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Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice

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Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice

#651

Post by parpfish »

ornornor wrote: post #578
vasilipupkin wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I roll my eyes when somebody says that they’re “the idea person” or that they have “the vision”.

I’d wager that most senior+ engineers or product people also have equally compelling “the vision”s.

The difference is that they need to do actual work all day so they don’t get to sit around pontificating.

Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice

#653

Post by om2 »

benreesman wrote: post #612
crznp wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really doesn't sound like a "mid-level exceeding their mandate". It sounds like Altman was personally involved in recruiting her. She said no and they took what they wanted anyway.

It feels weird to be defending Altman, but those of us who go hard on the legitimately serious shit are held to a high standard on being fair and while multiple sources have independently corroborated e.g. the plainly unethical and dubiously legal NDA shit Vox just reported on, his links to this incident seem thinly substantiated. I’m not writing the guy a pass, he’s already been fired for what amount to ethics breac…

There’s more evidence of Altman being personally involved in this incident than in him being personally involved in the OpenAI exit agreement, and he has denied the latter. I’m not sure I believe his denial in the latter case.

Having an NDA in exit terms you don’t get to see until you are leaving that claim ability to claw back your vested equity if you don’t agree seems more severely unethical, to be sure. But that doesn’t mean there’s more reason to blame it on Altman specifically. Or perhaps you take the stance that it reflects on OpenAI and their ethics whether or not Altman was personally involved, but then the same applies to the voice situation.

Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice

#654

Post by locusofself »

underlogic wrote: post #595
Cheer2171 wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does Scarlett Johansson have a distinct enough voice that she is instantly recognizable? It absolutely is if you've seen /Her/. It even nails her character's borderline-flirty cadence and tone in the film.

Actually until recently I thought the voice actor for "her" was Rashida Jones

I definitely thought "Sky" was Rashida Jones. I still do.

Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice

#655

Post by XorNot »

cycomanic wrote: post #647
XorNot wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If OpenAI commissioned a voice actor to lend their voice to the Sky model, and cast on the basis of trying to get someone who is similar sounding to the Scarlett Johannson, but then did not advertise or otherwise use the voice model created to claim it was Scarlett Johannson - then they're completely in the clear. Because then the actual case would be fairly bizarre: an entirely separate person, selling the rights to…

That's confidently incorrect. Many others already posted that this has been settled case law for many years. I mean would you argue that if someone build a macbook lookalike, but not using the same components would be completely clear?

I ask you what do you call the Framework [1]? Or Dell's offerings?[2] Compared to the Macbook? [3]

Look kind of similar right? Lot of familiar styling queues? What would take it from "similar" to actual infringement? Well if you slapped an Apple Logo on there, that would do it. Did OpenAI make an actual claim? Did they actually use Scarlett Johannson's public image and voice as sampling for the system?

[1] https://images.prismic.io/frameworkmarketplace/25c9a15f-4374...

[2] https://i.dell.com/is/image/DellContent/content/dam/ss2/prod...

[3] https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/IMG_1...

Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice

#656

Post by gkanai »

nicklecompte wrote: post #234

From the Ars Technica story[1], this is very funny: > But OpenAI's chief technology officer, Mira Murati, has said that GPT-4o's voice modes were less inspired by Her than by studying the "really natural, rich, and interactive" aspects of human conversation, The Wall Street Journal reported. People made fun of Murati when she froze after being asked what Sora was trained on. But behavior like that indicates understan…

Bloomberg's Odd Lots Podcast had an ex-CIA officer, Phil Houston, on in April of 2024. He was promoting a new book but he had a lot of great advice for anyone to use regarding 'tells' when people are lying. Murati was clearly lying- that's obvious then and now.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/an-ex-cia-officer-expl...

Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice

#657

Post by gkanai »

divbzero wrote: post #652

Wanting to imitate Her is rather ironic: It’s like watching Wall Street and wanting to be Gordon Gecko, or watching Gattaca and wanting to genetically engineer humans.

Either _that_ is the joke for Altman or there are lot of Johansson fans at OpenAI.

Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice

#658

Post by cjbillington »

Havoc wrote: post #144
anon373839 wrote: post #62

Well, 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…

> OpenAI yanked the voice from their product line. Still live for me? Unless the Sky I’m getting is a different one?

It is. They didn't remove the UI option, they just swapped it out under the hood for the "juniper" voice.

Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice

#659

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

ncallaway wrote: post #450
mensetmanusman wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Effective altruism would posit that it is worth one voice theft to help speed the rate of life saving ai technology in the hands of everyone.

Effective Altruists are just shitty utilitarians that never take into account all the myriad ways that unmoderated utilitarianism has horrific failure modes. Their hubris will walk them right into federal prison for fraud if they’re not careful. If Effective Altruists want to speed the adoption of AI with the general public, they’d do well to avoid talking about it, lest the general public make a connection between E…

>Effective Altruists are just shitty utilitarians that never take into account all the myriad ways that unmoderated utilitarianism has horrific failure modes.

There's a fair amount of EA discussion of utilitarianism's problems. Here's EA founder Toby Ord on utilitarianism and why he ultimately doesn't endorse it:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YrXZ3pRvFuH8SJaay/...

>If Effective Altruists want to speed the adoption of AI with the general public, they’d do well to avoid talking about it, lest the general public make a connection between EA and AI

Very few in the EA community want to speed AI adoption. It's far more common to think that current AI companies are being reckless, and we need some sort of AI pause so we can do more research and ensure that AI systems are reliably beneficial.

>When they start talking about the utility of committing crimes or other moral wrongs because the ends justify the means, I tend to start assuming they’re bad at morality and ethics.

The all-time most upvoted post on the EA Forum condemns SBF: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/allPosts?sortedBy=top&ti...

Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice

#660

Post by kelnos »

worstspotgain wrote: post #558
MrMetlHed wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be fine to not negotiate if you weren't going to use a voice that sounded famous. If I were offering something that let you make any kind of voice you want, I would definitely not market any voice that sounded familiar in any way. Let the users do that (which would happen almost immediately after launch). I would use a generic employee in the example, or the CEO, or I'd go get the most famous person I could affo…

Sounds judicious. You probably wouldn't get sued, and would prevail if sued. However, the question of how much human voice space Scarlett can lay claim to remains unsettled. Your example suggests that it might be quite a bit, if law and precedent causes people to take the CYA route. Consider the hypothetical: EvilAI, Inc. would secretly like to piggyback on the success of Her. They hire Nancy Schmo for their training…

> However, the question of how much human voice space Scarlett can lay claim to remains unsettled

I don't think it's that unsettled, at least not legally. There seems to be precedent for this sort of thing (cf. cases involving Bette Midler or Tom Waits).

I think the hypothetical you create is more or less the same situation as what we have now. The difference is that there maybe isn't a paper trail for Johansson to use in a suit against EvilAI, whereas she'd have OpenAI dead to rights, given their communication history and Altman's moronic "Her" tweet.

> Does Scarlett own her own voice more than Nancy owns hers?

Legally, yes, I believe she does.

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