Noor Ibrahim

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyIn the 2013 Oscar-winning movie Her, Joaquin Phoenix plays a lonely Los Angeles man who falls hopelessly in love with Samantha, an AI-powered virtual assistant voiced by Scarlett Johansson. “You seem like a person, but you’re just a voice in a computer,” he tells her in their first conversation.Flash forward to 2024, and that scenario is closer to reality than ever—uncomfortably so for Johansson, who this week accused the artificial intelligence company OpenAI of creating a virtual assistant voice that sounds “eerily similar” to her own. In a statement Monday, the Hollywood star revealed that the disturbing realization came after she had repeatedly declined offers from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to license her voice for the company’s latest chatbot, “Sky.”The tech tycoon has denied any connection between Sky’s voice and Johansson’s. But the question remains: why was Altman so gung-ho about using the Marvel actor’s voice in particular—instead of simply taking no for an answer the first time she rejected his offer and hiring some other Hollywood star? Cassandra Kulukundis, a casting director on Her, thinks she has the answer.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty ImagesColumbia Journalism School alumni descended into a heated row last week after a film director and producer who graduated from the school referred to some campus demonstrators as “murderous crackpots” and “pro-terror wack jobs,” prompting fierce backlash from other alumni in a Facebook thread.Norman Green, a 67-year-old Brooklyn-based producer and director who worked on True Life and Paranormal State—among other television shows, came under fire Thursday after responding to a message condemning the arrests of some 100 demonstrators protesting against the war in Gaza last week.“These protesters are unhinged. Nihilistic, pro-terror wack jobs. I’ll post a link,” Green wrote on a Columbia alumni Facebook thread reviewed by The Daily Beast, linking to several videos from the campus protests. “Maybe murderous, genocidal narcissists merit a response”Read more at The Daily Beast.