Earlier quoted context omitted.
Will be funny if Sam was the bad guy all along
Uh, we all should know exactly who and what Sam Altman is by now. He’s absolutely been the bad guy all along.
"Duh." [1] ;-)
Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice
571–580 of 1001 posts
Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice
#572Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bette Midler and Tom Waits didn't control their songs when they sued the companies.
But it makes it more likely that the listener will associate the commercial with the artist than just using the voice.
True to an extent. I'd argue that celebrity of a certain level would make one's voice recognizable and thus confusion can happen.
Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice
#573The more I find out about Altman the more I agree with the previous board about removing him. The guy just feels sleazy to me. Though he is doing what I want and that is not giving a fuck about artificial monopolies granted by government ie copyright
Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice
#574Well, that statement lays out a damning timeline: - OpenAI approached Scarlett last fall, and she refused. - Two days before the GPT-4o launch, they contacted her agent and asked that she reconsider. (Two days! This means they already had everything they needed to ship the product with Scarlett’s cloned voice.) - Not receiving a response, OpenAI demos the product anyway, with Sam tweeting “her” in reference to Scarle…
I know I have a reputation as an OpenAI hater and I understand why: it’s maybe 5-10% of the time that the news gives me the opportunity to express balance on this.
But I’ve defended them from unfair criticism on more than a few occasions and I feel that of all the things to land on them about this one is a fairly mundane screwup that could be a scrappy PM pushing their mandate that got corrected quickly.
The leadership for the most part scares the shit out of me, and clearly a house-cleaning is in order.
But of all the things to take them to task over? There’s legitimately damning shit this week, this feels like someone exceeded their mandate from the mid-level and legal walked it back.
Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice
#575Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, totally ethically bankrupt. But what bewilders me is that they yanked it as soon as they heard from their lawyers. I would have thought that if they made the decision to go ahead despite getting two "no"s, that they at least had a legal position they thought was defensible and worth defending. But it kind of looks like they released it knowing they couldn't defend it in court which must seem pretty bonkers to in…
> But it kind of looks like they released it knowing they couldn't defend it in court which must seem pretty bonkers to investors. That actually seems like there may be a few people involved and one of them is a cowboy PM who said fuck it, ship it to make the demo. And then damage control came in later. Possibly the PM didn't even know about the asks for permission?
The whole company behaves like rogue cowboys.
If a PM there didn’t say “fuck it ship it even without her permission” they’d probably be replaced with someone who would.
I expect the cost of any potential legal action/settlement was happily accepted in order to put on an impressive announcement.
Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice
#576Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did anyone say no to him other than Prince?
Coolio didn't say yes to Amish paradise but the record label that had the rights agreed to the deal without him (which certainly shows who's in charge in that industry eh?). Many years later, Coolio admitted that he was wrong about the whole thing though.
Oh my. That’s disappointing, in the sense that I believe I’ve heard Al say that he always checks with the artist.
Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice
#577Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing about the situation is that Altman is willing to lie and steal a celebrity's voice for use in ChatGPT. What he did, the timeline, everything - is sleazy if, in fact, that's the story. The really concerning part here is that Altman is, and wants to be, a large part of AI regulation [0]. Quite the public contradiction. [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-openai-artificial...
Some people might see some parallel with SBF and see how Altman would try to regulate competition without impeding OpenAI progress
Maybe they were the rogue AGI escapes we found along the way
Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice
#578Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing about the situation is that Altman is willing to lie and steal a celebrity's voice for use in ChatGPT. What he did, the timeline, everything - is sleazy if, in fact, that's the story. The really concerning part here is that Altman is, and wants to be, a large part of AI regulation [0]. Quite the public contradiction. [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-openai-artificial...
if this account is true, Sam Altman is a deeply unethical human being. Given that he doesn't bring any technical know how to building of AGI, I just don't see the reason to have such a person in charge here. The new board should act.
He has “The Vision”… It’s the modern entrepreneurship trope that lowly engineers won’t achieve anything if they weren’t rallied by a demi-god who has “The Vision” and makes it all happen.
Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice
#579Earlier quoted context omitted.
Withdrew too quickly? They didn’t come to an agreement to use her voice, they used her voice. And they obviously knew it was a problem because they went back to her like the night before trying to get her approval again. The correct thing to do was NOT use her voice. You don’t get to steal something, get all the benefit from it (the press coverage), and then say “oops never mind it was just a few hours you can’t sue…
They make no representation that it is her voice, and there's a really good chance that they separately made a voice that sounds similar enough to where if they could tack her name to it, it'd be good for advertising, but otherwise isn't her voice. Voices are really hard for people to distinguish as being a certain person without priming, so really she's doing for free the advertising they were hoping she'd do for pa…
I don’t know if it’s actually her voice. At this point I wouldn’t put it past them.
But if they concocted a fake voice to sound as much like her as possible, that’s not really better.
Altman’s tweet, combined with previous statements Her is his favorite movie, and trying to secure rights twice looks really really damning.
> so really she's doing for free the advertising they were hoping she'd do for pay
They didn’t want her to advertise for them. They wanted to use her voice. Do you not see a difference?
Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice
#580Earlier quoted context omitted.
This statement from scarlet really changed my perspective. I use and loved the Sky voice and I did feel it sounded a little like her, but moreover it was the best of their voice offerings. I was mad when they removed it. But now I’m mad it was ever there to begin with. This timeline makes it clear that this wasn’t a coincidence and maybe not even a hiring of an impressionist (which is where things get a little more w…
But it's clearly not her voice right? The version that's been on the app for a year just isn't. Like, it clearly intending to be slightly reminiscent of her, but it's also very clearly not. Are we seriously saying we can't make voices that are similar to celebrities, when not using their actual voice?
> Are we seriously saying we can't make voices that are similar to celebrities, when not using their actual voice?
I think the copyright industry wants to grab new powers to counter the infinite capacity of AI to create variations. But that move would knee cap the creative industry first, newcomers have no place in a fully copyrighted space.
It reminds me of how NIMBY blocks construction to keep up the prices. Will all copyright space become operated on NIMBY logic?