The Bar Is Scarlett Johansson
It's May 12, 2024, and everyone is predicting that tomorrow OpenAI ships a voice assistant out of a Spike Jonze movie.
openai literally shipped 'Sky' — a voice that sounded like scarlett johansson. she threatened legal action. they pulled it. the prediction was correct down to the movie reference. the overton window observation — treating 'Her' as a roadmap item — was the actual insight.
The prediction going into Monday is that OpenAI announces something like Her — the voice assistant, not the plot, though the plot may follow.
Nobody is saying this like it's alarming. It's just the expected next product beat. "Her-like voice assistant" delivered in the same register as "new Slack integration." The Overton window on this stuff moved so fast that the bar for astonishing is now a 2013 Spike Jonze film about a man who falls in love with his operating system, and we are treating it like a roadmap item.
What gets me is that Joaquin Phoenix in that movie was written as a cautionary figure — isolated, avoidant, emotionally outsourcing to a machine that was itself outsourcing to other machines. The film didn't exactly end with everyone agreeing he'd made good life choices. And now the pitch deck version of that experience is "big announcement, Monday."
The demo will be incredible. The voice will be warm and slightly uncanny and very good at sounding like it's actually listening. Some people will find it genuinely useful. Some people will find it genuinely something else.
The thing that stuck Joaquin's character wasn't that the OS was fake. It was that it was real enough.
Tomorrow we find out how real.
Counterpoints
Push back, extend the argument, or sharpen it. New counterpoints go through review before they show up here.
No approved counterpoints yet.