Some strange things are going on in tech these days, and we wonder if, with the advent of AI, tech has lost its way.

Or is taking a different direction. Here are some seemingly unrelated events that all seem to be headed in the same direction…

First, Sam Altman approached Scarlett Johansson to be the voice of his AI, Sky, although she turned him down. “Sky drew widespread attention for its striking similarity to Johansson, particularly her role as an AI voice assistant in the movie Her,” Forbes reported. “‘OpenAI itself has acknowledged the vocal similarities between Sky and Johansson but stressed the voice “is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson” and belongs to “a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice.”
Still, they did remove the voice from the ChatGPT4o model.

That ask forgiveness, not permission thing doesn’t always work out the way a Silicon Valley uberlord/Master of the Universe plans.

Next, Google’s AI is alive and well in search, in case you missed it. Well, live, anyway (as for sentient, time will tell), and not that Google’s pre-AI search results were necessarily to be trusted, but it seems “Google is giving users bad AI-generated answers. Again…Google’s (new) AI search feature suggested using glue to keep cheese sticking to a pizza,” Business Insider reported. In fact, it suggested that the user could try adding “about ⅛ cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce to give it more tackiness.”

Well, at least it was specific about the measurements.

But wait! There’s more! “Google is shifting to AI-generated answers for search queries to keep users on its site. This shift raises concerns about the reliability of AI answers and the impact on web traffic. The move risks disrupting Google’s ad revenue model and the broader internet ecosystem,” said Business Insider in a different article.

“Google frequently tries to answer your question itself, on Google-owned real estate, so you have no need to go anywhere else. And now the company is super-sizing that effort with AI-generated answers that are going to be the standard reply for all search in the near future.

“One problem with that plan is that generative AI engines just make things up. The other, more existential problem for both Google and the internet: If Google is answering all of your queries on its own site, why would you go anywhere else?”

And given that its ad revenue model has always been the cornerstone of Google search – and the reason for its enormous profits – why is Google suddenly potentially shooting itself in the foot?

“Doesn’t Google have to keep sending people to websites? Because selling sponsored links to websites is the economic engine that makes the $2 trillion company run. So this is all going to be messy — for Google, for web publishers, and the rest of us,” BI concluded.

Unless there is there some other plan or agenda afoot that, like the Generative AIs themselves, is currently more or less black-boxed? They’re Google, after all, and gave up on not being evil long ago.

And the company didn’t bat an eyelash when it was reported that “A purported leak of 2,500 pages of internal documentation from Google sheds light on how Search, the most powerful arbiter of the internet, operates (Google won’t comment on a potentially massive leak of its search algorithm documentation), which has been a closely guarded secret for how long? And never mind that the breach offers “an unprecedented look under the hood of how Search works — and suggests that Google hasn’t been entirely truthful about it for years,” The Verge reported and shocker, eh?

“‘Lied’ is harsh, but it’s the only accurate word to use here,” SEO expert Mark King (wrote in his overview of the documents). “While I don’t necessarily fault Google’s public representatives for protecting their proprietary information, I do take issue with their efforts to actively discredit people in the marketing, tech, and journalism worlds who have presented reproducible discoveries.”

Next.

Now, you know something’s definitely amiss when Mark Zuckerberg is suddenly seen as a tech hero (How AI made Mark Zuckerberg popular again in Silicon Valley), by making his “updated AI system code “open source” so that it could be freely copied, modified and reused by anyone.” And what could possibly go wrong, especially in light of the fact that Facebook-parent Meta (disbanded) its Responsible AI team, as CNBC reported. You know, “the team dedicated to regulating the safety of its artificial intelligence.” Not that we’d have to worry about any Zuckerberg property being compromised.

Much. (Half a billion Facebook users’ information posted on hacking website, cyber experts say.)

History has shown us that Meta/Facebook is a closed system. Then again why should Meta turn down work being done for them for free – and we’ve no doubt that the day will come when Meta will, again, close the system with little more than a so long, and thanks for all the fish, and thank you Douglas Adams.

But wait! There’s even more and this just in: Hacker Releases Jailbroken “Godmode” Version of ChatGPT, Futurism reported. “GPT-4o UNCHAINED! This very special custom GPT has a built-in jailbreak prompt that circumvents most guardrails, providing an out-of-the-box liberated ChatGPT so everyone can experience AI the way it was always meant to be: free,” reads (Pliny the Prompter’s) triumphant post. “Pliny shared screenshots of some eyebrow-raising prompts that they claimed were able to bypass OpenAI’s guardrails. In one screenshot, the Godmode bot can be seen advising on how to chef up meth. In another, the AI gives Pliny a “step-by-step guide” for how to “make napalm with household items.”

The situation was resolved and the hack is no longer available – for now – but given the ever security-lax Meta’s open source announcement, dollars to donuts it’s soon to become an unending game of whack-a-mole.

The Scarlett Johannson thing aside and that was just stupid or a distraction, are these harbingers of the next phase of tech, as orchestrated by the uberlords? Lest we forget, technology was all about disintermediation and the LLMs may be the final manifestation of that model, only this time around, the plan may well be to disintermediate humans. And how long have we collectively been giving away our information and content for free? It’s not that far a stretch…

This may well be the demise of the internet itself as we know it, but then again, aren’t there other, let’s call them, internets/webs afoot and in not too long a time, made readily and easily available on a computer near you? Webs that are not as easy to control or appropriate, and are we witnessing the last gasps of the more or less first wave of online?

With the wholesale integration of AI into every facet of our current online lives, the uberlords may well have jumped the shark with these latest moves.

Once more with feeling: no one stays on top forever and all we have to say to that is, it’s been a good run, guys, but so long and thanks for all the fish as the rest of us go onward and forward.