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Sam Altman just loves to be a sociopath and then brag about it. His latest?
https://x.com/sama/status/1790075827666796666
"Her".
In case you've been living under a rock, this is in reference to the 2013 movie in which Scarlett Johansson plays the voice of an AI girlfriend. And it's also a reference to Open AI's new product, Chat GPT 4o, whose voice sounds just like... you guessed it, Scarlett Johansson.
This is no mistake. Open AI actually approached Ms. Johansson and asked her permission to use her voice. When she said no, they said fuck it and did it anyway.
https://x.com/BobbyAllyn/status/1792679435701014908
If Elon Musk is chaotic neutral, Sam Altman is increasingly proving himself to be lawful evil. It's not a good look.
How does using a voice that sounds like Scarlett Johansson's harm anyone? Perhaps it was illegal, but you shouldn't claim it was evil unless you can identify the harm done.
I don't think it is outlandish to claim that people should have some control over their likeness, even if is apparent that the media in question is a digital reproduction rather than the original person.
For example, I think it is reasonable to consider deepfake porn generated without the consent of the person whose images trained the model to be bad even if it is clearly labeled as deepfake.
Likewise, becoming the voice of OpenAI will probably result in the digital version of you saying a lot of stuff you would not endorse, like telling racist jokes perhaps.
While it is true that anyone can train their voice models on SJ's movies, there is still a difference of impact there.
I think that if a court decides that they picked a voice actor who sounded as similar as her as possible, OAI should be on the hook for damages. It would be like hiring an impersonator of some celebrity for an ad.
Of course, the relation between AI companies and their training data is strained anyhow.
On the one hand, I am somewhat sympathetic to the analogy of human brains: every coder has read sample code, every artist has seen some pictures, every musician has listened to music they did not compose, every writer has read a few books. On the other hand, there is a world of a difference between this post being produced by all the English text my brain was trained on and Copilot regurgitating whole functions -- comments and all -- of the quake source code .
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Trivially it harms the person whose voice was copied, which is why she was going to sue. Surely you wouldn't like it if one of the world's most powerful companies used AI to make a porn with your likeness, for example.
But that's not really the point. The point is that pretty much everyone who has ever worked with Sam paints him as some sort of Machiavellian genius. Certainly the episode with Reddit played out that way.
Perhaps this person shouldn't be in charge of the world's most important technology?
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No one thing Sam Altman has done sticks out as evil. You have to have followed events for some time in order to get a feel for the pattern. I get SBF vibes from him. He does seem cleverer and more well-adjusted than SBF, but fundamentally he is making the same kind of gamble. Sam Altman thinks that there is a non-negligible probability that AGI will destroy the world, but he is building it anyway.
His advocacy for regulatory capture in his company’s favor is a pretty clear cut example of it.
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The non-disparagement agreements tied to an NDA on the topic of said non-disparagement agreement, tied to retaining your
equityweird not-quite-equity compensation, with no mention of said clause at hiring time, seems surprisingly pretty clear-cutI would have a much easier time believing his, “Aw shucks, I had no idea we were signing that. Must have been those silly lawyers,” routine if there wasn’t a long history detailing Altman’s penchant for plausibly-deniable power grabs.
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In what universe is this the same kind of gamble as placing double-or-nothing bets with other people's money until you inevitably bust?
SBF also affirmed that he would take the hypothetical bet that had something like a 51% chance of doubling world happiness and a 49% chance of destroying the earth.
He would sacrifice all of us on the altar of expected value.
https://bestinterest.blog/sbfs-stupid-bet/
Yes. When has Sam Altman suggested that he'd St. Petersburg Paradox us into oblivion?
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I feel like this is an embedded interest rate bet. And you need to heavily discount very long term outcomes to agree with him.
A 51% chance of doubling human happiness with a 49% chance of going to zero doesn’t work because compound interest exists. His path may get us their faster but as long as civilization is moving forward we should have other bets to make in the future or just compound growth.
Any gambler who has an edge wouldn’t take the bet because going to 0 is 0, but he would rightly think he has an edge and can take those other bets too.
I don’t think I’ve seen this argument before. SBF 51%-49% bet sounds ok I get the reasoning but are instincts are it’s stupid to take a 0% possible outcome. And it’s because all our experience is that Humanity continues to grow so the 0% option is far worse.
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I'm actually very interested in how SBF's personality and views will change after he's been off all of the stimulants for a while. I know that when he was in jail they knocked his Adderall dose from 40mg/day to 10mg/day and he went to court to demand more while he was on trial.
His legendary lack of empathy was probably at least partly a "too many amphetamines" problem.
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