‘Futurama’s Fight Against Celebrity Replicas Predates Scarlett Johansson’s OpenAI Feud By Decades
In recent years, the rapid advance of A.I. technology has become an urgent concern across multiple industries. It’s helping students plagiarize papers. It’s imitating your loved ones to scam you on the phone. Before last year’s strikes, members of the Writers and Screen Actors Guilds were raising the alarm that stingy studio heads would use it to replace them. Video game performers are currently on strike, in part over fears about A.I.; the Animation Guild could be next. And earlier this spring, one SAG member went public with her concerns about the technology hijacking her likeness.
But as Scarlett Johansson has kept up her feud with OpenAI all summer — as she should! — Futurama fans know Lucy Liu got there first.
Futurama, now a Hulu original series, is set around 1,000 years after its episodes air. Since its first season, when it aired on Fox, it’s been canon that future scientists will figure out how to keep heads alive in jars long after the bodies they were attached to have died. It’s a storytelling innovation that’s permitted guest appearances by stars who were still alive to play themselves, like Claudia Schiffer, Beck and the cast of Star Trek (the original series). It also lets the show’s writers reanimate deceased luminaries like Richard Nixon (voice of Billy West) for posthumous arcs.
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In the third-season episode “I Dated A Robot,” we find out what in-universe characters might want to do with the jar-head technology. Fry (West again), the show’s cryogenically frozen and unfrozen visitor from the 20th century, takes a day to do all the activities he’s always dreamed about; it seems unlikely that he could be romantically linked to a celebrity until his savvy friends tell him all he needs to do is go to Nappster. He finds out Lucy Liu (as herself) is available, loads up a blank robot and downloads her image onto it.
Obviously, the Lucy Liubot isn’t a perfect imitation of the real Lucy, but she’s close enough for Fry to want to “date” and obsessively make out with — so obsessively that his friends feel they have to intervene to break the spell. Alas, a middle-school propaganda film advancing the Space Pope’s position that the only purpose of relationships is procreation has no effect on Fry, who spends the screening kissing his robot. Taking the fight directly to Nappster, Bender and Leela find out it’s short for Kidnappster; that all its heads have been imprisoned there; and that getting downloaded causes them terrible pain.
After Leela (Katey Sagal) and Bender (John DiMaggio) have liberated the original Lucy — and survived Nappster’s counter-attack by dozens of homicidal Liubots — Lucy confirms that Fry’s is the last Liubot, and asks him to erase her. Fry is horrified, but Lucy explains, “When you downloaded her without my permission, you stole my image, and in the end that’s all I really have. That and the largest gold nugget in the world, one mile in diameter. If you love the real Lucy Liu and not just what you’ve seen in movies, genre-straddling lawyer shows and kiss-ass articles in People magazine, you’ll blank out that robot.”
Reluctantly, Fry agrees, then has to watch Lucy’s head declare her love for Bender, who’s spent the rest of the episode to this point railing against human/robot love affairs as a “tidal wave of moral decay.”
One target of this episode’s satire is obvious to anyone who was online at the end of the last millennium: Napster. The file-sharing platform that burst onto the cultural scene just a few months after Futurama’s series premiere in 1999 gets roasted when Bender and Leela confront an unrepentant Nappster executive. “You can’t shut us down!” he sputters. “The internet is about the free exchange and sale of other people’s ideas!” (Only true sickos will notice that this executive is named Jeff Jervis, just one letter off from open internet advocate Jeff Jarvis.) Back in the spring of 2001, when “I Dated A Robot” first aired, the battle against online file-sharing hadn’t yet been surrendered to the pirates, so jokes about “sharing” work that wasn’t yours in the first place had more of an edge.
But there was another target. In the late 20th century, advances in computer animation had brought audiences TV commercials starring long-dead showbiz stars. Presumably the estates of John Wayne and Fred Astaire granted their permission have CGI versions of the deceased performers endorse Coors Light and Dirt Devil, respectively, but — much like Lucy screaming in her jar when another nerd downloads a copy of her to his blank robot — Astaire and Wayne didn’t exactly give consent themselves. Though the campaigns did what they set out to do in terms of buzz and sales, Leora Broydo, a contemporary commentator at Slate, called them ghoulish. (Broydo also draws a distinction between computer-animating dead celebrities to shill products and doing it for narrative purposes in a movie like Forrest Gump, and though we all might agree in principle, that title may not be regarded as an artistic triumph now in the same way it was when this piece was published in 1997.)
Upsetting as it is to hear Lucy shriek in her jar as she gets zapped by another download, knowing she has no control over what the Nappster client is going to do with it, the evolution of A.I. and digital art has only gotten more dystopian in our day. Earlier this summer, Meta abandoned a project involving A.I. chatbots “embodied by celebrities” like Tom Brady, Padma Lakshmi and Paris Hilton. At the far end of the tech horror spectrum, Jenna Ortega recently told New York Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro she had deleted her Twitter account after receiving doctored pornographic images of herself as a child.
By comparison, what Scarlett Johansson says she suffered from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — “months” of him pitching her on lending her voice to a digital assistant, on which she ultimately decided to pass, only for the product to be rolled out sounding so uncannily like her that, after she called it out, the company dropped it almost immediately — isn’t as bad. But consider that it could potentially be used to make Johansson seem to say anything from a declaration of love for Altman to a seditious call for her fans to take up arms against the government.
In Futurama, Nappster seems to have gotten away with its patently unethical business model largely because no one bothered to look into it until one simple-minded idiot from the 20th century got a little too attached to the celebrity copy the company supplied him. This two-plus-decade-old warning about our distant future is pretty simple, and eminently relevant today. Seeking fame doesn’t grant the Sam Altmans of the world license to manipulate celebrities’ images. You should pay creators for the art you love.
And the Space Pope was probably right about one thing: DON’T DATE ROBOTS.
