Caitlin Dewey:

In April, Gmail turned 20; the service is two-thirds as old as I am. “We now have a huge accidental archive of our collective past,” wrote the editors at New York, to mark the occasion.

[…]

You have emails like this too, I’d imagine — happy emails and sad ones. Emails lost to time or memory or the unrelenting deluge of other, newer messages. Maybe it’s the first or last email you got from someone you treasure, or an announcement that changed your life, or a conversation you remembered wrong. Whatever forms this sort of long-lost email takes for you, I would love to see them.

If you would like to participate, there are more details in Dewey’s post, or you can visit the Google Form. Obviously, you can also forward messages to Dewey at linksiwouldgchatyou@gmail.com, because if this project did not have a Gmail address, it would be a shame.

See Also: UIs with accidental memories, previously linked.

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Bobby Allyn, NPR:

Lawyers for Scarlett Johansson are demanding that OpenAI disclose how it developed an AI personal assistant voice that the actress says sounds uncannily similar to her own.

[…]

Johansson said that nine months ago [Sam] Altman approached her proposing that she allow her voice to be licensed for the new ChatGPT voice assistant. He thought it would be “comforting to people” who are uneasy with AI technology.

“After much consideration and for personal reasons, I declined the offer,” Johansson wrote.

In a defensive blog post, OpenAI said it believes “AI voices should not deliberately mimic a celebrity’s distinctive voice” and that any resemblance between Johansson and the “Sky” voice demoed earlier this month is basically a coincidence, a claim only slightly undercut by a single-word tweet posted by Altman.

OpenAI’s voice mimicry — if you want to be generous — and that iPad ad add up to a banner month for technology companies’ relationship to the arts.¹ Are there people in power at these companies who can see how behaviours like these look? We are less than a year out from both the most recent Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes, both of which reflected in part A.I. anxieties.

Update: According to the Washington Post, the sound-alike voice really does just sound alike.

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