OpenAI’s ad for its latest model looks straight out of the movie ‘WALL-E’ — and people have thoughts

• OpenAI’s Astra demo is drawing comparisons to “WALL-E” and “Her.”
• Astra can order takeout, list items on eBay, and create games, among other things.
• Some users say they’re worried AI could make humans too dependent on technology.

At this point, there’s hardly any reason to get off the couch.

OpenAI released a demonstration video for its new Astra model on Thursday. In the clip, people sit or pace before a large screen, barking orders at the model, which heeds their demands — including requests to list furniture on eBay and order takeout — almost instantly.

The futuristic video, which so far has more than 75 million views on X, sparked a spirited online debate: How much is too much automation? And how long until humanity starts to resemble the sedentary space people from “WALL-E?”

“Give humans nothing to do, nothing to build, nothing to struggle for long enough, and Idiocracy stops looking like satire and starts looking like a roadmap,” one user wrote on X.

OpenAI’s new model

The ChatGPT maker called Astra “the world’s most intelligent and aligned model” in a press release on Thursday.

OpenAI said it applied lessons from what it called the “Hugging Face incident,” in which rogue agents hacked into the platform’s servers during a test, to make Astra safer.

By Friday, some users on X were proudly displaying highly detailed 3D scenes created on Blender via prompts on Astra.

Other users posted clips from video games they designed using the new model. Users said the games were easy to create and highly steerable.

A dystopian future

Astra quickly drew comparisons to various movies in which characters rely on AI to the point of being unable to live without it.

Some comparisons were flattering — like Jarvis, Iron Man’s digital companion who controls his armor and occasionally delivers dry jokes.

Other people, though, said that with models like Astra, it was only a matter of time before humanity regressed into a slothful, inert species with no reason to move, travel, or work.

In “WALL-E,” the 2008 Pixar classic, humanity abandoned Earth after it became filled with garbage. They left the planet aboard a giant spaceship, and 700 years later, the population evolved into obese screen-watchers who got their nutrition through straws.

“You know, survival, longevity, health, food, regenerative food, all that stuff,” the film’s director, Andrew Stanton, told NPR in 2008 when it first came out. “So what’s the point of living? And so it was like this hellacious, perpetual vacation.”

Users on X also compared the technology to the 2013 film “Her,” directed by Spike Jonze, in which the main character, played by Joaquin Phoenix, falls in love with an AI companion before discovering that it’s also in love with more than 600 other people.