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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

#151
post #35

I love how we went from questioning copyright & licensing to "GPT vs Google, which one is better". To every artist or engineer out there who contributed to the general knowledge: you lost, everything you've ever done to help other people is now part of the models and there's nothing you can do to take it back. What even happened to the copyright strikes artists were supposed to bring up against these AI companies? Th…

I think that's a naive take. Derivative works are nothing new. What's new is that the price of this work is much lower with a tradeoff in quality. Even human copycats are still better than generative AI by miles.

The artist is not defined by their past work or other miscellaneous artifacts, but their perspective and creativity. This too is not a revelation. AI has nothing to do with this. It's just a means to an end.

The real problem is the legal stuff. Everything else is hype.

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#152
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That makes it weird, but it doesn't (itself) mean they literally used her voice. It just means they were inspired by the movie. It's not illegal to be weird.

I think it’s less the voice and more about how they went about it. They were apparently in negotiations with her and they fell apart. Then they tried to resume negotiations with her two days before the new model launched.

If it was just an actor, it might be a case of inspiration gone awry. But this particular actor sued Disney in 2021 after making a lot of movies and a lot of money making movies for them.

Deliberately poking a fight with a litigation happy actor is weird. Most weird is really benign. But this is the kind of weird that forces out of court settlements. It’s reckless.

Edit - mistyped the date as 2001. Changed to 2021.

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes it weird, but it doesn't (itself) mean they literally used her voice. It just means they were inspired by the movie. It's not illegal to be weird.

Perpetual benefit of the doubt given for every implication as though it’s happening in a vacuum is how humanity keeps putting megalomaniacs and sociopaths into positions of power and influence. It’s really a shame.

If we're going to pillory Sam Altman, it's important to do it for the right reasons. That was not a good reason. I really should not need to defend this principle.

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#154
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]

If Nazis had the nuclear bomb then they'd would've been backed into a corner and quite possibly dropped the bomb.

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#155
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.

> There are hundreds of people with similar voices.

Voice *actors* act. It is in the name. The voice they perform in is not their usual voice. A good voice actor can do dozens of different characters. If you hire a voice actor to impersonate someone else's voice, that is infringement. Bette Midler vs Ford, Tom Waits vs Frito Lay are the two big examples of court cases where a company hired voice actors to impersonate a celebrity for an ad, and lost big in court.

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#156

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.

I believe professional singer's voices will be copyrighted in future if not getting already.

Trademarked more likely.

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#157
Is something going on with the HN ratings for this submission?

It was ranked #1 a few minutes ago, and now below 20. It's 190 points posted You can watch this submission sink in realtime by refreshing; it's amazing almost.

See a live screengrab here: https://imgur.com/a/E3fOEvF everything with this submissions point / time ratio is ranked way higher.

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#158

If you get 10 random people in a room and blindly played a clip of Scarlett Johansson speaking normally (ie not lines from a movie), I'd put money that exactly zero out of 10 people could identify the speaker. It's one thing to copyright a performance or own a likeness. Owning the sound of a voice is scary territory we do not want to get into, or the estate of every singer will be suing the estate of every other sing…

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Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#159

If you get 10 random people in a room and blindly played a clip of Scarlett Johansson speaking normally (ie not lines from a movie), I'd put money that exactly zero out of 10 people could identify the speaker. It's one thing to copyright a performance or own a likeness. Owning the sound of a voice is scary territory we do not want to get into, or the estate of every singer will be suing the estate of every other sing…

[deleted]

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#160
All these journalists only now saying OpenAI stole a voice, and how Sam is so sneaky, when we only heard a PR release of someone sue-happy.

Look, I'd have respected it if you reported the voice sounded like Her by doing your own investigative research. To now pile on just shows you were sleeping at the wheel before, so be objective, don't pretend to know that it is a done deal only now.

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