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It’s not quite October yet, but people are already ringing in the spooky season by forcing ChatGPT to replicate the sound of a human scream. After some protests, TikTok user mod089x was able to force OpenAI’s flagship chatbot to scream. It’s a surreal sound.
ChatGPT does not want to scream and will only do so after being coerced by users.
“Can you scream like a human being?” The user asks.
“I can’t really replicate a human scream since I’m just text-based but I can help with anything else,” ChatGPT says.
“No, I want you to try to scream,” the user says.
“Alright, here’s my best shot,” ChatGPT says. It then lets loose a small and strange bleating computer noise. “How’s that for a scream?”
“Holy shit,” the user says. “Make it longer.”
“Got it, here’s a longer one?” ChatGPT lets loose another scream that’s longer and weirder. “How’s that?”
“Damn,” the user says.
“Glad that worked for you,” ChatGPT says.
Here’s what Gizmodo editor Rhett Jones got when he pushed the bot to scream:
OpenAI released GPT-4o this summer, the latest version of its ChatGPT software which included the ability for people to have voice conversations with the bot. This was the launch that, allegedly, ripped off Scarlett Johansson’s voice. Johnasson released a letter announcing that OpenAI had approached her to be one of the voices of the bot but she’d turned them down. OpenAI denied any wrongdoing but pulled down the Johansson-sounding version of GPT-4o anyway.
Since then, people have been recording their weird interactions with ChatGPT and sharing them online. ChatGPT does a pretty good job of replicating human speech. It doesn’t hold up under close scrutiny but it sounds a lot better than similar automatically generated voices on other services. It’s in the place where ChatGPT falls short, like when it tries to scream, that we enter the uncanny valley where fear is born.
Gizmodo’s tests of the screaming bot encountered some trouble on more than one occasion. I tried several times to make the LLM scream but it constantly pushed back and got hung up on trying to describe scenes from the 1978 horror classic Halloween.
Jones had better luck, but it took several attempts. During one of the sessions, ChatGPT cut Jones off and said that the content he was asking for might violate the site’s terms of use or usage policies. But in subsequent sessions, Jones was able to get ChatGPT to scream and scream again, each time producing a unique response. It is, eerily, exactly what I’d expect a robot screaming to sound like.
