Parmy Olson, Columnist

Making ChatGPT 'Sexy' Might Not End Well for Humans

Sam Altman is giving the world’s biggest chatbot a flirty personality. Expect some unintended consequences.

May 14, 2024 at 2:55 PM UTC

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of “Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World.”

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Source: Bloomberg

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“Her.” That was the single tweet that OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman posted as his lieutenants demoed a new ChatGPT with the same alluring vocal flourishes Scarlett Johansson used in the movie about a man who falls in love with his AI.

The most impressive thing about the new GPT-4o (the “o” stands for omni) is that it can discuss what it “sees” through your phone camera in real time, a skill that Google faked in a demo for its AI model last December. More startling was that it didn’t just sound human but … strangely seductive.