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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.
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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