I'll be there for you

The problem with using a legion of AI bots to cure loneliness.

- BY PETER GRIFFIN

When Silicon Valley entrepreneurs talk about how we will eventually interact with artificial intelligence, they often name-drop Her, the 2013 movie about a man who fell in love with his AI companion, Samantha.

Voiced by actress Scarlett Johansson, Samantha is a sassy and sensitive digital personality that succeeds in extracting Theodore from his melancholy through a series of heart-to-heart conversations.

But the crushing reality of what Theodore is dealing with is revealed late in the movie when Samantha tells him she is simultaneously interacting with 8316 other people and is in love with 641 of them. Eventually, she disconnects from Theodore to devote her computer power elsewhere.

OpenAI founder Sam Altman was so inspired by Her that he asked Johansson if he could use her voice for Sky, a conversational AI “with 100 unique personalities”. She turned him down, so he came up with a similar-sounding clone, later disabling it and apologising to Johansson who described the whole affair as “so disturbing”.

“This technology is coming like a thousand-foot wave,” she told The New York Times.

Now Meta's Mark Zuckerberg is taking the concept behind