing is just creating all of these different
races to capture more users.
And it's not like real inclusion,
because you know, Meta barely has any black people
working at the company and many of these tech companies
across the industry, that is true as well.
Yeah, and it's like the whole point of this,
like why are they doing this?
Well, they want you to build a personal relationship
with the company.
It's not Meta the corporation.
It's not open AI, you know, a thing that's run by Sam Altman.
It's this like friend you have that you talk to every day
and it speaks to you and you can make it sassy.
Or I guess with Amazon, you can also make it sweet or chill.
There's all these different options
so you can like tune it to fit just right
with your personality.
And I think ideally make you more drawn in
and locked into these ecosystems.
This isn't just a conversation about like the racial identities
of these voices.
There's been an ongoing very long debate as well
about the gender identity of these voices
because the default voice across every single voice assistant
ever has always been a woman.
And years ago, I was working at courts,
which was this digital publication based in New York
and one of my colleagues, she did this story, Leah Fessler,
where she actually was testing not just the fact
that all these bots speak as women,
but she was also testing to what degree
they would be subservient
versus actually pushback of a user would harass
the voice assistant.
And she found that when you said to Siri,
you're a bitch, which by the way,
a lot of users would do because it speaks like a woman.
Siri would then say, I would blush if I could.
What?
Yeah, exactly.
Not only is it about the way that these companies choose
to embody a certain persona to attract
and develop trust with users,
it also then affects the way that users learn
to speak with these chat bots
and then potentially leaks into the way
that they interact with real people in their day to day lives.
And so after Leah Fessler did this story,
the UN actually recreated her report
and talked about how this was like a gender equity issue
because it was projecting this idea that like women
are subservient and should be, you know,
the voice of these assistants that are meant to serve you
and that if you abuse them, that's wholly fine
and they should just, you know, be demure about it
and laugh it off and whatever.
And the recommendation was like,
maybe we should stop doing this.
Like maybe we should stop making every single voice assistant
female.
Well, I can hear the like complaining counter-argument
to this was like, well, who cares?
It's just a computer like, what is this matter?
You're making too big of a deal out of this.
But like, you have to remember,
you're interacting with this thing like a person
that's not having no effect on you.
It's not like this totally inert thing in our society.
The way, like the tone of interactions,
the way that we talk to whether it's people
or computers or whatever it is,
it, you carry that in to the rest of your life
and the rest of our world.
So these things have a huge impact,
especially when you think about like how many billion people
have an iPhone, like these are huge cultural forces
in our society.
And it's not the what this new sassy mode is going to be
different without tell you to go to hell if you're mean to it.
So in the press release, it does say that the reason
why it's an adult mode, I mean, it uses explicit language.
But yes, it also is meant to push back on you.
So I just need to read this because it's so funny.
So this is what the press release says.
The sassy style is built on one premise.
Help first, judge, always expect reality checks
delivered with charm, compliments that somehow sting
and warmth you didn't see coming.
Which is in a way this weird competitive thing
like happening in the background
because this is a criticism that open AI constantly
gets for chat GPT that it's like too effusive,
that it always agrees with you.
Yeah, always tells you your ideas are great.
So here they're like, well, this one
will argue.
Given what we said about the extremely demure,
extremely passive ones leading to people
to think that that is the way to treat women,
that this seems like a promising step from that.
You know, I honestly feel like Amazon probably,
there was probably some motivation to respond
to that criticism with this.
Because at the time when that report came out from the UN,
I mean, it was, Amazon was like the main player in the game.
I mean, there was Siri as well,
but no one was really using Siri at the time.
I mean, no one's still, no one uses Siri.
But, you know, like, I use Siri every day.
I don't really talk to my phone.
Yeah, I don't use it for a lot,
but like if I'm going to send a text
or I mean, setting a timer is the obvious one,
but anything I can where it actually works,
what voice does your Siri use?
Well, I think this is a really interesting question.
Like, how do you decide which voice
you want your digital assistance to use?
Like, I would love to hear from listeners here.
Like, there's all, there's all a million different ways
you can contact us who put it in the comments, send us an email.
How did you choose which voice your AI uses?
Or did you even choose?
Because you're using people.
Exactly.
Okay, so knowing the internet,
this is going to lead very quickly to sexy stuff, right?
This is a slippery slope.
And it already has.
It already has.
Yes.
Do you know the story of opening AI,
modeling Chatchee BT off of her?
The movie, the sci-fi movie,
with Scarlett Johansson, Spike Jones.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's like a guy walking Phoenix falls in love
with his phone, like the female voice AI.
Exactly.
I think most people know the controversy
that happened where Scarlett Johansson was like,
really angry at the fact that it appeared
that opening AI had used her voice,
but it turned out it was just another voice actress
that sounded remarkably like Scarlett Johansson.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And was like intonating in the voice of Chatchee BT
almost exactly the way that the movie her does.
Is it a coincidence?
You know, the opening AI said it was,
but then they pulled, they removed the voice, right?
They're like, we're sorry.
Got rid of that particular one.
They did.
They acted.
They were like, we don't know what you're talking about.
Like there's no way that we at,
but in reporting my book, what I found was that,
Sam Altman and all the opening AI executives,
for years, years, talked about the movie her
as their North Star of what they were trying to achieve.
They were like, we want it to feel like this ever-present AI model
that's just so seamless and has this amazing sexy voice
and we want it to feel like that
where it's just like perfectly assisting people.
And I, there's this quote that I,
when I was doing interviews on this
that I thought was particularly funny
where a former employee, I was asking him,
I was like, well, you know, like that movie's also just,
like it goes badly.
Right, yeah, it's a cautionary tale, right?
And he said to me, this was like one of my favorite clothes.
He was like, I would think it's because it was an assistant
that was wonderfully integrated into a life.
And the positive arc of that story,
before it on Raffles is a really great story
of AI's evolution in society.
And of course, in that movie,
their Joaquin Phoenix falls in love
and then they try to have sexual relations
where the voice assistant sends like a physical woman
to his apartment to try and embody the voice.
And this is like not science fiction.
Right, this is the product roadmap of OpenAI.
So XAI, which is Elon Musk's AI company,
has a like, I forget what it's called,
but there's like an adult mode where it like,
we'll immediately start flirting with you
and try it at like sex
and it'll like send you AI generated, you know,
nudes and things like that.
Those companies like Repa AI,
which are explicitly AI girlfriends,
old boyfriends, but, you know,
the gender balance of the users is very much skewed.
Right.
Male, that it designed to make people fall in love
with the AI and exactly that.
Right.
If you fall in love with your computer,
it is going to be a huge business windfall.
Yeah, you had absolute cash cows
as soon as you're in love with the computer.
Yeah, I mean, this is topic for a whole other show,
but like the relationships that people are building
with these AI tools,
I think a lot of the time, like in the media
and like the popular discourse that gets framed
is like these sad men alone in their basements,
but it's not a mistake, right?
These tools are designed for this sort of thing to happen
and like as always, like,
well, well, the social consequences be,
well, we're gonna find out.
Yeah, I really feel like that is the logical conclusion
of why these companies are ultimately creating.
These voice personas is,
they want to develop trust,
but like the maximum version of trust that makes it really
addictive and sticky to be using these products.
So much so that it becomes love.
Thanks so much for listening.
If you liked what you heard, you can join us next week
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