domain:firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com
Quantumfreakonomics
23m ago
I 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.
Forgotpassword
24m ago
I don't think it's totally unique to East Asia. Dated some white women who essentially exhibited the same behaviors (admittedly way less as a proportion), but there's a particular subgenre that is cultivated by East Asian cultures.
I'd consider the sort of 'bad dates' they go on essentially not going on any dates ever. They'll occasionally sally to make an app profile, book a single 30 minute coffee with somebody who passes a 3 week DM interview and then strike them from the record for whatever random reason onto the next.
do_something
29m ago
kill a fair number of birds.
Note that alternative power generation methods also kill many animals, directly and indirectly. Is there any indicator that number of animals killed is worse for wind power?
Wind farms are unsightly
This one depends on person, I guess
gattsuru
37m ago
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.
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.
anon_
40m ago
It’s worth noting that a lot of trump’s policy success from the last admin came through bill Barr
Which makes Barr's recent statements against Trump all the more entertaining. Here's a man that pushed a lot of Trump's policies through an extremely unfriendly DOJ, turning around and saying Trump is unfit for office.
anon_
43m ago
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.
NullHypothesis
44m ago
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
50m 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.
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 - basically they just want to grow the pie, even if that means losing some more legacy 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.
There's a button at the top that does that for you (translate to occidental).
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