Listen to it here.
The whole episode was about the recent OpenAI/Scarlett Johansson thing that blew up in Manton’s face.
I, by chance, was at the computer when it was published and curious as my first take on why I was angry was muddled in said anger and so I listened to this immediately. I found it very interesting and very human (in a good way). A little protocol of mostly Manton’s views:
- His initial take was: The sky voice was not intentionally ripping of Her.
- The response felt like: Some People were angry with him because he was defending a disgraced company.
- So to restate it: A plausible take was given.
- A tweet: “her”. He didn’t even think when giving that take that the tweet could be about the voice per se.
- An interesting thought experiment: What if we’re talking about a war criminal. What if they used a ridiculous weapon that doesn’t exist to do their war crimes? If somebody claimed that. Shouldn’t we able to say they did not use a ridiculous weapon that doesn’t exist?
- And then: A news article seems to vindicate the plausible take.
- But then: Does the news article actually do that?
- And: There still might be a legal case. It seems very possible.
- A plea by the cohost: Give it some rest. It’s not Manton you’re blindly angry with.
- AI is here to stay: We have to engage with the technology.
I think we’re all still guessing and may never know. Depending on what we take into account, some things seem more plausible than others.
I stand by my slightly more sophisticated way of putting it after I fired my first shot. I will give it another try here: Not taking into account what else is going on with that industry and that company in particular - their track record so far - and not taking into account how important a Sam Altman seems to think he is - right up in there with Dorsey and Musk as the co-hosts seem to agree - makes Manton’s plausible take based on circumstantial evidence kind of less plausible (which also renders the thought experiment unsuitable). And I wouldn’t want to have the feeling that the person behind my blog hoster is not seeing this quite plausible connection. Isn’t there this saying “where there’s smoke, there’s fire”?
So saying Manton makes me look bad “by association” is surely putting it way too strong. I will own that. But I will say that subsuming all the critical voices under the same umbrella seems inappropriate. I think - if we are fair to me and some others - that it seemed a little naive to not think about the smoke and coincidentally call everybody else just other, less rational, angry people (or at least strongly implying it) and not at least contemplating the possibility of a backlash.
Alright. That has been said. Uff.
I also want to say, candidly, I do love the idea of the audio narration feature that seems to have come out of reflecting on this. This is good. AI is indeed not going anywhere. And we may never fully reconcile our feelings about this issue. But that doesn’t mean we need to not have human connections or aren’t allowed to make the web feel better.