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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.
It sounds like they wanted to use ScarJo's voice all along, got too far in development, asked permission, got rejected, and then salvaged by picking an actress who was a close as possible. A lot of work goes into these things, cadences, pitch, pronunciation; once you're far enough in you can't change voices without changing a lot of other work. I doubt it was malicious, but I wouldn't call it totally honest.
As for the "her" tweet, that could mean anything. I never watched the movie and had to have explained to me how these two things connected. I don't have an especially high opinion of tech CEOs but I imagine Altman wasn't literally thumbing his nose at ScarJo. If he were, he's open-and-shut the villain, and my opinion if tech CEOs isn't that low.
Disagree with the posters saying this is nothing or even a win for OpenAI. ScarJo is popular, tech CEOs are not, and ScarJo has something of a case. This absolutely will have sway with people at the White House, or Brussels, who are looking for excuses to meddle in AI. And it only takes one sympathetic judge to establish a precedent that makes it harder for everyone. OpenAI will be fine, of course, because more and more regulation will ensconse them in a nice monopoly. Sorry anon, AI is too dangerous, and it looks like you don't have a license.
Supposedly, they hired the actress before reaching out to ScarJo.
Not sure it matters; outcome depends on the vagaries of California law and how sympathetic the judge/jury are.
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When GPT-5 comes out and @sama tweets "skynet" I'll bet you say the same thing.
well, they already named the system Sky, at this point it's just a question of linking several together and see what happens.
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It's almost definitely a reference to the movie "her". What does that mean? Is this a reference to ScarJo specifically, or just the movie? Does the AI voice resemble the movie "her" in any way even without ScarJo's involvement? Is this an innocuous joke, or Altman thumbing his nose?
Without reading his mind, it's actually not obvious what exactly he meant.
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Eh... I dunno.
Historically, yes, but a lot of the recent tools are amazingly good. This guy (cw: FFXIV spoilers up to 6.0, NSFW audio) is audibly AI-gen, but it's based on a character that has maybe an hour or two of voice lines, total, and while it's ElevenLabs rather than running on a home desktop, I'm pretty sure you could get similar results through RVC. Handling more varied content over longer periods would probably want more input media, but it's the work of days rather than months.
Sure, but releasing something for a Youtube video is different from releasing a large commercial product. Imagine thousands of man-hours on the voice making sure the AI never says anything embarassing, pronounces sensitive words appropriately, still sounds pleasing and attractive, doesn't accidentally sound angry when you prompt it a certain way... You have a bunch of nerds who watched "her" and want to use ScarJo's voice, so you prototype with that, hoping everythijg will work out. Now she says no. What do you do? Find someone with a similar voice so you don't have to redo thousands of hours of work.
This would be extremely easy and plausible for a PM unless he was explicitly told not to.
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Yes, that's part of the game. I guess we're supposed to believe that the CEO that's part of a company dealing with AI, that recently had a kerfuffle involving an AI voice from a movie just coincidentally tweeted the one thing that perfectly touched on all of these things?
Thing is, this sort of plausible deniability Twitter baiting is fine for a pop star, but maybe not appropriate for actual grownups. This guy is building AI and beating off board attacks; he's as close as we come to comic book CEO-villains like Lex Luthor.
He doesn't get to act like Taylor Swift or Drake.
It's incredibly suspicious, it's also impossible to know what it actually means without reading Sam Altman's mind. Think poorly of him, it's only fair, but I won't pretend that I know exactly what he meant.
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