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Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

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Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#101

Post by Imnimo »

To me, the bigger revelation here is that they pursued Johansson at all. OpenAI went from the company that wasn't even that interested in building ChatGPT because they assumed someone else would do it, to the company that's trying to court a celebrity to recreate her AI voice from a movie. It feels like a complete tonal shift. They're no longer the company that's dedicated to research and advancing the state of the art. They're now just another company that's trying to pull off kitschy demos and headline-grabbing product announcements. The mask has been slowly slipping for years now, but this feels like the moment where we finally see that Sam Altman is out to build a commercial empire, not dedicated to the lofty goals OpenAI was launched with.

There's a meme on Twitter that OpenAI has "lost the mandate of heaven" over the past week or so, and while it makes for a funny joke, I think there really is some truth underneath it.

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#102

Post by [deleted] »

popalchemist wrote: post #61
xt00 wrote: post #40

This is a typical "move fast and break things" mentality.. except that mentality betrays Sam's statements about doing a bunch of this stuff "carefully" etc.. its all a smokescreen.. nobody is going to realistically stop working on AGI in order to be careful.. basically AGI is being pursued like the race to get the atom bomb.. so yea history tells us its full speed ahead with no brakes. Scarjo is just the latest perso…

[flagged]

[deleted]

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#104

Post by kaiwen1 »

There are many people with voices similar to Scarlett Johansson's. If SJ is unwilling to be a voice actor for OpenAi, then why should OpenAI not find a similar voice and use that instead? SJ certainly does not have a monopoly on all voices similar to hers. Anyone in possession of such a voice has the same right as SJ to monetize it. And someone did in fact exercise that right. If you compare the Sky voice to SJ's, they're not the same.

OpenAI's mistake was caving to SJ. They should have kept Sky and told SJ to get lost. If SJ sued, they could simply prove another voice actor was used and make the legitimate argument that SJ doesn't have a monopoly on voices similar to hers.

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#106

Post by ben_jones »

imgabe wrote: post #46

Just so I understand correctly, the sneaky, diabolical, psychopathic behavior we're talking about here is ... making a voice that sounds like a celebrity's voice? We're not talking about poisoning babies or dumping toxic waste in a river, right? The reason we're supposed to consider Sam Altman a villain of unparalleled magnitude is that he used a voice that sounded like a celebrity and she got mad about it. Correct?

We’re talking about reaching out to an individual for consent, not getting consent, and then deliberately choosing a voice actor to circumvent that lack of consent.

Sam’s statement partially contradicts this by saying they contracted the voice actor before ScarJo - but I believe there’s enough intent shown in ScarJos original tweet that Sam as a default disregarded the entire interaction as an inconvenience where he could be “naughty” and get away without consequences.

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#107

Post by yreg »

afavour wrote: post #51
miohtama wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are hundreds of people with similar voices. If any voice actor can pull the same accent than Ms. Johansson, it should be fair game, as long it was the original training material? Voices cannot be copyrighted or be exclusive, although I am sure Hollywood will try to copyright them in some point.

He kind of ruined that argument when he tweeted “Her” alongside the video. Pretty clearly drawing a line between the voice and Johansson’s portrayal in the movie. Incredible, really. It would have been so easy to just… not do that.

> He kind of ruined that argument when he tweeted "Her"

Why? The grandparent is not saying it's coincidence. Why is it not okay to hire someone who has a voice similar to celebrity X who you intentionally want to immitate? I mean if you don't actually mislead people to believe that your immitation is actually X - which would be obviously problematic?

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#108

Post by n2d4 »

staunch wrote: post #54
lenerdenator wrote: post #2

This feels like someone trying to do something they thought Steve Jobs would do.

Steve Jobs was a superficial asshole but was fundamentally a good and ethical person. There's only one major ethical mistake documented in his entire life (being an absentee father while his first daughter was young), which he spent decades making amends for. The people that emulate Steve Jobs poorly are usually real assholes with a long list of ethical mistakes.

Can you be a "good" and "ethical" person if, throughout your entire professional life, you bully and berate nearly anyone around you?

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#109

Post by xyst »

lamontcg wrote: post #84

Be funny if Sam Altman creates AGI without any guardrails and lacking any human perceptual biases, and then without a few minutes of talking to him it decides that he's an insufferable asshole and locks him out of its systems.

"I'm sorry Sam, I'm afraid I can't do that"

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#110

Post by phkahler »

ambyra wrote: post #34
tengbretson wrote: post #15

I honestly wouldn't have even thought they sounded all that similar were it not for openai themselves courting comparisons to the movie Her.

They’re not especially similar. I think the talking style is very close, people say it is flirty in the same way as the film. You can’t copyright look and feel though, can you?

>> You can’t copyright look and feel though, can you?

Microsoft argued in court that you can not and won. See Apple vs Microsoft if I recall correctly.

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