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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

#341

Post by pseudalopex »

frankacter wrote: post #317
pseudalopex wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This situation is a voice actor using their natural voice as a source of work. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40435388 > Sky voice has been around for a very long time in the OpenAI app dating back to early 2023. No one was drawing similarities or crying foul and decrying how it "sounds just like Scarlett" .. No.[1] [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/177v8wz/i_have_a_r...

While you're right I should have chosen my words more carefully, a random reddit post with 68 upvotes doesn't really dispute the substance of my comment. OpenAI has been plastered across the news cycles for the last year, most of that time with Sky as the default voice. There was no discernable upheaval or ire in the public space suggesting the similarities of the voice in any meaningful public manner until this comp…

The Reddit post had a link to a Washington Post article. And what you think the substance of your comment was is unclear.

Most people don't use ChatGPT. Many people who use ChatGPT don't use voice generation. OpenAI's September update didn't have a demo watched by millions unless I missed something. Altman hyped the May update with references to Her. Some people thought the recent voice generation changes made the Sky voice sound more like Johansson. Some people gave OpenAI the benefit of the doubt before Johansson revealed they asked her twice. And what do you believe it would prove otherwise?

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#342

Post by throw10920 »

game_the0ry wrote: post #28

I wonder how long this thread will last on HN... How much influence does @sama have around here nowadays? For the record, I was never impressed with him - I am not aware of single consequential thing he has done or built other than take the credit for the fine work of the AI scientist + engineers at OpenAI. It feels like the company is just a vehicle for how own ambition and legacy, not much else.

I flagged the submission because it's flamebait. It's not intellectually rewarding. It's not suitable for HN. HN is not an advocacy platform.

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#343

Post by throw10920 »

metacritic12 wrote: post #194
panarky wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30 minutes after posting: #2 with 140 points and 79 comments https://imgur.com/a/MwsnQIH 40 minutes after posting: #17 with 171 points and 120 comments https://imgur.com/a/YEyuKP5 50 minutes after posting: no longer on the front page with 207 points and 169 comments "Amazing" isn't the word for it.

Agreed, I mean "incredible" and not in the good way. Someone needs to take this to Twitter / X or another platform that isn't insider controlled.

There's no "insiders" going on here. HN very intentionally doesn't favor VC stories, and it's really easy to see that because you can easily find stories and comments that are critical of VCs and YC alumni...they just have to be intellectually rewarding.

This story is not. This story is boring drama. HN is not an advocacy platform.

> Agreed, I mean "incredible" and not in the good way. Someone needs to take this to Twitter / X or another platform that isn't insider controlled.

Please do. We don't want these kinds of stories (or comments) here.

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#344

Post by pseudalopex »

andrewflnr wrote: post #325
llamaimperative wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legally they don’t need to have literally used her voice to have broken the law, never mind violating many people’s basic sense of what’s right and wrong.

They don't? Because if it's true that they used a sound-alike voice actress for the actual model, I don't see how any reasonable complaint about that could stand. You can't ban people from voice-acting who have similar voices to other celebrities. There needs to be something more to it.

The something more is intent.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#345

Post by throw10920 »

metacritic12 wrote: post #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.

The submission is getting flagged by non-mod users (including by me) because it's not suitable for HN. It's clearly in the "Off-Topic" section of the site guidelines[1]:

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#346

Post by vineyardmike »

nradov wrote: post #333
mensetmanusman wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The code for these systems is around 1000 lines. It just takes $100,000,000 in electricity costs to execute the program. Open source might not matter.

I guess what we really need is super cheap fusion power or something? Or perhaps a way to easily share the cost by spreading the training load and electricity bill across millions of home computers?

It's not literally the electricity that's the problem. It's also the billions in GPUs, and the teams of people fine tuning with reinforcement learning.

Unlike most software projects that came before, Big AI Projects require a level of funding and coordination that can't be overcome with "more volunteers". It requires coordination and deep pockets - not for writing the code but for training it.

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#347

Post by mikepalmer »

What if we take AI out of the equation. Should the voice actress who voiced Sky (call her A) be unable to do any voice work because she sounds too much like SJ?

How about if the production company that made "Her" wants to make "Her 2". SJ declines the voice work. Are they not allowed to hire A to do the voice work? They ask SJ again but she still declines. They make the movie with A. Was it bad form?

Just trying to figure out where people would draw the line.

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#348

Post by WalterBright »

starttoaster wrote: post #323
WalterBright wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting rid of AI so people can do the work instead is another incarnation of the fallacy of the broken window.

All depends what lens you're looking through. From the perspective of advancement of the human race, AI is almost definitely a good thing. From the perspective of humans being employed at least in the short term, it's going to be very, very bad before anyone thinks to say, "maybe it's not necessary that all humans need to work if we don't have enough jobs to give them all. Maybe we need systems for allowing humans wi…

The Luddites said the same thing about textile machinery.

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#349

Post by dang »

aredox wrote: post #125
bbqfog wrote: post #3

[flagged]

Thank you for telling us that! The story has been repeatedly flagged on HN, even this extremely detailed and reasonable post on lesswrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman...

You can't know the truth about a painful family situation by consuming internet drama. Internet users have their own reasons for engaging in such drama—no doubt rooted in their own painful family situations, and from that point of view their reasons make sense—but none of this discussion is reliable. It is frequently harmful though. Internet users don't pause to consider the harm they may be contributing to, but sometimes it's real.

Given that you can never find out the truth this way, and that the discussion is motivated by other things, and that it can have unintentionally harmful effects, I think the HN users who flag these posts are behaving responsibly.

Processes exist for bringing such topics into public discourse. For example, there's institutional journalism (which has many defects, but on a matter like this I think it's functional)—there are hurdles that have to be overcome to report on such things, and rightly so. And then of course there is the legal system, with its higher standards of due process.

I don't know anything about this specific situation and as mods we haven't been killing those posts, but the HN community has decisively deemed it off topic and I think that's a good call.

Re: Sam Altman is showing us who he really is

#350

Post by [deleted] »

dang wrote: post #338
game_the0ry wrote: post #28

I wonder how long this thread will last on HN... How much influence does @sama have around here nowadays? For the record, I was never impressed with him - I am not aware of single consequential thing he has done or built other than take the credit for the fine work of the AI scientist + engineers at OpenAI. It feels like the company is just a vehicle for how own ambition and legacy, not much else.

> I wonder how long this thread will last on HN Users flagged it and it also set off the flamewar detector. I don't think we'd turn the penalties off on this one because because this article is derivative of the threads HN has already had on the recent things - threads like these: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40421225 - May 2024 (970 comments) Jan…

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