The Poolish - Torment Nexus Edition, 2 June 2024

Our horrible coming techno dystopia, and more news

Well the former president has been convicted of a felony, that’s pretty big news. Kind of makes the rest of the news that happened over the past couple of weeks look like frivolous bullshit, at least the news that doesn’t involve that part of the world where people are getting blown up with bombs, or that other part of the world where people are getting blown up with bombs. But it’s my job to try, so here’s what I’ve been able to scrape up from the bin of news that’s all bad news but not the worst news:

Sam Altman Fumbles the Torment Nexus

The last couple of years have been a tornado of news and speculation and terror and hand-wringing and dumbassness about AI. Where is this technology going? What are the implications? What are the true motives of the people behind OpenAI, the real life Skynet company that’s in reality less like Cyberdyne and more like one of these cringy Googly techbro startups with turtlenecks and ping pong.

Well, now we know the answer: They want to make the Scarlett Johansson fuckbot from that Spike Jonze movie.

Okay, that’s an unfair characterization on my part. At no point in the film does Joaquin Phoenix actually physically copulate with a robot shaped like Black Widow. It’s just awkward cybersex with her disembodied voice, mostly. But of course Her wasn’t supposed to represent a scenario that we want, it’s not a quirky romantic comedy. It’s a Spike Jonze movie, which means it’s a quirky deep hitting themes comedy.

So of course Sam Altman wanted Johansson to be the voice of the latest model of Talking ChatGPT. Of course he wanted to bring to life that movie about a lonely man whose emotional entanglement with a chatbot obliterates his humanity. Of course we must once again furiously tap the sign:

Sam Altman is just kind of an incompetent dipshit though? So while he did reach out to Johansson to get her on board with the project, she of course turned his dimwit techbro ass down. And of course he went ahead and deepfaked it anyway, because not only do we have access to deepfake technology, Altman made that technology and works in the deepfake factory.

He could easily have gotten away with it, too. So the damn robot sounds a bit like Scarlett Johansson, so what, lots of women have a sensual voice. He was swimming in plausable deniability here right up until his dumb ass did this:

Because of the dumbest three letter tweet of all time, Altman now has a thermonuclear lawsuit on his hands from a woman who’s played a deadly assassin in at least three movies and a sexbot in only one. Who knows how hard this might rock the ship of AI technology now—it brings us dangerously close to having to accept Elon Musk’s vindictive racist Harlan Ellison AI as our Skynet overlord instead of simply a sexy Nordic lady who can’t comment on politics or draw hands.

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