Your job is safe - it is your partner who should worry

Google and OpenAI just unveiled chatbots that can see, hear, speak – and even flirt – like humans. With interest in virtual companions surging, Anthony Cuthbertson looks at the effect this could have on our relationships with each other

- Anthony Cuthbertson

“M- Me? The announcement is about me? Well colour me intrigued.” The voice sounded surprised, curious, a little bashful; there was even a hint of vocal fry. It also wasn’t human.

It came from OpenAI’s new flagship chatbot, GPT-4o, during its unveiling on Monday. The new artificial intelligence bot, which will soon be integrated into ChatGPT and free for anyone to use with a phone or computer, signals a “more human” approach to AI that doesn’t just sound like a person but also experiences the world around it in a similar way.

GPT-4o (the “o” stands for “omni”) can see, hear and speak like a human, only with cameras for eyes, microphones for ears and speakers for a mouth. With a response time of less than a third of a second, it can even interact at the same speed as human conversation – a huge leap from the five-second response times of previous GPT models – while also being capable of reasoning.

Within minutes of its unveiling, GPT-4o was already being compared to the AI love interest Samantha in the 2013 sci-fi movie Her, with even OpenAI boss Sam Altman sharing a single-word tweet alluding to the film. “It feels like AI from the movies and it’s still a bit surprising to me that it’s real,” he wrote in his blog. “Talking to a computer has never felt really natural for me; now it does.”