My mother took me to the Sears Department store in the 1980s to “adopt” a Cabbage Patch Kid, that marketing mega trend that made children ‘adoptive parents’ before they hit their 10th birthdays. The next stage of the process was to encourage us to fill out some official-looking paperwork to mail back to HQ, so they could send us a modified official “Birth Certificate” with their new name.
The name I chose for my doll was Anita.
I can’t say why, or where, the yen for this name came from. But for some reason, I was attached to it. This is one of those era-defining moments that’s burned into my memory. It would crystallize future events in my life and loom larger than it should have, given the importance of this moment (it was just a doll).
And then there’s my name: Samantha.
The 2013 film “Her,” a seminal near-future science fiction romantic love story, was written and directed by Spike Jonze and starred Joaquin Pheonix as Theodore, a socially awkward romantic who falls in love with the voice of the AI Operating System played by Scarlett Johansson. Theodore wandered around the world with (err…) earbuds stuck deep in his ears, and chatted with “Her,” going on dates in the park, falling asleep with his earbud in his ear. That friendly and sexy voice of the Operating System is named Samantha.
So it would appear, there’s something more to both of our names. At least in my tiny universe.
While listening to this series, I realized that AI tech companies are working to create sentient chatbots in the likeness of real people…and the name Samantha is a popular choice among these prototypes.
In the 3-part mini-series “Simulated”, Anita Rao interviews journalists, Replika bot users, scholars, authors, and scientists about how our life intersects with AI now, and then what it could be in the future.
It’s hard to know exactly what to do with this information
When I reflect on the story of my Cabbage Patch Kid, whom I named Anita back in the 1980s, I realize that it’s been a slow march toward this day. And that all along, there have been scientists working to create life-like replicas of humans, in both doll form and interactive form. Thank you Spike Jonze for your brilliant script, Samantha is now the name that comes to mind when we think of a sexy, disembodied slightly flirty voice. It could be worse.
There was a collective cultural shock when ChatGPT finally arrived on the scene for the general public, just over a year ago. This gasp appeared despite all the advanced warnings (especially, as I’ve written before, those of us who work in the podcasting sphere, where we have been using AI to transcribe our scripts for years, because this has contributed to the large language model of machine learning, one of the building blocks of AI). Most of us, it appears, were not truly ready for this moment. And yet, here we are.
Let me be the first to disavow you of the idea that you will not have anything to do with AI bots, in a deeply personal or romantic way, in your lifetime.
If you find yourself in need of some updated primers on how, where, and why AI will affect our daily lives, the 3-part mini-series Simulated, from the podcast Embodied, tackles a range of must-consider topics.
We are so very much at the beginning beginning of all of this
Melissa McCool, a licensed psychotherapist and chief product officer at Ellipsis Health, a company that builds AI companions, reminds us in Episode 1:
“I think for all of us, it's really important to remember that we are at the very, very, very beginning stages of AI. Like literally this is — it's like 1996 with cell phones, which is — and I'm old enough to remember, they were like huge big brick blocks, and you only had one if you were very wealthy. So we're back in the brick, like it's 1996 with the cell phone. So literally, we know very little about this.”
To imagine where we will all be in 30 years—given the current state of AI—is not very clear, other than to say that given our current technological trajectory, we should buckle up. The filmmaker Tyler Perry just halted an $800 million expansion to his studio after spending a few hours playing with OpenAI’s text-to-video model Sora. Many fear that AI will take many creative jobs away; others are ready and willing to work with AI to create new forms of art and ideas.
It’s likely fair to say that most of us are flat-footed in this race. So consider this series a short bit of homework. Perhaps it is already time to consider how AI could impact those things we hold as sacred human activities: falling in love, having sex and dying.
All of these are now the frontier of AI that’s at our doorstep now, whether we choose to step over the threshold or not.
“Simulated” takes on a range of big and important questions about how we will need to fold some of this thinking into the most intimate parts of our lives. And soon.
Welcome to the not-so-distant future.
Key Takeaways from the interview:
3:01 = The person who gave Anita Rao a key piece of advice that led to the foundation of the series Embodied
8:35 = It’s surprising how easily humans form deep attachments to robots, even if they aren’t very advanced (as in the movie “Her”)…it’s mostly about text, not actual robots
9:55 = Anita tells us what it was like to download to app Replika and make her own digital “friend”
12:10 = What is the Uncanny Valley?
13:10 = What was the entry point to the subject of AI, and what made it a mini-series, and not just a one-off episode?
14:14 = “I just met someone who got broken up with by a robot, and it blew my mind.”
14:55 - 16:25 = What is “grief-tech?”
17:35 = This model of mini-series is not sustainable…this is how they did it at Embodied
18:15 = Here’s how she might have done it differently, now that she’s looking back
19:25 = Would you do this mini-series model again?
21:02 = Follow-up to this series…AI porn?
24:24 = Anita realized that her worries going into this series were in all the wrong things….here’s what she thinks we should actually be worried about
25:53 = Anita’s key take-homes from making this series (there are three)
29:52 = Why sensory and memory are the crucial missing pieces of the AI bot world
31:35 = What Anita will take out of this series forward into her work
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