Sam Altman's Inconsistent Candor Is Showing
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
The guy running the leading AI company was previously fired by the board because they didn't think he was showing proper restraint with regard to A LOT of areas. That decision was quickly overturned. And now we have OpenAI showing that they have no qualms about deep-faking a voice actor if they don't get the proper rights.
And we're supposed to believe that OpenAI has the proper protections in place to safely bring into fruition the AI of tomorrow?
We will wish in the future they had succeeded. He’s on the Elon fast track.
No, that isn't established. They are claiming they used a different actress, so no deep-faking involved. If the actress turns out to not be real, then yes Sam A is guilty of lying and some pretty gross behavior. If it turns out to be true though, what they did is a bit scummy, but not dishonest ~and not illegal~, unless you believe that people who sound similar to Scarlett Johansson don't have the same rights to their voice as Johansson does to hers.
Edit: It may actually be illegal given the intent. There is court precedent on this
<not2b> The answer, based on two different court precedents (Bette Midler, Tom Waits), is that the company can't do that. Companies cannot hire soundalike people to advertise their products after the person with a distinctive voice they really wanted declined. Doesn't matter if they hired a soundalike and used her voice.
I don't understand how it's different in any material way.
And I don't think the issue here is so much copyright as it is likeness rights.
Imitating someones voice doesn't break copyright but there have been several cases against companies that have used sound alikes in (for example) commercials
If Altmans use of "Her" in a tweet and the previous communication between OpenAI and Scarlett Johansson could persuade a judge that it wasn't a random chance they chose an actor that sounded like her but had set out to imitate her voice deliberately she might have a strong case for damages
For example Tom Waits was awarded $2.6M when Frito-Lay used an actor that sounded like him in an ad:
https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar_case?case=1598913833858...
I am so sick of reading this shallow dismissal.
It’s a classic bad faith argument where the offender tries to undermine the victims rights by claiming: “in fact I’m really just defending this other persons rights!”
It’s an intentionally obtuse strawman to say “people who sound similar to”.
It’s more than just Johansson’s voice. It’s meant to evoke the character she played in a film.
A performance that she developed and provided for a role for a project she worked on.
You may be unable or unwilling to appreciate that as work, or even hard work, but it is, and this skeezy company knows it too because they were so taken by that performance that they wanted to use it in their product.
I’ll frame it in a way people on this site can understand.
If you steal my code, but have some third party copy it while changing function and variable names(unfortunately exactly what these llms are also doing) and I complain about you doing that, and you say “O, so I guess anyone who writes python doesn’t have the same rights to their own work as you now?!”
I suppose in the absence of Johansson's rights to the character she developed means that this unethical megacorp has defacto rights to that character? Absurd.
> It’s a classic bad faith argument where the offender tries to undermine the victims rights by claiming: “in fact I’m really just defending this other persons rights!”
> It’s an intentionally obtuse strawman to say “people who sound similar to”.
> I’ll frame it in a way people on this site can understand.
Perhaps you wouldn't be so sick of it if you attempted to actually understand the argument. The irony in dismissing this as a "shallow dismissal" is you're actually making a shallow dismissal yourself. Your condescending attitude and feeling that you're so much smarter than everybody else is also (I suspect) a hindrance to actually trying to understand what someone with a different viewpoint than yours might possibly be thinking.
This particular case is pretty clear cut: Sam A liked Johansson's voice and either found an actress to mimic it, or he stole it. But when you are creating policy and law, you have to get at the underlying principles, and be able to apply that equally to multiple situations, many of which will be far less clear cut than this one. I.e. laws don't (or shouldn't) say "Sam A can't imitate Scarlet Johannson's likeness," they have to provide some sort of standard and/or benchmark that defines the underlying principle.
Is it possible that you are talking about a specific case, while the people you accuse of shallow dismissals are actually going a lot deeper than you and talking about the greater (and much harder to nail down) principles?
This particular case is boring. It's mostly just gossip mixed with cult of personality. Far, far more interesting to me is the philosophy and principles behind it.
Welcome to HN by the way! (and I mean that seriously. We've obviously disagreed here, but that's what makes this site great IMHO. I do hope that you come to have a little more humility and respect for others though, otherwise you're likely to miss the real interesting deep discussions I love this site for).
Bootlicking for an unethical megacorp is the road to "deeper and greater principles"? Peak HN.
It's all user error I suppose?
If you think ill-behaved billionaires are excusable, then we disagree. Though we seem to be stuck in a dystopian world run by them - so I guess you "win", in a sense.
Sam Altman is showing us who he really is
I thought the amount of "Weirdo defending Musk on Twitter' energy for Elon was amazing, but the amount of reality-denial that the OAI defenders have is quite a different beast. They wanted SJ's identity, she declined, they effectively cloned her against her will instead. That's about as sick as you can get. Future really looks bright!
> The Torment Nexus announces it has retained counsel in OpenAI dispute.
> On Sunday OpenAI announced it was removing its new horny robot girlfriend voice, explaining in a blog post that the voice was “not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson” at all (and frankly it’s weird of you even to think that???) but was actually the real human meat voice of a completely different actress who goes to another school, you wouldn’t know her. Also she’s from Canada.
> Recapping the imbroglio, Casey Newton wrote that Sam Altman is full of shit [measured, respectful] and Ed Zitron wrote that Sam Altman is full of shit [angry diatribe]. But with the final departure of co-founder and actual technologist Ilya Sutskever, whose last-ditch effort to oust Altman failed last fall, OpenAI is now firmly under the control of Paul Graham / Marc Andreessen style technofascist incompetents, and this kind of clown show will increasingly be the norm.
There's about a dozen links in there I don't feel like copying but it's easy to find.
Agreed that it's obvious that (assuming there is another voice actress) they found one as close to Scarlett Johansson as possible. That's a dirt bag move. But ~it's not illegal and~ it's not copying if they used a real, different actress. It's Scarlett Johansson's right to refuse her own voice, but it's not her right to prevent anyone else from agreeing.
That voice actress that they used has just as much right to her voice as Scarlett Johansson does to hers. Why should the voice actress not be allowed to work just because she sounds like Johansson? Why shouldn't Johansson be disallowed to work because she sounds like the unnamed voice actress?
Edit: It may indeed be illegal. Thank you child comments
That is simply untrue. Check out the Midler-Ford case, the Tom Waits case as just two examples.
If the intent is to mimic the character, you're in trouble. OpenAI is trying to claim they weren't mimicking Samatha, but you'd have to be a fool to believe that, given the other evidence.
I'm quite torn on whether this is how it ought to be though. If the burden of proof is on showing intent, then I think it's a good balance. If it shifts to just "chance of confusion" like many trademark cases have, that seems pretty unfair to average people and stacked in favor of the rich and famous.
Refs for others:
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co
[2]: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-05-09-me-238-st...
[3]: https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/22/tech/openai-scarlett-johansso...
https://www.expertinstitute.com/resources/case-studies/adver...
https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/using-name-or-likeness-anot...
https://www.tramatm.com/blog/category/other/sound-alikes-5-h...
> That's a dirt bag move. But ~it's not illegal
Experience tells me that everyone loves when someone chooses what the law allows over morality.
Can we acknowledge that immoral acts are often not illegal and illegal acts are often not immoral and then say that it's put to rest that it's obviously and definitely a dirt bag move?
Absolutely! No disagreement from me there.
I would also add that (to me personally) companies choosing what the law allows over what is moral doesn't impress me at all, in fact it lowers (sometimes drastically) my opinion of the company. When companies choose the moral thing over not-illegal-but-gross, especially when it costs them money, it raises them a huge deal in my book. I try to celebrate those decisions when I see them.
Just calls him a manipulative sociopath already.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
Edit: Atoav’s comment is more accurate.
Isn't what you did here a perfect example of how – if we were to take it seriously – any discussion could be "stopped" merely by whatabouting about the messenger?
I think Sam Altman can defend himself.