I was curious too because reading from zero context, it sounded like a founder was in jail. Turns out "DJ OT" is their mascot, and the cartoon on the page makes a lot of sense.
By "something happens to me", are you talking about a temporary absence (due to an illness or a vacation or something) or are you talking about the bus number (you get hit by a bus)?
If I didn't much care for my critics, then letting them invent a lot out of story I can rebut easily is worth waiting a few days, knowing full well I can publish it widely whenever I want.
An ordinary person worries all the time about dealing with the legal system. A big company does it all the time.
I mean clearly having Scarlett Johansson on board was plan A.
Bringing the voice offline and then revealing it was a recording of someone else who coincidentally sounded exactly the same is definitely plan B or C though.
I don't understand how you can trust OpenAI so much to think it was all an accident.
> I honestly don't understand how delusional you have to be to think OpenAI wanted this to happen.
(1) I've become tired of the "I honestly don't understand" prefix. Is the person saying it genuinely hoping to be shown better ways of understanding? Maybe, maybe not, but I'll err on the side of charitability.
(2) So, if the commenter above is reading this: please try to take all of this constructively. There are often opportunities to recalibrate one's thinking and/or write more precisely. This is not a veiled insult; I'm quite sincere. I'm also hoping the human ego won't be in the way, which is a risky gamble.
(3) Why is the commenter so sure the other person is delusional? Whatever one thinks about the underlying claim, one would be wise to admit one's own fallibility and thus uncertainty.
(4) If the commenter was genuinely curious why someone else thought something, it would be better to not presuppose they are "delusional". Doing that makes it very hard to curious and impairs a sincere effort to understand (rather than dismiss).
(5) It is muddled thinking to lump the intentions of all of "OpenAI" into one claimed agent with clear intentions. This just isn't how organizations work.
(6) (continuing from (5)...) this isn't even how individuals work. Virtually all people harbor an inconsistent mess of intentions that vary over time. You might think this is hair-splitting, but if you want to _predict_ why people do specific irrational things, you'll find this level of detail is required. Assuming a perfect utility function run by a perfect optimizer is wishful thinking and doesn't match the experimental evidence.
Having someone sing in the exact same style as another singer is totally different from what OpenAI did with their voice AI (having a female actor speak in a flirty tone).
It makes sense with music but you're setting a really dangerous precedent if you can't even hire a voice actor who sounds similar for speaking.
Yeah but follow the effects back to their causes: the colonies that became America were British colonies, not French or Spanish or Portuguese or Dutch colonies.
In other words: America was founded by British people. Settlers/colonizers from Britain.
> the colonies that became America were British colonies, not French or Spanish or Portuguese or Dutch colonies.
Some of them were British from the outset, but not even all of the original 13 Colonies were originally British:
- Parts of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Connecticut were Dutch before they were British ("even old New York was once New Amsterdam / why they changed it, I can't say; people just liked it better that way")
- Parts of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania were Swedish before they were Dutch before they were British
And that's to say nothing about the various Spanish (and later Mexican), French, and Russian colonies annexed throughout the US' post-revolutionary history. If we're gonna assign credit for the Internet to old European imperial powers, Spain in particular probably has just as much (if not more) to do with it than Britain, given that California was originally a Spanish colony (and then a Mexican colony, and then briefly its own country before the US annexed it).
To be precise the two colonies that were not always British|English from the outset had both become British|English colonies for a full century prior to the American Revolutionary War.
> America was founded by British people. Settlers/colonizers from Britain.
Not exactly - as pointed out not all the colonies were established by England (prior to the Union) and while under British authority by the time of the Revolutionary War the people within the colonies were not all from the United Kingdom as most were born in the Americas and a good number were descended from non-United Kingdom parts of Europe.
>otherwise we believe they used copyrighted audio from S. Johansson's movies.
I will slightly rewrite the quoted bit to reflect reality as is currently known by the public: "otherwise we assert without evidence they used copyrighted audio". I'm fully of the opinion that everyone on both sides is wrong here, and I'm only right because I hold the most minimal opinion; that everyone needs to go outside and touch grass because this whole thing is bizarre and pointless.
The comment I responded to made the statement that OAI behaved like the sea witch who literally stole someone's voice. That is not the case here, since Scarlett still has her voice and OAI only (allegedly?) copied it. Whether OAI violated copyright law is a different matter, but steal her voice they did not.
I don't think that's quite the same. Are they going out and hiring impersonators of the actors who declined the role or digitally enhancing the substitute to look like them? That seems closer to what happened here.
Asking someone to license their voice, getting a refusal, then asking them again two days before launch and then releasing the product without permission, then tweeting post launch that the product should remind you of that character in a movie they didn't get rights to from the actress or film company is all sketchy and -- if similar enough to the famous actress's voice, is a violation of her personality rights under California and various other jurisdictions: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights
These rights should have their limits but also serve a very real purpose in that such people should have some protection from others pretending to be/sound like/etc them in porn, ads for objectionable products/organizations/etc, and all the above without compensation.
> But hiring another actor to replicate someone you refused your offer is not illegal and is done all the time by hollywood.
Probably this could indeed make them "win" (or not lose rather) in a legal battle/courts.
But doing so will easily make them lose in the PR/public sense, as it's a shitty thing to do to another person, and hopefully not everyone is completely emotionless.
> But doing so will easily make them lose in the PR/public sense, as it's a shitty thing to do to another person, and hopefully not everyone is completely emotionless.
If an actor is saying no and you have a certain creative vision then what do you do?
Johansson doesn't own the idea of a "flirty female AI voice".
Find someone else? You think this is a new problem? Directors/producers frequently have a specific person in mind for casting in movies, but if the person says no, they'll have to find someone else. The solution is not to create a fictional avatar that "borrows" the non-consenting person's visual appearance.
First time I hear about it, but reading about it, it seems that specific case actually changed the typical terms for actors to prevent similar issues?
> Rather than write George out of the film, Zemeckis used previously filmed footage of Glover from the first film as well as new footage of actor Jeffrey Weissman, who wore prosthetics including a false chin, nose, and cheekbones to resemble Glover. [...]
> Unhappy with this, Glover filed a lawsuit against the producers of the film on the grounds that they neither owned his likeness nor had permission to use it. As a result of the suit, there are now clauses in the Screen Actors Guild collective bargaining agreements stating that producers and actors are not allowed to use such methods to reproduce the likeness of other actors.[
> Glover's legal action, while resolved outside of the courts, has been considered as a key case in personality rights for actors with increasing use of improved special effects and digital techniques, in which actors may have agreed to appear in one part of a production but have their likenesses be used in another without their agreement.
If they didn't use her voice at all, doesn't seem like there would be a case or even concern.
Also, they proceeded to ask her for rights just 2 days before they demoed the Sky voice. It would be pretty coincidental that they actually didn't use her voice for the training at all if they were still trying to get a sign off from her.
If they used her actual voice for training the model that shipped then I agree with you. It seems like they used the voice from another woman who sounds similar though.
It doesn't "seem like" in this instance, "no no that is not what we did we commissioned someone else" without specifying who is their claim.
From technical standpoint, a finetuned voice model can be built from just few minutes of data and GPU time on top of an existing voice model, almost like how artists LoRAs are built for images. So it is entirely within possibility that that had happened.
I guess it takes more than a couple of days to organize things with an A list star, esp. if there's a studio recording session involved rather than just using existing material.
This strongly suggests they weren't trying to get her voice until the last minute (would have been too late for the launch) but, rather, they had already used the other actress, and realized they were exposing themselves to a lawsuit due to how similar they were.
It was a CYA move, it failed, and now their ass is uncovered.
Surely the company that has been gobbling up data and information without the rights to them or any form of compensation have suddenly turned a new leaf and decided to try and pay an actress that isn't involved.
Like, lets be real here. This wouldn't be the first time they would be using material without the right to them and I don't expect this to change any time soon without a major overhaul of EVERYTHING IN THE COMPANY and even then it will probably only happen after lawsuits and fines.
What I'm wondering is why are they doing that in the first place. Why is the best AI company in the world trying to stick a flirty voice into their product?
It pains me to say it, but I really think it pays dividends to consider the very obvious possibility that the people who are doing this are in general just not socially well-adjusted.
Everything about OpenAI speaks of people who do not put great value on shared human connections, no?
Hey, I like that artist. I am going to train a computer to produce nearly identical work as if by them so I can have as many as I like, to meet my own wishes.
Why is it surprising that it didn't really cross their mind that a virtual girlfriend is not a good look?
This is not an organisation that has the feelings of people central to its mission. It's almost definitionally the opposite.
Yes, it seEms a LOt of big Names in tech have this same problem. Curious that, isn't it?
I also think it is tipping their hand a bit. I know companies can do multiple things at once, but what might this flirty assistant focus suggest about how AGI is coming along?
...because human brains enjoy being talked to in a flirty voice, and they benefit from doing things that their customers like? Doesn't seem that mysterious
Funny how Matt Levine acts like he's forced to write about Elon Musk (he's always like "ughh I have to talk about Musk again") when literally NONE of his readers ask him to talk about Musk (all the feedback on Twitter is people asking him to talk about something else).
What?