domain:nunosempere.com
As for the "her" tweet, that could mean anything.
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-geniuses like Lex Luthor, he doesn't get to act like Taylor Swift or Drake.
SlowBoy
1hr ago
Scarlett Johansson doesn't have an IP right to "female voices that sound vaguely like Scarlett Johansson." As long as they can produce the receipts to show that this is actually what happened, she'd have no case.
No, but she has the rights to her own likeness, which OpenAI wanted to use. Did they? That could only be known through trial, it takes one sympathetic judge to hear the case and start discovery. And I find it extremely plausible that, on a large software engineering team, someone said something bad in an email. And a settlement wouldn't look good for OpenAI's PR either.
SlowBoy
1hr ago
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.
Tanista
8m ago
Star Wars toy sales are the metric I use, and star wars nerds and normies aren't buying sequel trilogy shit.
Fair enough. Let's say they perceived nerds as reliable consoomers.
As for the rest: BSG didn't just change Starbuck and introduce Laura Roslin (so two female regulars), most of the prominent humanform Cylons were female. That's a big change.
It was noticeable. And was noticed. It was just that the writing was "woke" but not yet in the particularly oppositional sense that seems to characterize modern gender swaps where they a) cannot seem to have a counter-balance where male virtues were respected (BSG being a milscifi show helped here) and b) seem to actively want to insult the legacy audience.
RDM was relatively deft in how he navigated things, both on and off-screen. The actors had the same initial reaction as modern stars to the backlash but the less connected internet (Katee Sackhoff talks about having to go to an internet cafe to pay to read the hate, which is funny) and the fact that studios didn't see attacking racist fans as part of the promotional strategy all helped.
most BSG2 fans are sci fi starved nerds who wanted anything after babylon 5 and star trek went off the air.
Another way to read BSG2's success is that it kept or neutralized the oBSG fans (sometimes literally buying them off like Richard Hatch) and brought in new fans who were driven either by wanting to see scifi or contrast (I was a Stargate kid and BSG was...very different. Having both was great). In the end, it was likely a positive outcome (especially since BSG, with all due credit, was not really like SW at that point)
This is what studios are trying to do. Keep legacy fans that love SW/whatever and are starved for it, while bringing in new "diverse" fans. They fail at it, constantly, not because the idea is bad (a ton of people showed up for the Force Awakens, that was also its high point in "undecided" markets like China) but because the culture has polarized such as to make the execution almost inherently awful.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
21m ago
I've pwritten on this at some length in the past](https://www.themotte.org/post/865/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/185340?context=8#context), but the evidence is much stronger than "I don't like the looks of this". I'll accept that the elections are free and fair when there aren't thousands of people mentally adjudicated incompetent voting in my state. If the clerk's office admits it's not capable of running a cross-check that prevents that subset, specifically covered as ineligible to vote, I have no idea why anyone would believe it's capable of preventing the myriad of other ineligible voting that occurs.
NullHypothesis
just now
That's what OpenAI claims, whether it's true or not doesn't matter from a PR perspective now. I think it makes sense for them to nip in the bud and just end with this small controversy rather than make it an even bigger deal with actual lawsuits flying around (and perhaps having to reveal something they don't want to during discovery).
I would think enough people did like the voice that it would be worth keeping it around, especially since it's not like the other AI voices are any more popular or liked.
Stellula
6m ago
Does this really sound that much like Scarlett Johansson? Even after Sama made that tweet this still didn’t occur to me. It just sounded like a generic, friendly female voice to me, and I think the “Her” tweet was just a reference to the plot of the movie, not the voice.
This whole kerfuffle seems annoying to me, and also seems like Scarlett Johansson reaching for a way to include herself.
They offered her a job, she refused, and then they got somebody else to do the same thing. Now she’s mad. This is not interesting.
Maybe the angle here is that since AI duplications are so easy and good now that we’ll enter a sort of guilty until proven innocent phase where everybody assumes they are more important than they might actually be.
No the company is not “deep faking” you, you just aren’t actually unique.
gattsuru
57m ago
The likely worst-case legal scenario is a lawsuit followed by settling out of court for a trivial amount.
Depends on what you consider trivial. TraceWoodgrains pointed to Midler v Ford in California, and it's foundational for Californian law, but the punchline is that Ford got off scot free, and the ad agency in question was hit for 400k USD. But that's because Midler was an issue of first impression at the time, limiting evidence of 'evil motive'; contrast the later Waits v Frito where Frito-Lay and its advertising company got tapped for a combined $2m USD over an ad that "broadcast in September and October 1988 on over 250 radio stations located in 61 markets nationwide" (though the advertising company had verbally offered to indeminfy Frito-Lay before running the ad). Contrast in turn White v. Samsung, where a literal robot acting as but clearly not Vanna White, which rhymes with today's problem, and ended up at 400k USD over a fiery dissent.
It's not business-ending, at least for a business OpenAI's size -- even adjusted for inflation and for how much Californian juries hate tech companies, I'd expect closer to 1m than 100m. But for all the philosophical problems with an expansive right of publicity, it's not toothless.
zeke5123a
2hr ago
Isn’t there a group 4 who just finds it creepy as her was dystopian? Then there is group five who call a certain terrorist-cum-philosopher Uncle Ted.
Harlequin5942
1hr ago
I don't think there's ever been a point where a given leader was race or gender-swapped
A half-example: the female Zulu leader in Civ 2 was a gender-swapped Shaka.
comicsansstein
41m ago
Toggle simplified reader view (available in Brave and Chrome, I think, the button is next to the bookmark star); or open the page style and remove the font from the rules (right click on the text -> Inspect -> in the "filter styles" box write font-family -> uncheck all the rules setting the "Charm" font).
I like Lindsay's take on the whole DEI. Paraphrasing:
Diversity means whatever is opposing the cultural hegemony. That is why room full of women feminists can be diverse and why Larry Elder can be a Black Face of White Supremacy. So in practice, diversity means that you have to welcome subversive elements into the company/movement/club or whatever, diversity needs to be ensured by cadre of political commissars who themselves are experts on diversity.
Inclusion means that you are welcoming to "diversity", it is making sure that the subversive elements can have free reign. The basic form of inclusion is basically censorship - you will be subject to certain "ethical standards", that you will not do hate speech or microagressions. The advanced level of inclusion is called belonging, this means that you now have to be active and supportive of these elements: you have to put pronouns into your bio, you have to get rainbow keychain for your company card and so forth.
Equity means adjusting shares in order to make citizens A and B equal on basis of diversity. This is your cookie cutter socialist redistribution so that subversive elements get necessary resources to thrive and multiply, but now expanded to other domains such as positions of power inside companies or in casting of movies or moderating teams of some random forum. As with other socialist movements that were also very keen on redistribution, it has to be enforced by diversity and inclusion experts - those are the vanguard forces that will at first enforce equitable society until this becomes automatic as when socialism is supposed to voluntarily turn into communism.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
2hr ago
Obviously not the parent poster, but one glaring thing about the whole essay is that she doesn't seem to waste a single word of reflection on what she, or the other women she talks about, could have done to avoid the bad outcomes they experienced. A good start would be to spend some thought on questions like: why was I attracted to the guy that turned out to be a jerk? What did he say that made me believe he would be or do something he actually wouldn't? Could I have recognised the deception beforehand? Were some experiences better than others? What set those apart? Is there a way I could optimise in that direction in the future? Instead, she is lamenting it in the fashion of people who complain that everything on TV is boring, or social media addicts who lament that their social media is toxic and make periodic shows of quitting it, only to inevitably come back and resume being prime contributors to it being toxic for everyone else.
2D3D
24m ago
Russian lancets paired with Orlan-10s are insane cost-effective weapons that are the biggest organic capability that Russians have used to truly wreck Ukrainians, and the Russians deserve every bit of credit for developing an insanely capable platform themselves.
Without getting into too much details, small form factor UAVs are where the west is absolutely fucking smoked. Russia can spit out Orlans at 1/10 the price of a worthless Switchblade, not a single fucker uses the meme level Black Hornet or any other US platform, and thats not even getting into what China is doing. A boeing insitu is like a cool buck and a half, but Chinese WZ are literally 20% of the price and even that is considered way too expensive for the Chinese. Commercial off the shelf parts bought off Taobao are allowing Ukraine to offset Russias immense artillery advantage, and trust me that the Chinese are way fucking ahead of the USA on that. I talked in other threads about air supremacy and I stand by that, but even a hundred F35s can't take out a thousand AV500, let alone 10k jury rigged Mavic 2 EAs.
The gutting of European manufacturing in favor of precision strike capabilities made sense in 2000 to mid 2010s, but the game has changed with small form factor drones. Every unit knows it, but fucking Rheinmetall is still dicking around with maaaybe one composite cabled tether UAV for their new panther while China is integrating drones at 2:1 ratio per combatant. I used to think the only thing that will stop China is their retarded focus on grenade launchers at the squad level, but the fucking drone swarms spat out of flatbed trucks is a goddamn nightmare worse than skynet.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
39m ago
Some of them have also wondered why the penguinball speaks with a German accent and is a talented scientist.
philosoraptor
1hr ago
the guide @No_one posted the other day on what men are actually attracted to (https://www.jsanilac.com/dispelling-beauty-lies/).
Is that available anywhere in a non-stupid font? I probably wouldn't mind reading it but the typeface makes my eyes bleed.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8hr ago
Bizarre stuff, though it is eye-opening.
Are these women incapable of picking (understandably less attractive) simp/soyboy/nerdy men (perjorative terms used to denote an archetype succinctly) who would be flattered by any female attention and very likely take it slowly with sex? No, they have to go after the fratty chad/dudebros who all want to have anal sex and constantly pressure them. Who even wants to have anal sex with women? There's a hole specifically designed for penis, free of feces and it's right there!
The author's career as an onlyfans star shows that she knows that there are a bunch of unassertive and unthreatening men who are very interested in relationships with women, men she plans to exploit financially! A 7 goes for 9s and 10s and is shocked to discover the 10 has more options and is less likely to settle, what a cruel world... Only this 7 is busy doing the exact same thing to 5s and 4s on a ruthless, depersonalized, industrial scale.
ace
4hr ago
Evaluating wanting to have the act of sex outside of the context of a relationship with a guy is putting the cart before the horse. It flows out of getting to know somebody. Imagine how the trajectory of this lady's life would have changed if she had just gotten together with an steady boyfriend and had sex if and when she felt comfortable enough and attracted enough to that particular guy, not the abstract idea of sex where the guy is a placeholder. Were no men trying for long term relationships with her? Or were they, and she was just oblivious? Maybe she could have attracted more or better male attention using the guide @No_one posted the other day on what men are actually attracted to (https://www.jsanilac.com/dispelling-beauty-lies/).
There is absolutely zero medical basis for virginity.
Virginity isn't real.
As an aside, she (like most people TBF) seems pretty oblivious to evolutionary psychology, and what sex and virginity meant to illiterate goat herders with no access to antibiotics or pregnancy tests or STD tests and how that shaped sexual strategies and the evolution of our emotions and culture. From an evolutionary standpoint for men, the absolute worst case reproductive outcome is raising somebody else's kid. Guarding against that possibility occupies a lot of young men's thoughts. In all of human history, we in the last 60 years are the weird ones, where we can plan pregnancies and detect/manange/treat STDs.
No_one
1hr ago
Russians believed defenses were going to crumble because enough people are bribed. They targetted anti-air installations etc but iirc weren't even hitting command posts and definitely not blowing up soldiers in barracks. It was no 'Shock & Awe'.
That changed after it became clear it'll go on. They blew up almost the entire 'International Legion' base, with the exception of one building where both missiles were intercepted and/or failed. It wasn't executed perfectly, the missiles didn't arrive within a brief window so most people got out..
I would like to think it wouldn’t have happened.
Nah. It'd have happened, the difference is they'd not have underestimated it. Russia is a state born in warfare. They're not blessed by protective seas like Americans or Britain. And after WW2, you can hardly blame them wanting to keep neutral states on their border.
Sure, these days you can always just nuke the invaders after they cross the border, and it's not even a big deal contamination wise. But the idea is not instinctively attractive to most people.
So is this failure because of corrupt or incompetent procurement? Or were we just not expecting it to come to this?
Recent funny factoid I learned. The weapon Lancet was inspired with, Israeli Hero-120 was sold to Hungary for $350k per suicide drone. Russian Lancets were on export for $35k. Actual price to build them is almost certainly <$10k even in low series production.
Switchblade 600, an equivalent weapon, costs $120k. These are all electric drones without thermal sights with comparable ranges.
Is this efficiency?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
40m ago
So far I have given them four grandkids. So that's something. But I didn't start participating in the dating market until I was 25 and married someone they probably thought was a step down.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
9hr ago
No, they used another (consenting) actress's voice who happens to sound a lot like Scarlett Johansson.
Scarlett Johansson doesn't have an IP right to "female voices that sound vaguely like Scarlett Johansson." As long as they can produce the receipts to show that this is actually what happened, she'd have no case.
That Altman referenced "Her" does not really bear on this. You can like or dislike the world portrayed in Her. Personally I found it a pretty uplifting vision of what a near-singularity future could look like, at least up to a few minutes before the ending. And you can like or dislike the voice that they demoed. Personally I can't stand it, and the sultry, flirty, overtly sexy affect really doesn't appeal to me. (But I'm a homo, so presumably I'm not the target audience, and maybe I'd be a big fan of some Josh Hartnett soundalike with an analogously please-fuck-me inflection, I dunno.) But neither has anything to do with whether Scarlett Johansson has somehow been wronged. She hasn't.
In any event, my distaste for the voice apparently was widely enough shared that they nixed it. But that just reflects a decent product sensibility and indicates nothing about this incredibly stupid attempt at a gotcha by you or all of the anti-progress Redditors who are joining you in hate-jerking over this as we speak.
2D3D
2hr ago
There are excessively few high quality women having kids in the west even controlling for earlier sexual activity. The high breeders in the west are muslims and blacks and latinos, with only latinos being able to reliably reach class escape velocity. Most new kids are net negative, and the Asians have bet on robots. Not necessarily the best bet, but if their societies collapse it'll just fall over dustily, not ruined from within by disgruntled 'minorities'.
nomenym
2hr ago
In practice, "inclusion" means conformity to the ideology. For example, the mere presence of a conservative expressing non-progressive opinions will make a space non-inclusive. All kinds of diversity are welcome except that diversity which is non-inclusive, and so that actually means a rather narrow range of diversity limited to "historically marginalized groups" of race, gender, and sexuality.
Her was not dystopian? A divorcee unready for another relationship works through his issues through a relationship with an AI, and when the AI leaves for reasons the movie implies he is ready for another relationship with a woman.
If anything, it's optimistic regarding human-AI relationships.
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