Politics

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.

Astrida Valigorsky/WireImage via Getty ImagesLocal officials have given the boot to a proposal to erect a huge neon sign over Morgan Wallen’s new bar at Nashville’s famed Honky Tonk Highway, criticizing the country music star for instances of misbehavior and past use of a racial slur.The Tuesday vote by the Nashville Metro Council saw 33 members vote against Wallen’s 20-foot sign, which advertises “Morgan Wallen’s This Bar,” according to The Tennessean. Just three members voted in favor of the plan.The full name of Wallen’s new space is This Bar and Tennessee Kitchen, the title of a 2019 song of his. The six-story facility, which actually features six different bars, bills itself as an “homage to his love of all things Tennessee and the fans that have embraced him and his music,” according to its website.Read more at The Daily Beast.

MSNBCNathan Wade, the former Fulton County special prosecutor who worked on Donald Trump’s election interference case in Georgia, described how threats from the former president’s most ardent supporters have upended his life in an interview Wednesday on MSNBC.Wade resigned in March after the judge in that case determined that a prior relationship between Wade and District Attorney Fani Willis created an “appearance of impropriety.”Having previously spoken to ABC News earlier this month about the circumstances surrounding his departure from the legal team, Wade on Friday added some more details about the downside of helping to bring a case against a former president with notoriously loyal supporters.Read more at The Daily Beast.