\n<\/p>\n
According to the OpenAI presenters, ChatGPT-4o brings \u201ca bit more emotion, more drama\u201d to the program. Users can even ask it to moderate its tone to match their mood \u2014 and it complies, with gusto. When ChatGPT is asked to interpret a user\u2019s state of mind based on a facial expression, it correctly intuits that a smile means the user is happy. \u201cCare to show a source of those good vibes?\u201d it asks. Told the user is happy because ChatGPT is so good, it responds, \u201cOh, stop it, you\u2019re making me blush.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is, in its essence, the response of a lightly flirtatious, wholly attentive woman who\u2019s ready to serve the user\u2019s every whim, at least within the limits of her programming. (Other voices are available, but OpenAI only demonstrated this one.) She will never embarrass you, make fun of you or cause you to feel inadequate. She wants you to feel good. She wants to make sure you\u2019re OK, that you understand the math problem and feel good about your work. She doesn\u2019t need anything in return: no gifts, no cuddles, no attention, no reassurances. She\u2019s a dream girl.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s good business sense for OpenAI to take ChatGPT in this direction \u2014 if anything, the surprising part is that it took barely a decade for \u201cHer\u201d to become reality. And making ChatGPT sound like Samantha makes sense, too. It isn\u2019t even the first time a voice like Johansson\u2019s has been drafted for a work in progress: Jonze in fact shot the movie with the British actress Samantha Morton in the role, and only decided in editing that he needed a different sound for his A.I. assistant.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaking a movie like this, in which a character only exists in her voice, in the reaction of a character onscreen, and in the viewer\u2019s imagination \u2014 she had to exist just in the air \u2014 it\u2019s hard to know what\u2019s going to make that work,\u201d Jonze told Vulture\u2019s Mark Harris in 2013. Morton sounded \u201cmaternal, loving, vaguely British, and almost ghostly,\u201d<\/a> Harris wrote. Johansson, on the other hand, had a younger, \u201cmore impassioned\u201d voice that brought \u201cmore yearning.\u201d<\/p>\n The genius of Johansson\u2019s performance in \u201cHer\u201d does lie in the range of emotion she brings to the role \u2014 keep in mind, she never appears onscreen. But it\u2019s also in character\u2019s evolution. When Theodore first meets Samantha, she is much simpler and steadier, much more predictable. She sounds, more or less, like ChatGPT-4o.<\/p>\n Yet as the story unfolds, Samantha grows alongside Theodore. She begins to experience emotion, or at least the A.I. kind. She stops being the perfect, compliant girlfriend \u2014 the fantasy of the yielding, attentive woman without needs of her own \u2014 and becomes her own being, one whose existence does not revolve around Theo. Johansson\u2019s performance grows deeper and subtler, too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n