A lonely man living in Los Angeles downloads an AI assistant with a woman's voice. Though it is just a computer, he names the assistant Samantha and begins to fall in love with her.

This was the plot of the 2013 science fiction film Her, with Samantha played by Scarlett Johansson. Just over a decade later, OpenAI has created a similar chatbot, and the voice is very familiar...

Nine months ago, Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, asked Johansson to sample her voice for his new chatbot. The film star refused, but the company still launched their AI assistant, with a voice that sounded just like Johansson's.

In response, the actress said that she was "shocked, angered and in disbelief," and, soon afterwards, OpenAI deactivated the speech option.¹

The company claims it was an innocent mistake. However, this came soon after two senior employees left OpenAI with serious safety concerns.²

For supporters of AI, the technology will make more things possible than ever before. Humans will be more productive, more creative, and have more free time. Cliff Jurkiewicz, a senior employee at a recruitment company, claims that generative AI "enables humans to do things faster and often better".³

However, critics argue that AI will soon replace basic human tasks. For instance, Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of the popular dating app Bumble, recently claimed that AI could date people on your behalf.³

Rather than gaining more freedom, we might end up trapped by the technology. As the American writer Tyler Austin Harper warns: these technologies "don't expand our mind's capacity to think, but outsource it".⁴

Already, 70% of Generation Z use AI in their daily lives. Many people predict that 90% of online content will be generated by AI come the end of the year.⁵

However, as the Scarlett Johansson story suggests, AI companies are more concerned with making money than with protecting our privacy. And, because the technology is so new, it is not clear that the legal system will keep people safe.

The film Her has a message. Making connections with other humans is harder than interacting with a computer, but it's also more meaningful. Hopefully we can learn this message before it is too late.

Is technology making us less human?

Yes: Once AI is more intelligent than the general population, people will begin relying on it for everyday tasks. Work, social life, romance - soon everything that makes us human will happen via a computer.

No: AI is meant to assist human activity, not replace it completely. Although this might cause disruption at first, the technology will eventually allow people to live busier, happier and fuller lives.

Or... Even if using technology can make our lives easier, we might lose more than we gain by relying on computers. After all, the hardest things we do are often the most rewarding.