The Weekly Weird #25

OpenAI's Sky won't fly, a futuristic head trip, Germany poops on speech, Microsoft's Copilot promises total recall

May 22, 2024

Greetings and salutations, fellow Weirders!

Welcome back once more, for this 25th (!) edition of our weekly wander through the wilderness of weirdness. Time flies when you’re discombobulated by the dolorous drumbeat of dystopian doings besetting the world on all sides, right?

The next episode of the podcast drops this Sunday, 26 May, so make sure you check it out.

Housekeeping over, let’s crack on!

OpenAI’s Sky Won’t Fly

They say that life imitates art, but the meta nature of the tech industry’s assault on reality has ratcheted up another notch this week.

In last week’s Weird (#24), we covered the launch of OpenAI’s Chat-GPT4o, now available as an app that will listen to you through your microphone, watch you through your camera, and talk back to you. This led me to make a by-now well-worn comparison between the new iteration of Chat-GPT and Spike Jonze’s dystopian romance Her, in which Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with an AI voiced by Scarlett Johansson.

Unlike emotionally balanced and socially capable people, it seems that the Silicon Valley set don’t all see a film about a grown man developing an obsession with a fake woman that lives in his smartphone as a bummer. It turns out that the resemblance between Sky (the voice of the new ChatGPT) and Johansson (as showcased in the many videos they released) may not have been entirely coincidental.

Sam Altman, the head honcho over at OpenAI, apparently approached Johansson to be the voice of their product because he loved the film Her and thought it would be a cool crossover, so when she turned him down and he released the app with a strikingly similar voice, lawyers started their stopwatches. He even tweeted the word ‘her’ on its own on May 13, implying at least an acknowledgment of, if not an intention behind, the connection between the film and his app that aped it.

The replies he received were not all complimentary.

Altman’s tweet may end up being a key piece of evidence in this sordid affair, as it supports the allegation that the choices made by OpenAI (already in trouble for using the work of others to train their language models without permission or compensation) may constitute a legal breach.

As Sky News reported:

Mr Altman approached the 39-year-old Oscar nominee to voice the current ChatGPT 4.0 system last September but Johansson declined for personal reasons, she said in a statement.
"He told me that he felt that by my voicing the system, I could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and AI. He said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people."

Johansson continued, in her statement:

"Two days before the ChatGPT 4.0 demo was released, Mr Altman contacted my agent, asking me to reconsider. Before we could connect, the system was out there."

You read correctly. Altman approached her twice, nine months before and two days before the launch, and now, with a Peter Griffin fart-in-the-elevator level of dissembling, is pretending he never wanted ChatGPT to sound like her.

OpenAI has now paused the controversial voice "out of respect for Ms Johansson", according to Mr Altman in a statement on Tuesday. The company offers five voices that can speak generated answers through its ChatGPT service.
However, the tech giant denied Sky was ever based on the actress's voice.
"The voice of Sky is not Scarlett Johansson's, and it was never intended to resemble hers," said Mr Altman.

This is the guy who controls the company that has built the closest thing yet to artificial general intelligence. This guy. We’re going to let this guy build Skynet. Really?

For fun, check out this Reddit thread called Exactly how stupid was what OpenAI did to Scarlett Johansson?

As one user put it, with a clarity and directness sadly lacking in most of the media coverage:

These aren't cheesy tech bros. They aren't nerds. They aren't rock stars. They're the same greedy corporate asshole types who want to own your house, your water supply and keep your wallet constantly funnelling them money for their services and private planes. It's an easy joke, but it ain't funny.

Darn tootin’. It’s a joke alright, but it ain’t funny.

A Futuristic Head Trip

A company called BrainBridge released a mind-blowing video this week demonstrating their visualisation of the technology they’re developing, “the world’s first head transplant system”.

As you’ll see in the above video, they tout the release of an all-in-one machine solution for full head transplants, where the donor and recipient bodies are side-by-side for speed and efficiency.

Besides suggesting that head transplants could be used for people with paralysis or terminal cancer, BrainBridge also allude to the possibility of life extension, claiming that the human brain can last for several hundred years as long as the body it is attached to is healthy.

From their website:

BrainBridge is the world’s first revolutionary concept for head transplant system, employing cutting-edge robotics and artificial intelligence to ensure successful head and face transplantation procedures with improved outcomes and faster recoveries.

Forget the infamous blood transfusions of the West Coast billionaire class. Why settle for the blood when you can have the whole enchilada?

In a nod to John Woo’s delightfully silly, incredibly complicated, and increasingly possible film Face/Off, the BrainBridge rig would also enable face transplants.

BrainBridge will be able to conduct face and scalp transplantation to restore functionality and aesthetic appearance. Younger donor tissues reduce the risk of rejection and enhance appearance, with meticulous suturing and post-operative care to promote healing and minimize scarring.

Healing after a head transplant would be pretty involved and probably require immobilisation to avoid busting your stitches and having your head fall off, but fear not! BrainBridge have thought of everything.

The BrainBridge Head Band, equipped with a Brain-Computer Interface, allows patients to communicate their needs during recovery, control devices, and execute tasks independently using their thoughts, enhancing autonomy and quality of life.

The best bit of all? It’s fiction (at least for now).

BrainBridge is the brainchild of Hashem Al-Ghaili, the Berlin-based producer, filmmaker, science communicator, and molecular biologist who previously made a splash with his visualisation of an “artificial womb facility” (baby factory) called EctoLife.

With BrainBridge, as in the above video of a Matrix-style foetus farm, Al-Ghaili sets out to both push forward the bleeding edge of tech and also comment on it. I’ve reached out to him about coming on the podcast, and I sincerely hope he accepts, it would be fascinating to have a chat with him.

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Germany Poops On Speech

As of April 1, 2024, it is much easier for German civil servants to be dismissed from their jobs because of their personal views or political opinions.

Put with characteristic Teutonic bluntness by Nancy Faeser, Federal Minister of the Interior:

“Anyone who rejects the state cannot serve it.”

ZDF reported on the change in the law (excerpts translated from German by Google):

The reform provides that the authorities will in future be able to issue disciplinary orders against extremist officials - which will then be examined retrospectively by the administrative court. The decision may include all disciplinary measures, including downgrading, removal from civil service, and deprivation of retirement. Those affected can file a lawsuit against the order.
It is also envisaged that a conviction for sedition in the event of a prison sentence of six months or more will result in the loss of civil rights.

Well, “extremist officials” don’t sound good. Why wouldn’t a country want to prevent lunatics from handling the gears of Der Staat? The devil, as always, is in the detail. Who gets to determine the definition or parameters of the extremity in question? In this case, the government, or whomever is in their employ as the manager or overseer of the allegedly extreme officials in question.

I went to Berlin and sat in court watching while the German justice system tried to railroad the writer, satirist, genuine mensch, and friend-of-the-show

CJ Hopkins

for his views on the pandemic restrictions and mask mandates. Not only did they trot out some pretty risible arguments as to why they thought he was guilty of what amounted to a thought crime at most, they even doubled down after losing by using their statutory right to appeal, meaning that more time and money and energy will yet be expended by the German government simply to attempt to prove a point and establish a precedent, to no particular valuable end other than the use of power in defence of the power of that power to assert itself, and to send out the message that sniffing at government overreach will get you spanked.

In a nutshell, I’d say I regard askance the sound judgment of the German authorities when it comes to who is and isn’t an extremist.

To put the law change into perspective as the sledgehammer-to-crack-a-walnut that it is, here’s ZDF again:

According to the Federal government in 2021, 373 disciplinary measures were imposed in the federal administration. In relation to the total number of around 190,000 civil servants working for the federal government, there were disciplinary consequences of less than 0.2 percent.

Why go to the trouble of making it easier to crack down on rogue civil servants if the incident rate is less than 0.2%? Back to the Federal Minister of the Interior:

“Nevertheless, such individual cases also permanently damage trust in the integrity of the public service.”

Ah, of course. Nothing less than 100% conformity to the Party line is tolerable. Definitely no queasy history in Germany where that attitude worked out badly, right?

This reminds me of the firing of Dr David Nutt by the UK’s Labour government in 2009. The good doctor was sacked for pointing out that certain drugs scheduled as illegal in the UK were less harmful on balance than drugs such as alcohol and tobacco which were legal and readily available. This led the Home Secretary at the time, Alan Johnson, to drop a hall-of-fame clanger, quoted in The Guardian:

“Professor Nutt was not sacked for his views, which I respect but disagree with,” he writes. “He was asked to go because he cannot be both a government adviser and a campaigner against government policy.”

Translation: We didn’t fire him for what he thought, we fired him for what he thought.

Oh, okay, that’s much better.

Let’s see how this all shakes out over in Deutschland. Three out of five poops. 💩💩💩

Microsoft’s Total Recall

Microsoft, everybody’s favourite example of a giant faceless mega-corporation, has trotted out a face in the shape of CEO Satya Nadella to fluff the world’s tech and business media with the news that AI will now come as standard with Windows in the form of Copilot.

The best bit, according to the smiley man whose company definitely won’t do anything untoward with your data, is a function they have named Recall, which will remember everything you’ve ever done on your computer because this is a feature that *checks notes* nobody in their right mind would ever want, especially not in the hands of a company that just had “one of its most serious reputational crises” because it “ignored years of warnings that its product security and practices failed to meet the most basic standards.”

Skip to 3:23 in the video below for the Recall skinny.

How does the fancy technology work? It screenshots your computer constantly and feeds the images into an AI that can then perform “semantic search” to find things not by keyword but by association, as in the example of the ‘brown leather bag’ in the video.

As the Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern puts it to Nadella:

“There could be this reaction from some people that this is pretty creepy, that Microsoft is taking screenshots of everything I do.”

Nadella rebuts with:

“It’s all being done locally…that’s the promise.”

What are the odds of that “promise” ageing well?

As a former White House director for cyber policy told Cyber Security Dive:

“Microsoft has the government locked in as a customer, so the government’s options for forcing change at Microsoft are limited, at least in the short term.”

Cool. Microsoft have a massive “security debt” because they’re so dominant in the market, so they haven’t had to improve protection across their product lines, and because the US government uses their software, Uncle Sam can’t really punish them or shut them down in an extreme case because it would mess up the federal government’s IT systems.

Incredibly intrusive technology being rolled out across the board by a giant company with tremendous reach and an impenetrable bureaucracy? Check.

CEO guarantee that all will be well? Check.

Strong incentives in place for protection, improvement, promise-keeping, and compliance, with capable and motivated regulators standing by to jump in at the first sign of trouble?