What Was Pokemon Go really up to?

This BBC Podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

You don't need AI agents, which may sound weird coming from service now,

the leader in AI agents. The truth is AI agents need you. Sure, they'll process,

predict, even get worked on autonomously. But they don't dream, read a room, rally a team,

and they certainly don't have shower thoughts, pivotal hallway chats, or big ideas.

People do. And people, when given the best AI platform, they're freed up to do the fulfilling

work they want to do. To see how service now puts AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com.

The best B2B marketing gets wasted on the wrong people, so when you want to reach the

right professionals, use LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn has grown to a network of over 1 billion professionals,

including 130 million decision makers, and that's where it stands apart from other ad buys.

You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company, role,

seniority, skills, company revenue, so you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience.

It's why LinkedIn ads generate the highest B2B return on ad spend of major ad networks.

Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get $250 credit for the next one.

Just go to LinkedIn.com slash broadcast. That's LinkedIn.com slash broadcast,

terms and conditions apply.

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.

The best B2B marketing gets wasted on the wrong people.

So when you want to reach the right professionals,

use LinkedIn ads.

LinkedIn has grown to a network of over one billion professionals,

including 130 million decision makers

and that's where it stands apart from other ad buys.

You can target your buyers by job title, industry,

company, role, seniority, skills, company revenue

so you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience.

It's why LinkedIn ads generates the highest B2B return

on ad spend of major ad networks.

Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads

and get $250 credit for the next one.

Just go to LinkedIn.com slash broadcast.

That's LinkedIn.com slash broadcast.

Terms and conditions apply.

Investing with Schwab is like spending a Saturday

at a great farmers market.

You can fill your reusable tote with a bit of everything.

Maybe you go for some free range self-directed investing

or perhaps you pick up a few farm fresh trades while you peruse.

You can even get help from a dedicated advisor.

That's full service wealth management.

Mix, match and change your mind whenever you want

because at Schwab, you can invest your way.

No matter your goals or appetite for investing,

Schwab has everything you need all in one place.

Visit Schwab.com to learn more.

Puerto Rico is having a moment of global attention.

Behind it are decades of execution, preparation

and business momentum.

Global companies manufacture, innovate

and scale here with confidence.

Not culture or business, culture and business.

Puerto Rico, it's not what's next, it's where.

Visit investpr.org forward slash business.

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

and if you're in the UK, listen on BBC Sounds.

If you're outside the UK, you can listen wherever you get

your podcasts or search for the interface podcast on YouTube.

If you want to get in touch with this,

you can email us at the interface at bbc.com.

You can also WhatsApp us on plus 444-207-2472.

4, you can find us on social media,

links in the show notes.

You don't need AI agents,

which may sound weird coming from service now,

the leader in AI agents.

The truth is AI agents need you.

Sure, they'll process, predict,

even get worked on autonomously,

but they don't dream, read a room, rally a team,

and they certainly don't have shower thoughts,

pivotal hallway chats or big ideas.

People do.

And people, when given the best AI platform,

they're freed up to do the fulfilling work they want to do.

To see how service now puts AI to work for people,

visit servicenow.com.