Hacker News Reader

Comment by meat_machine | Hacker News Reader

Scarlett voiced Samantha, an AI in the movie "Her"

Considering the movie's 11 years old, it's surprisingly on-point with depictions of AI/human interactions, relations, and societal acceptance. It does get a bit speculative and imaginative at the end though...

But I imagine that movie did/does spark the imagination of many people, and I guess Sam just couldn't let it go.

View on HN

It's not just that. Originally the AI voice in Her was played by someone else, but Spike Jonze felt strongly that the movie wasn't working and recast the part to Johansson. The movie immediately worked much better and became a sleeper hit. Johansson just has a much better fitting voice and higher skill in voice acting for this kind of role, to the extent that it maybe was a make/break choice for the movie. It isn't a surprise that after having created the exact tech from the movie, OpenAI wanted it to have the same success that Jonze had with his character.

It's funny that just seven days ago I was speculating that they deliberately picked someone whose voice is very close to Scarlett's and was told right here on HN, by someone who works in AI, that the Sky voice doesn't sound anything like Scarlett and it is just a generic female voice:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40343950#40345807

Apparently .... not.

Also, I understand that sama considers "Her" his favorite movie. Perhaps, for him, it just had to be ScarJo's voice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com