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What does artificial intelligence sound like? Hollywood has been imagining it for decades. Now A.I. developers are cribbing from the movies, crafting voices for real machines based on dated cinematic fantasies of how machines should talk.<\/p>\n
Last month, OpenAI revealed upgrades<\/a> to its artificially intelligent chatbot. ChatGPT, the company said, was learning how to hear, see and converse in a naturalistic voice \u2014 one that sounded much like the disembodied operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson in the 2013 Spike Jonze movie \u201cHer.\u201d<\/p>\n ChatGPT\u2019s voice, called Sky, also had a husky timbre, a soothing affect and a sexy edge. She was agreeable and self-effacing; she sounded like she was game for anything. After Sky\u2019s debut, Johansson expressed displeasure<\/a> at the \u201ceerily similar\u201d sound, and said that she had previously declined OpenAI\u2019s request that she voice the bot. The company protested that Sky was voiced by a \u201cdifferent professional actress,\u201d but agreed to pause her voice<\/a> in deference to Johansson. Bereft OpenAI users have started a petition<\/a> to bring her back.<\/p>\n A.I. creators like to highlight the increasingly naturalistic capabilities of their tools, but their synthetic voices are built on layers of artifice and projection. Sky represents the cutting edge of OpenAI\u2019s ambitions, but she is based on an old idea: of the A.I. bot as an empathetic and compliant woman. Part mommy, part secretary, part girlfriend, Samantha was an all-purpose comfort object who purred directly into her users\u2019 ears. Even as A.I. technology advances, these stereotypes are re-encoded again and again.<\/p>\n Women\u2019s voices, as Julie Wosk notes in \u201cArtificial Women: Sex Dolls, Robot Caregivers, and More Facsimile Females,\u201d<\/a> have often fueled imagined technologies before they were built into real ones.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In the original \u201cStar Trek\u201d series, which debuted in 1966, the computer on the deck of the Enterprise was voiced by Majel Barrett, later the wife of the show\u2019s creator, Gene Roddenberry. In the 1979 film \u201cAlien,\u201d the crew of the USCSS Nostromo addressed its computer voice as \u201cMother\u201d (her full name was MU-TH-UR 6000). Once tech companies started marketing virtual assistants \u2014 Apple\u2019s Siri, Amazon\u2019s Alexa, Microsoft\u2019s Cortana \u2014 their voices were largely feminized, too.<\/p>\n These first-wave voice assistants, the ones that have been mediating our relationships with technology for more than a decade, have a tinny, otherworldly drawl. They sound auto-tuned, their human voices accented by a mechanical trill. They often speak in a measured, one-note cadence, suggesting a stunted emotional life.<\/p>\n But the fact that they sound robotic deepens their appeal. They come across as programmable, manipulatable and subservient to our demands. They don\u2019t make humans feel as if they\u2019re smarter than we are. They sound like throwbacks to the monotone feminine computers of \u201cStar Trek\u201d and \u201cAlien,\u201d and their voices have a retro-futuristic sheen. In place of realism, they serve nostalgia.<\/p>\n That artificial sound has continued to dominate, even as the technology behind it has advanced.<\/p>\n Voice-to-speech software was designed to make visual media accessible to users with certain disabilities, and on TikTok, it has become a creative force in its own right. Since TikTok rolled out its text-to-speech feature, in 2020, it has developed a host of simulated voices to choose from \u2014 it now offers more than 50, including ones named \u201cHero,\u201d \u201cStory Teller\u201d and \u201cBestie.\u201d But the platform has come to be defined by one option. \u201cJessie,\u201d a relentlessly pert woman\u2019s voice with a slightly fuzzy robotic undertone, is the mindless voice of the mindless scroll.<\/p>\n Jessie seems to have been assigned a single emotion: enthusiasm. She sounds as if she is selling something. That\u2019s made her an appealing choice for TikTok creators, who are selling themselves. The burden of representing oneself can be outsourced to Jessie, whose bright, retro robot voice lends videos a pleasantly ironic sheen.<\/p>\n Hollywood has constructed masculine bots, too \u2014 none more famous than HAL 9000, the computer voice in \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey.\u201d Like his feminized peers, HAL radiates serenity and loyalty. But when he turns against Dave Bowman, the film\u2019s central human character \u2014 \u201cI\u2019m sorry, Dave, I\u2019m afraid I can\u2019t do that\u201d \u2014 his serenity evolves into a frightening competence. HAL, Dave realizes, is loyal to a higher authority. HAL\u2019s masculine voice allows him to function as a rival and a mirror to Dave. He is allowed to become a real character.<\/p>\n Like HAL, Samantha of \u201cHer\u201d is a machine who becomes real. In a twist on the Pinocchio story, she starts the movie tidying a human\u2019s email inbox and ends up ascending to a higher level of consciousness. She becomes something even more advanced than a real girl.<\/p>\n Scarlett Johansson\u2019s voice, as inspiration for bots both fictional and real, subverts the vocal trends that define our feminized helpmeets. It has a gritty edge that screams I am alive<\/em>. It sounds nothing like the processed virtual assistants we are accustomed to hearing speaking through our phones. But her performance as Samantha feels human not just because of her voice but because of what she has to say. She grows over the course of the film, acquiring sexual desires, advanced hobbies and A.I. friends. In borrowing Samantha\u2019s affect, OpenAI made Sky seem as if she had a mind of her own. Like she was more advanced than she really was.<\/p>\n When I first saw \u201cHer,\u201d I thought only that Johansson had voiced a humanoid bot. But when I revisited the film last week, after watching OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT demo, the Samantha role struck me as infinitely more complex. Chatbots do not spontaneously generate human speaking voices. They don\u2019t have throats or lips or tongues. Inside the technological world of \u201cHer,\u201d the Samantha bot would have itself been based on the voice of a human woman \u2014 perhaps a fictional actress who sounds much like Scarlett Johansson.<\/p>\n It seemed that OpenAI had trained its chatbot on the voice of a nameless actress who sounds like a famous actress who voiced a movie chatbot implicitly trained on an unreal actress who sounds like a famous actress. When I run ChatGPT\u2019s demo, I am hearing a simulation of a simulation of a simulation of a simulation of a simulation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Tech companies advertise their virtual assistants in terms of the services they provide. They can read you the weather report and summon you a taxi; OpenAI promises that its more advanced chatbots will be able to laugh at your jokes and sense shifts in your moods. But they also exist to make us feel more comfortable about the technology itself.<\/p>\n Johansson\u2019s voice functions like a luxe security blanket thrown over the alienating aspects of A.I.-assisted interactions. \u201cHe 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 A.I.,\u201d Johansson said of Sam Altman, OpenAI\u2019s founder. \u201cHe said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n It is not that Johansson\u2019s voice sounds inherently like a robot\u2019s. It\u2019s that developers and filmmakers have designed their robots\u2019 voices to ease the discomfort inherent in robot-human interactions. OpenAI has said that it wanted to cast a chatbot voice that is \u201capproachable\u201d and \u201cwarm\u201d and \u201cinspires trust.\u201d Artificial intelligence stands accused of devastating the creative industries, guzzling energy and even threatening human life<\/a>. Understandably, OpenAI wants a voice that makes people feel at ease using its products. What does artificial intelligence sound like? It sounds like crisis management.<\/p>\n
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