If it spurs on the movement to create legislation controlling how likenesses are used in AI models, Sam Altman has done himself a great disservice here.
Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice
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Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice
#832Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is so special about her voice? They could’ve found a college student with a sweet voice and offered to pay her tuition in exchange for using her voice, no? Or a voice actor? Why be cartoonishly stupid and cartoonishly arsehole and steal a celebrity’s voice? Did he think Scarlett won’t find out? Or object? I don’t understand these rich people. Is it their hobby to be a dick to as many people as they can, for no r…
Scarlett voiced Samantha, an AI in the movie "Her" Considering the movie's 11 years old, it's surprisingly on-point with depictions of AI/human interactions, relations, and societal acceptance. It does get a bit speculative and imaginative at the end though... But I imagine that movie did/does spark the imagination of many people, and I guess Sam just couldn't let it go.
It's not just that. Originally the AI voice in Her was played by someone else, but Spike Jonze felt strongly that the movie wasn't working and recast the part to Johansson. The movie immediately worked much better and became a sleeper hit. Johansson just has a much better fitting voice and higher skill in voice acting for this kind of role, to the extent that it maybe was a make/break choice for the movie. It isn't a surprise that after having created the exact tech from the movie, OpenAI wanted it to have the same success that Jonze had with his character.
It's funny that just seven days ago I was speculating that they deliberately picked someone whose voice is very close to Scarlett's and was told right here on HN, by someone who works in AI, that the Sky voice doesn't sound anything like Scarlett and it is just a generic female voice:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40343950#40345807
Apparently .... not.
Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice
#833Well, 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…
To each their own. I personally didn't get Scarlett Johansson vibes from the voice on the GPT-4o demo ( https://openai.com/index/hello-gpt-4o/ ) even though I'm a huge fan of hers (loved Her, loved Jojo Rabbit, even loved Lucy, and many many others) and have watched those and others multiple times. I'd even say I have a bit of a celebrity crush. To me it's about as close to her voice as saying "It's a woman's voice".…
OpenAI confirmed it by removing the voice immediately after Johansson's lawyers reached out
Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice
#834Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is what makes me wonder if this might grow into a galvanizing event for the pro-creator protests against these AI models and companies. What happened here isn't particularly unique to voices or even Scarlett Johansson, it is just how these companies and their products operate in general.
I think the only way for these protests to get really tangible results is in case we reach a ceiling in LLM capabilities. The technology in its current trajectory is simply too valuable both in economic and military applications to pull out of, and "overregulation" can be easily swatted citing national security concerns in regards to China. As far as I know, China has significantly stricter data and privacy regulatio…
We have almost run out of training data already so I’m not convinced they will get massively more generalised suddenly. If you give them reasoning tasks they haven’t seen before LLMs absolutely fall apart and produce essentially gibberish. They are currently search engines that give you one extremely good result that you can refine up to a point, they are not thinking even though there’s a little bit more understanding than search engines of the past.
Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice
#835Earlier 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...
What is so special about her voice? They could’ve found a college student with a sweet voice and offered to pay her tuition in exchange for using her voice, no? Or a voice actor? Why be cartoonishly stupid and cartoonishly arsehole and steal a celebrity’s voice? Did he think Scarlett won’t find out? Or object? I don’t understand these rich people. Is it their hobby to be a dick to as many people as they can, for no r…
> Is it their hobby to be a dick to as many people as they can, for no reason other than their amusement? Just plain weirdos
They seem to love "testing" how much they can bully someone.
I remember a few experiences where someone responded by being an even bigger dick, and they disappeared fast.
Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice
#836From 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...
Is there actually any evidence for this? AFAIK, other similar claims about people doing certain things when lying have been debunked(like fidgeting, avoiding eye contact, etc)
Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice
#837Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Tactical charisma" is a good one. Honestly though, if you actually listen to him and read his words he seems to be even more devoid of basic empathetic human traits than even Zuckerberg who gets widely lampooned as a robot or a lizard. He is a grifter through-and-through.
Emotional intelligence /true empathy cannot be learned or acquired, at least IMHO. But it can be learned to be mimicked almost to perfection, either by endless trial & error or by highly intelligent motivated people. It usually breaks apart when completely new intense / stressful situation happens. Sociopaths belong here very firmly and form majority. If you know what to look for, you will see it in most if not all p…
> Emotional intelligence /true empathy cannot be learned or acquired, at least IMHO.
I think you are right in general here in this comment but I am not sure if you are right on this bit.
Peterson might be slightly overstating the number of sociopaths (others put it at more like one in thirty).
Those people have to fake it (if they can be bothered; it doesn't seem to hold people back from the highest office if they don't)
The vast majority of people with noticeably low empathy, though, simply haven't ever been taught how to nurture that small seed of empathy, how to use it to see the world, how to feel the reciprocal benefits of others doing the same. How to breathe it in and out, basically. It's there, like a latent ability to sing or draw or be a parent, it's just that we're not good at nurturing it specifically.
Schools teach "teamwork" instead, which is a lite form of empathy (particularly when there is an opposing team to "other")
I was never a team player, but I have learned to grow my own empathy over the years from a rather shaky sense of it as a child.
Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice
#838I'm not a fan of Sam Altman, but this is such a non-issue. The solution is simple: adapt and find new ways to be creative in the world of AI. Copyright is becoming a thing of the past and rightly so. We just have to collectively accept this and move on because laws won't stop it.
Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice
#839Isn't OpenAI mostly built upon disregarding the copyright of countless people? And hasn't OpenAI recently shown that they can pull off a commercial coup d'état, unscathed? Why would they not simply also take the voice of some actress? That's small potatoes. No one is going to push back against OpenAI meaningfully. People are still going to use ChatGPT to cheat on their homework, to phone-in their jobs, and to try to…
>Isn't OpenAI mostly built upon disregarding the copyright of countless people? It sure was. But OpenAI decided to poke the Bear and is being sued by NYT. And apparently as a sidequest they thought it best to put their head in a lion's mouth. I wouldn't call the PR clout and finances of an A-list celebrity small potators. They could have easily flown under the radar and have been praised as the next Google if they ke…
> > Isn't OpenAI mostly built upon disregarding the copyright of countless people?
> It sure was.
Can you cite something that elaborates on this point? Do people who read books and then learn from it also disregard copyright? How is what OpenAI does meaningfully different from what people do?
Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice
#840Altman often uses tactical charisma to trap gullible people, government entities, and any unsuspecting powerful person for his ends. He will not bat an eyelid to take whatever unethical route if that gives him "moat". He relentlessly talks as if "near-term AGI" is straining to get out of the bottle in his ClosedAI basement. He will tell you with great concern about how "nervous" or "scared" (he said this to the US Co…
"Tactical charisma" is a good one. Honestly though, if you actually listen to him and read his words he seems to be even more devoid of basic empathetic human traits than even Zuckerberg who gets widely lampooned as a robot or a lizard. He is a grifter through-and-through.
I agree. By tactical charisma, I didn't mean to imply that he has genuine empathy. I mean that he says things the other person finds pleasing, in just the right words, and credible-sounding seriousness. Tactical in a tempting sense: "Don't you want to be the bridge between man and machine, Scarlett?" or, "Imagine comforting the whole planet with your voice" — I've slightly rephrased a bit here, but this is how he tried to persuade Scarlett Johannson into "much consideration" (her words).
Yes, I've listened to Altman. A most recent one is him waffling with a straight-face about "Platonic ideals"[1], while sitting on a royal chair in Cambridge. As I noted here[2] six months ago, if he had truly read and digested Plato's works, he simply will not be the ruthless conman he is. Plato would be turning in his grave.