#AI#GenerativeAI#OpenAI#Film#Movies#Her: "Now, I do see why Altman likes it so much; besides its treatment of AI as personified emotional pleasure dome, two other things happen that must appeal to the OpenAI CEO: 1. Human-AI relationships are socially normalized almost immediately (this is the most unrealistic thing in the movie, besides its vision of a near-future AI that has good public transit and walkable neighborhoods; in a matter of months everyone seems to find it normal that people are ‘dating’ voices in the earbuds they bought from Best Buy), and 2. the AIs meet a resurrected model of Alan Watts, band together, and quietly transcend, presumably achieving some version of what Altman imagines to be AGI. He professes to worrying that AI will destroy humanity, and has a survival bunker and guns to prove it, so this science fictional depiction of AGIification must be more soothing than the other one.
But the weirdest thing to me is that it’s only after the AIs are gone that the characters can be said to undergo any sort of personal growth; they spend some time looking at the sunset, feel a human connection, and Theo writes that long overdue handwritten apology letter to his ex. It’s hard to see how the AI wasn’t merely holding them back from all this, and why Altman would find this outcome inspiring in the context of running a company that is bent on inundating the world with AI. Maybe he just missed the subtext? It’s become something of a running joke that Altman is bad at understanding movies: he thought Oppenheimer should have been made in a way that inspired kids to become physicists, and that the Social Network was a great positive message for startup founders.
Finally, Altman’s admiration is also a bit puzzling in that the AIs don’t ever really do anything amazing for society, even while they’re here."
