They stole my voice with AI

Actually that's easy: it wouldn't be profitable, yet.

They just about manage to make a good multimodal transformer that can generate audio and you expect that right away they can also interpolate in latent space? How does that actually work? It's not so simple. What benefit do they have from training on Scarlett Johansson's data, because they sure as hell have a big risk. They clearly hired a voice actress and they clearly told her to sound like Scarlett Johansson in "Her", and the end result perfectly fits with that. The voice doesn't "uncannily sound like SJ", no it just vaguely resembles her voice and mostly just mimicks the mannerisms from the movie. For me this is a perfect example of Occam's razor. One explanation is simple and realistic. The other explanation requires significantly more advanced AI control than OpenAI has claim/demonstrated, and it requires Altman to be so obsessed with the SJ idea that he goes out of his way to secretly train on her voice, risking legal exposure, while still hiring a voice actress.

No. Their assets are synthetic. Their identity is not. Their value and identity is in the real relationship and trust the creator builds with the audience. And that is what the company in question here tried to imitate. They didn't copy Jeff for his angelic voice, they copy him for the trust implicit in his reputation, name and 750k followers. It's the same reason Chris Pratt still gets hired to do commercials for millions despite the fact that any acting student would do it for 500 bucks and why openAI tried to copy Scar Jo in particular.

All these performances can be done by anyone for nothing, but they have commercial value because of the reputation of the person that's lending their likeness to them. And that's of course also why this is blatantly illegal by the way, we have personality rights and you can't shill your product with someone's likeness without consent, whether that likeness is AI generated or reproduced in some other way.

In other words, that's just the normal lifecycle of words in a language with an active speaker community. In any stage of history, the meaning of words is just the speaker community's projection of will.

Best I can do now is acknowledge that what counts as "theft" is a complicated topic and can't be decided by a binary "is said object still there after alleged theft has occurred?". I've benefited from some digital theft, naturally, so I might be biased to uphold my own morality but the kind of theft contemporary AI tech has enabled is something else entirely. Somewhere there is where I draw the line.

Recently, I introduced a few friends to the works of digital artist wlop. The immediate reaction was "Is that AI?". I can't help but feel offended in behalf of wlop. It doesn't help that they have made LoRAs out of his work. It's not so much the "theft" of techniques/concepts/etc. that enrages me but rather, the theft of credibility that a human is capable of this output. I imagine Jeff Geerling (and, to a lesser extent, maybe ScarJo) is enraged along similar lines. In this AI summer, other people are fighting for their livelihoods, other people are fighting for their credibility. And, of course, there's an intersection of people whose credibility is their livelihood.

Note that in reframing it as theft of credibility, the owning party has been definitely injured to an extent. As in, said object (credibility) is no longer what it once was after alleged theft has occurred.

And I'm not trying to state some Universal Truths that I will debate to death. Again the whole point is that what counts as "theft" is a complicated topic. I'm sure if you spend a bit more brainpower, you can find analogies that will make me look like a hypocrite. I'm just seeing this community lately strongly signal towards preserving some "original" meaning of words in the belief that it will solve some problem or another and I'm tired of it; I have similar linguistic thoughts about the whole uproar on the term "hallucination" but that's for another comment thread essay.

> People have to adjust expectations, not laws.

I know this thread is about theft but this attitude is downright dangerous in general. People should expect laws to adjust, lest they become irrelevant. Quick example: it's not fair to tell workers to adjust their expectation in light of the emergence of the gig economy. Should they just expect their labor to be exploited then, moving forward? I say, absolutely not. Legislation should catch-up to uphold/strengthen labor laws. Replace "gig economy" with "AI" and we are sort-of back on topic.