October 30, 2023
In 2013, Spike Jonze’s film “Her” envisioned a world where people form emotional bonds with artificial intelligence, challenging conventional notions of love and isolation. A decade later, ChatGPT’s newly added voice capabilities are turning elements of this vision into reality, as individuals engage in extended dialogues with the AI assistant while on the move.
AI researcher Simon Willison recently spent an hour talking to ChatGPT verbally while walking his dog. He described the experience as “living out the first ten minutes of some dystopian sci-fi movie.” Other people have also been using ChatGPT’s voice features to have creative development sessions, work through ideas, and simply pass the time.
One Reddit user described using it to “fully thought out an idea for a novel” during a one-hour walk. Another user said that they use ChatGPT to chat with while driving to work in the morning, describing it as “a creative way of surviving the drudgery that is Belgian traffic jams.”
Conversations with ChatGPT won’t become as intimate as those with Samantha in Her anytime soon, but people have been forming personal connections with the chatbot in text since it launched last year. Some people have even fallen in love with chatbots hosted by Replika, which allows a more personal simulation of a human than ChatGPT.
There also privacy concerns about sharing deep personal elements of your life with a cloud-connected machine. OpenAI says that it may use conversations with ChatGPT to train future AI models, if conversation history is turned on.
The sources for this piece include an article in ArsTechnica.
