Regardless of the ethics here and what it says about the character of this CEO, the choice to make an AI voice resemble the character from that movie seems tacky and creatively bankrupt to me. ChatGPT is very much not that character, do something original ffs.
this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
207 points (87.9% liked)
AI
4006 readers
34 users here now
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines, unlike the natural intelligence displayed by humans and animals, which involves consciousness and emotionality. The distinction between the former and the latter categories is often revealed by the acronym chosen.
founded 3 years ago
That makes it all the worse, though. Their usual horseshit, that they're doing all this immoral stuff to build a better future, that was always disconnected from reality, but at least it was still possible to conceive of a person so privileged, that they might genuinely not realize their failings.
But with this, they knew that it was not ok, did it anyways, and there's just absolutely no possible explanation other than that Sam Altman is a fucking child or on a power trip.
What, people can't ID a tech billionaire psychopath anymore? It's not like they're from different stock.
These tech billionaires are actually idolized from where I am from. You ever see those sigma edits from the usernames "hustletop" "Growknowledge" "Lion entrepreneur" lol. I remember so many edits of sam altman after the whole acquisition from Microsoft and rehiring him. I was actually disgusted. L
This the same guy who (allegedly) has apparently been having unethical CNC kink parties💀? Like no judgment, I'm actually kind of into CNC, but you have to Actually get enthusiastic informed consent first (and during) and use safewords. You can't just foist it on people who happen to show up to a party, that's literally (allegedly) just sexual assault. Seems like he might just be (allegedly) completely indifferent to the concept of consent.
Edit: here's the source https://www.salon.com/2024/05/21/coercive-climate-of-silicon-valleys-ai-boom-fuels-troubling-parties-researcher-says/
Apparently the person didn't specify any specific OpenAI executives by name, so it's uncertain whether Altman knew about the parties. Still reflects poorly on him if this is the culture at OpenAI tho imo.
~~I'm afraid to ask, but will anyway, what does CNC mean in this context?~~
Sorry, read the article. Rape-y games I guess.
Proper cnc is not rape, that's the entire point
That's what I said. Rape-y games.
He literally raped Scarlett Johansson.
You don't own the rights to the voice of every actor who arguably sounds kinda like you. OpenAI had an idea of a type of voice they wanted, when Scarlett said no they hired a voice actor. I mean, what? There are many valid criticisms of Sam and OpenAI don't get me wrong but this is one I just can't get on board with.
I feel like I'm missing something though because so many people are commenting on this as though Scarlett had her own voice used without her consent or something.
They reached out to her a couple days before they launched, and said hey do you want to maybe reconsider that thing where we asked you about this a couple times, and both times you told us to go fuck ourselves
And then they told the media that they were in discussions with her, when the discussions were her lawyer telling them to go fuck themselves
And then Altman tweeted "her"
And then when it launched, it was according to her so freakishly similar that her friends were weirded out by it
If it was some different actress saying hey this sounds a lot like me, that wasn't the one that they clearly had in mind when they were making their plans about it, then I could see a pretty strong argument to say hey relax buddy sometimes different people just sound similar
I don't really know; I'm not familiar enough with movie people to really listen to it and see what I think and I don't care enough to investigate. But just based on the above I feel like probably she has a fairly strong case.
Yeah. Imagine the great advertising and publicity they would get by having it voiced by Scar Jo.
If she would have said yes, they likely would have dropped the similar sounding voice that they had and released it with the other three voice options, got Scar Jo to come do the voicing, and then released her voice like two weeks later.
OpenAI had an idea of a type of voice they wanted
Yep. It was a very specific voice they wanted.
they hired a voice actor
This made me think a little too, but then I started thinking about how people talk. Even if a person's tone is similar, the mannerisms are still drastically different. The voice actor had to spoof Scarletts voice well enough to even fool Scarletts friends.
While I haven't read Altman's tweets (or tweets from someone else at OpenAI?) personally, rumor has it he knew what he was doing with a specific voice actor. The intent was to spoof her voice. The intent is probably more damning than the actual act, TBH.
To summarize, there are a few nuggets here: They approached SJh first with a specific reason to use her voice; Some asshat bragged about spoofing the voice on Twitter; There was clear intent of generating a likeness of SJh.
(Thinking about the broke actors for a second.. /s) Their face and voice are at the core of their career, similar to how company branding is makes a company unique. While I am not a lawyer, it seems there are some parallels with trademark and copyright law here.
"Accidentally" using a voice that sounds like SJh would be a really poor argument now as well.
they hired a voice actor
This made me think a little too, but then I started thinking about how people talk. Even if a person's tone is similar, the mannerisms are still drastically different. The voice actor had to spoof Scarletts voice well enough to even fool Scarletts friends.
I don't get this. Why are you assuming they constructed the voice with only the samples from another voice actress and didn't use any from Johansson? Why are you assuming they used the samples from that voice actress at all and didn't only use samples of Johansson's voice they scraped from all corners of her prolific history of work?
Any random company I would give the benefit of the doubt, but these AI companies have specifically shown they don't care about copyright law specifically or ethics in general, and they definitely have no qualms lying about where they get their data and what they do with it.
If parts were generated, copied or acted it seems somewhat irrelevant. They intended to, and did, generate SJh's likeness, by whatever means, and that is the key point.
But yeah, they probably mixed and matched voice samples to their liking. I wouldn't doubt that for a second. If actual samples were used in the final product, that would be extremely damning.
Ok see this I get. Yes I agree if they did this, it's totally unethical and presumably illegal as well and they should face consequences for that. They claim to have hired voice actors for all their voices though, assuming that's true (maybe a big assumption) I don't think there's an issue but if it's more like what you suggested then it's a big violation.
Yes, "to summarize" indeed.
Yeah most voices aren't even close to unique.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
"He told me that he felt that by my voicing the system, I could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and AI," Johannson wrote of the interaction this week.
Johansson is inextricably linked to the contemporary conception of AI by her iconic performance in Spike Jonze's acclaimed 2013 film "Her," in which she voiced a chatbot that became romantically entangled with a human character played by Joaquin Phoenix.
But "nine months later," she continued, "I was shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference" in a new version of ChatGPT that can carry out a spoken conversation with users.
Its spokespeople — there are none so prominent as the increasingly ubiquitous Altman, who's produced an endless stream of headlines with his simpering forecasts about how AI will soon make the world better for everybody — refuse to apologize for training their models on data indiscriminately scraped from authors, artists, and anything else they could scavenge online.
Sometimes the Altmans of the world tepidly offer that individual creators will be able to opt out of the racket, which is of pale comfort to writers getting replaced by ChatGPT or artists losing work to OpenAI's DALL-E.
But trampling on Johansson's wishes around her own likeness show how the industry really operating: by moving fast, seizing anything it needs to gain market share, and using rhetoric about potential utopias and doomsdays to try to wrangle permission after the fact.
The original article contains 814 words, the summary contains 273 words. Saved 66%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Didn't we know that?