According to the OpenAI presenters, ChatGPT-4o brings “a little more emotion, more drama” to the program. Users can also ask him to tone down to suit their mood – and he obliges, with gusto. When ChatGPT is asked to interpret a user’s mood based on a facial expression, it correctly guesses that a smile means the user is happy. “Care to show the source of those good vibes?” he asks. Told to the user that he is happy because ChatGPT is so good, he replies: “Oh, stop it, you’re making me blush.”
This is, in its essence, the response of a slightly flirtatious, totally attentive woman, ready to satisfy the user’s every whim, at least within the limits of her programming. (Other entries are available, but OpenAI has only demonstrated this one.) It will never embarrass you, make fun of you, or make you feel inadequate. He wants you to feel good. He wants to make sure that you are okay, that you understand the math problem, and that you feel good about your work. He doesn’t need anything in return: no gifts, no cuddles, no attention, no reassurance. She’s a dream girl.
It makes good business sense for OpenAI to take ChatGPT in this direction: If anything, the surprising part is that it took just a decade for “Her” to become a reality. And making ChatGPT look like Samantha also makes sense. It is not even the first time that a voice like Johansson’s has been chosen for a work in progress: Jonze in fact shot the film with the British actress Samantha Morton in the role, and only during the editing phase did he decide that he needed a different sound to his voice. AI assistant.
“Making a film like this, where a character exists only in his voice, in a character’s reaction on the screen, and in the viewer’s imagination – he had to simply exist in the air – it’s hard to know what will make all of that work,” he said. Jonze told Vulture’s Mark Harris in 2013. Morton sounded “maternal, loving, vaguely British and almost ghostly,” Harris wrote. Johansson, on the other hand, had a younger, “more passionate” voice that carried “more desire.”
The brilliance of Johansson’s performance in “Her” lies in the range of emotions she brings to the role – keep in mind that she never appears on screen. But she is also in the evolution of her character. When Theodore first meets Samantha, she is much simpler and more stable, much more predictable. She looks, more or less, ChatGPT-4o.
Yet, as the story develops, Samantha grows up alongside Theodore. She begins to feel emotions, or at least the artificial intelligence kind. She stops being the perfect, compliant girlfriend—the fantasy of the compliant, attentive woman with no needs of her own—and she becomes her being, a person whose existence doesn’t revolve around Theo. Johansson’s performance also becomes deeper and more subtle.
