On being ScaJo-ed
In Her, Scarlett Johanson (to whom I’ll refer here as ScaJo) used her voice to impersonate an AI assistant with whom Joaquin Phoenix falls in love. A few years later, OpenAI launched a conversational agent with the same voice (we could say that this is the inverse of the movie, the AI playing ScaJo). Sam Altman tweeted “her” so everybody would know that they were proud of copying a talented human being. Of course, the PR team advised to remove the tweet, ScaJo’s agent complained about it, and finally, OpenAI “kinda” proved that they did not use ScaJo’s voice to copy her but an actress with a similar voice. Obviously, there is an attempt to copy ScaJo, even if they use a similar voice, but it will be up to the courts to decide what’s this. Meanwhile, I am very worried about a new possibility: being ScaJoed in my regular life.
A few weeks ago, I decided to write a grant to fund my Prebiotic Chemistry Database (though I ended up giving up on this purpose). As my total amount of experience for that specific grant type is zero, I decided to do something that I rarely do: ask the AI! My rational was: the AI has been trained in government documents, so it would probably give me a template with the grant structure so I only need to fill the gaps. So I asked, and it provided a reasonable document. However, one thing called my attention: the following sentence:
However, the field is currently fragmented, with data scattered across numerous publications and databases, hindering the ability of researchers to easily access and integrate this information
Why did it call my attention? Well: because it’s mine. I had written almost exactly the same sentence a few months ago for an abstract; and I am pretty sure that I used exactly these words in one of the intermediate versions.
However, all this knowledge is scattered across myriads of publications, preventing researchers and computers from easily interacting with this data.
What is going on? Is the AI as smart as Bruno? Am I as dumb as an AI? Are we both equally smart? Does OpenAI have access to my Notion / Google Docs? Is it a coincidence? am I just paranoid? This is what I mean by being ScaJoed. From now on, we will be puzzled about the source of specific ideas and thoughts, and we will probably be unable to determine whether our info is being leaked. In the best-case scenario, we will return to using paper and pencil to write ideas; in the worst-case scenario, we will end up wearing foil coil hats.