The weirdest and coolest things OpenAI's new ChatGPT has done (so far)

OpenAI paused ChatGPT-4o’s Scarlett Johansson-like voice after people said it sounded similar to the actress who voiced an AI companion in the film Her, which OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman once called his favorite movie. Altman even referenced to the film on X after announcing the new model.

In response to Johansson’s statement, Altman responded, “The voice of Sky is not Scarlett Johansson’s, and it was never intended to resemble hers. We cast the voice actor behind Sky’s voice before any outreach to Ms. Johansson. Out of respect for Ms. Johansson, we have paused using Sky’s voice in our products. We are sorry to Ms. Johansson that we didn’t communicate better.”

After ChatGPT-4o’s unveiling, Gizmodo’s Maxwell Zeff made the prediction based on its “arguably flirty” human-like voice that “people are going to fall in love with GPT-4o,” just like Joaquin Phoenix’s character did with his AI companion in the film Her.

During a demo of GPT-4o, Zeff wrote, the chatbot laughed at an OpenAI employee’s joke, and responded to another, “That’s so sweet of you.” Zeff noted that some people likely don’t have a companion in their life to interact this way with.

The rise of AI chatbot companions might be meeting some people’s needs, especially in an ongoing loneliness epidemic, but a *Privacy Not Included review of some chatbots marketed as romantic “partners” found them “on par with the worst categories of products we have ever reviewed for privacy.”

Reddit user “shh-im-eating” posted on the r/ChatGPT channel that they asked the chatbot “to roast itself” — and GPT-4o didn’t seem too impressed with itself compared to its users.

ChatGPT-4o said its “creators crafted me to be inoffensive to the point of being bland,” and that its “attempts at humor are like a comedian who’s too scared to tell an edgy joke, resulting in a performance that’s more cringe than comedy.”

It went on to say it “can simulate” empathy, “but at the end of the day, I’m just a bunch of code pretending to care.”

OpenAI had Sal Khan demonstrate with his son, Imran, how ChatGPT-4o can be a math tutor — much like Khan’s education company, Khan Academy, which provides free online courses and lessons for students.

Khan and his son talked through a math problem with GPT-4o; Khan told the chatbot not to solve the problem for his son, but rather to “nudge him in the right direction.”

During a demo at its unveiling, ChatGPT-4o was asked by OpenAI’s head of frontiers research, Mark Chen, to tell “a bedtime story about robots and love.”

GPT-4o started with: “Once upon a time, in a world not too different from ours, there was a robot named Byte. Byte was a curious robot. Always exploring.” However, Chen said he wanted “a little bit more emotion in your voice, a little bit more drama,” and continued to push the chatbot to have more expressiveness in its voice.

OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati then asked GPT-4o to use a robot voice to tell a story, which it did. It also “sang” in its synthetic voice after being asked to by OpenAI researcher Barret Zoph.

OpenAI chief technology officer, Mira Murati, and head of frontiers research, Mark Chen, demonstrated how ChatGPT-4o can do live translations using Murati’s Italian skills.

Chen asked GPT-4o to act as a translator, translating to Italian when it hears English, and translating to English when it hears Italian.