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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

#141

Post by hot_gril »

n2d4 wrote: post #108
staunch wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Tensions run high in these situations, and in the end they were just building personal computers. So yes, I can understand a boss who's always yelling that the product is shit and demanding that people fix it, but is also an ok person.

If there's a comic book villain tech leader out there, it's a CEO of some lifeless conglomerate that mainly buys out the competition and fires everyone aboard, or it's someone in charge of society-altering tech who is choosing to misuse it. And I'm not going to name names.

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#142

Post by breadwinner »

kaiwen1 wrote: post #104

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, th…

Agree. And what about people who look similar to SJ? Are they precluded from acting jobs, simply because SJ became an actor first?

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#143

Post by [deleted] »

lenerdenator wrote: post #60
panarky wrote: post #6

Altman would have us believe it's all just an innocent misunderstanding but without actually saying so: "We cast the voice actor behind Sky’s voice before any outreach to Ms. Johansson." Is he trying to suggest the company did not try to make the voice sound like her without her permission? The statement sounds like it's written by a lawyer to be technically true while implying something that is actually false. These…

If the voice actor was cast... why bother reaching out to ScarJo? Like, do you want to pay her fee, Sam? Because the general idea is to not pay the fee. Which is why you probably cast the voice actor before reaching out to Johansson.

[deleted]

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#144

Post by okanat »

sneak wrote: post #95
rawrawrawrr wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parody is covered under fair use.

As pointed out upthread, fair use is an exemption for copyright . You don’t need fair use for something that isn’t copyrighted (and, indeed, isn’t even copyrightable).

The voice and expression is copyrightable, that's just how audio books are under copyright protection.

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#145

Post by bobthepanda »

michaelmrose wrote: post #81
dotnet00 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue is intent. It's fine if two voices happen to be similar. But it becomes a problem if you're explicitly trying to mimic someone's likeness in a way that is not obviously fair use (eg parody). If they reached out to Johansson first and then explicitly attempted to mimic her despite her refusal, it might be a problem. If the other voice was chosen first, and had nothing to do with sounding the same as…

You don't need fair use for something that isn't copyrightable.

No, it is. Waits v. Frito Lay was a successful lawsuit where Tom Waits sued Frito Lay for using an impression of his voice in a radio commercial. https://casetext.com/case/waits-v-frito-lay-inc

See also Midler v. Ford Motor Co. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#146

Post by wvenable »

zemo wrote: post #12
behnamoh wrote: post #7

I don't like @sama just as much as the next person, but come on, in what world is ScarJo's voice unique? There are many people who sound like her. Does she imply that she "owns" this voice so no one else can use it? Excuse me, that's not how it works. Edit: IMO OpenAI should just make their voice engine open source. Then we'll see if ScarJo or anyone else can stop the open-source community. I expected more from her.

you have to be willfully missing the point when he said Her was his favorite movie, tweeted just “her” when the Sky voice was announced, and when they repeatedly tried to get the voice actor from Her. People who do underhanded things don’t just come out and say “look at me, doing the bad thing!”

I don't think any of this translates to anything bad. He loves the movie. OpenAI invented similar technology. They wanted to use Scarlett's voice to market it. She said no. They used a different voice.

People really want their to be a crime here with no evidence. You all have ears, you can listen to both clips back to back and discover, unsurprisingly, that they are actually different voices. Not even an imitation.

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#147

Post by 650 »

Imnimo wrote: post #101

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 a…

There's nothing more to be done, we're reaching the limits of what the current attention-transformer models can accomplish, and more data and computing power will not get us much further. With the investment OpenAI has taken in, coupled with their annual costs ($$$) they have to start making money, soon. Sam is embracing the grift, and power is corrupting him like most others in his place.

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#148

Post by yreg »

TylerE wrote: post #112
yreg wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

He strongly implied that it wasn’t an imitation.

We are talking about miohtama's argument, not Sam Altman.

I don't believe Sam Altman, but I am interested in the general “is it legal/ethical to immitate something uncopyrightable” argument.

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#149

Post by avarun »

lenerdenator wrote: post #60
panarky wrote: post #6

Altman would have us believe it's all just an innocent misunderstanding but without actually saying so: "We cast the voice actor behind Sky’s voice before any outreach to Ms. Johansson." Is he trying to suggest the company did not try to make the voice sound like her without her permission? The statement sounds like it's written by a lawyer to be technically true while implying something that is actually false. These…

If the voice actor was cast... why bother reaching out to ScarJo? Like, do you want to pay her fee, Sam? Because the general idea is to not pay the fee. Which is why you probably cast the voice actor before reaching out to Johansson.

Because it’s still great marketing to have Scarjo on board? That immediately returns positive ROI on the cost to hire her.

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#150

Post by tangentstar »

miohtama wrote: post #14
panarky wrote: post #6

Altman would have us believe it's all just an innocent misunderstanding but without actually saying so: "We cast the voice actor behind Sky’s voice before any outreach to Ms. Johansson." Is he trying to suggest the company did not try to make the voice sound like her without her permission? The statement sounds like it's written by a lawyer to be technically true while implying something that is actually false. These…

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.

No, voices can be exclusive. One good example is Bette Midler, who sued Ford in tort for misappropriation of voice and won on appeal to CA9. 849 F.2d 460.
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