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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.
This is scuzzy and icky and whatever, but is it really true that one must ask permission from an individual before replicating some facet of their physical existence?
As a commercial matter, sure, you can't profit off the likeness of another and that settles this (and Sama already pulled the voice). But beyond the narrow commercial protections, I don't know that society has ever endorsed a broader sense in which reproducing someone's face or voice without permission is off-limits.
A good part of the philosophical problem with right of publicity is that it has very little impact outside of the commercial protections, and even the commercial protections are only protective to the point where the broader public knows you. It's very much a cut out to protect celebrities and the famous, not defend the little people. California has an unusually broad combination of statutory and common-law protections, but it's still only something that matters to public figures worried about getting used as an advertising or product campaign.
((Other 'moral rights' have similar problems: see VARA for a particularly ugly one.))
But that specific context impacts here, at least if Altman did what people are thinking he did.
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