domain:nature.com
jeroboam
8m ago
Maybe I should have resisted the D&D reference. Here's what a "Lawful Evil" character is like.
https://www.thegamer.com/dungeons-dragons-alignments-explained-how-to-actually-play-lawful-evil/
In general, Lawful Evil is less disruptive to the average party if you play it right. It lacks the “kill and destroy” stereotypes of Chaotic Evil, favoring organization and order. Lawful Evil characters can put together long cons and intricate plans. They can work within the law, using bureaucracy and legalism to their advantage. On the other hand, Lawful Evil characters can be dominators, people who believe that the best way to set up society is to control others, preferably under an iron fist.
With everything we've learned about Sam, this seem to fit. Open AI seeks control over what users can do with AI, but when in a position of control makes unethical choices.
Note that this one little flareup is not the whole story but was just posted because of its high culture war valence.
As for the "her" tweet, that could mean anything.
When GPT-5 comes out and @sama tweets "skynet" I'll bet you say the same thing.
bonsaii
15m ago
Don't know much about economics (had to google "0 lower bound"). Got any reading suggestions for understanding what you mean by operating under that condition?
jeroboam
17m ago
Does this really sound that much like Scarlett Johansson?
ScarJo claims (in my linked tweet above) that it sounded so much like her that her friends and family couldn't tell the difference.
So... I think either yes or she is lying.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
19m ago
One party intentionally or unintentionally dates down, finding a partner who recognizes the very good thing they got and holds on tight.
Tanista
21m ago
Even after Sama made that tweet this still didn’t occur to me.
It occurred to everyone else on the internet (including me but I was primed). If a ton of people hear ScarJo and then it turns out they literally offered the job to Johansson, I'm inclined to believe she's reasonable in thinking there was something there.
No the company is not “deep faking” you, you just aren’t actually unique.
Almost no one is. Amber Heard had a body double do the sex scenes for a movie, I guess you could say that that makes her not unique.
But I don't think it's delusions of grandeur to think that part of the value (in this case the titillation) in such a scene is specifically that it's Heard. There's a reason they took the legal risk of doing this. Which is why stars negotiate for the right to control even fake nudity - it can have an impact on their image. Some people just are more important than others, or they wouldn't be speaking to Sam Altman and basically being offered an ambassador role in one of the hottest AI companies.
Johansson wouldn't be unreasonable imo in thinking the appeal has something to do with her. Whether or not she has a legal right is another thing.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
25m ago
Even among RealMenTM, there is a lot less competitive participation sport for Bowling Alone type reasons.
When I was a kid, the culturally dominant paradigm for male participation sport in the UK was pickup games of football (soccer for you Americans) or basketball and the preferred marketing message was "What you are doing is a facsimile of professional team sports, so you should wear what the pros wear in order to be winning like them."
In the current year, the culturally dominant paradigm for male participation sport (I have no idea how accurate this is, but advertising follows the culture) is "Do you even lift, bro?" strength-based gym culture. Strength training is fundamentally PvE in a way which pickup football (or whatever the American equivalent is) is PvP, but even more so the culture of lifting with your gym bros is one of collaborative self-improvement, not competition. I have aged out of the target audience for sportswear marketing, but if I was marketing activewear to gym bros, I would reflect this change in my marketing messaging.
This is even before we consider the modern trend of selling sportswear to the spectators as athleisure. I notice that the men I see in the streets in traditional casual styles are, on average, in much better shape than the men in athleisure. FWIW I don't think the same is true for women, where athleisure appeals to the "I've got it and I want to flaunt it, and sportswear is an excuse to dress sexy before sunset" crowd.
ares
28m ago
The famous "120 mil to the govt or 40 mil to La Raza" option.
I have not heard of this, and my googling isn't coming up with anything. Can you provide more specifics?
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
29m ago
This isn't a new problem, but probably is the highest-profile case. I remember hearing a podcast episode about "the default voice of Tiktok" a few years back (2018?), who was suing because the scope of the project was unclear when she signed up (IIRC it was pitched as an academic project), and because, according to her, widespread, easily-recognized text-to-speech using your specific voice is a career limiter for other voice acting prospects.
You know, this does hit on a curious experience I had.
I was going through my big stack of George Carlin DVDs, and I got to one which opened on about 10 minutes of unadulterated white bashing. Now I recall, way back in the day, when I first watched this special, that never bothered me. But that was also performed in an era before State and Federal governments were nakedly discriminating against me. Or the schools I would send my children to began gutting the curriculum to cater to lower black achievement levels. Or preposterous notions of "restorative justice" allowed feral blacks to terrorize schools with impunity. Or before decent, productive, law abiding people were punished to the maximum extent of the law for refusing to allow themselves to be victimized by habitual criminals with a politically relevant melanin content.
It reminds me how I laughed at similar bits by Louis CK about how whites have had it so good, we've gonna get fucked so hard when the tables turn. It was funnier as a hypothetical, in the context of lots of other challenging and awful bits. Now it just makes me angry beyond reason to watch it happening in earnest.
Did I care about AC2's pope shiving when it came out? Nope. But it also came out in a very different cultural climate. Things that were hypothetical back then are actually happening now. I also never cared when the pilot episode of The Lone Gunman involved an airplane crashing into the twin towers, and it was all framed as marginally goofy hijinks. But things happened between now and then which significantly changed the cultural context in which an episode like that, made today, would be received. This is not hypocrisy or evidence of any sort of inconsistency.
Edit: I want to note, I know "feral blacks" might be an inflammatory phrase, but I am honestly at a loss as to what else to use. There is a massive cohort of aggressively and confidently antisocial and violent blacks in our schools, enabled by feckless "restorative justice" policies. They are a force of destruction, disruption and violence, unaccountable to all, and utterly untamable, as though a pack of feral animals had been loosed in schools. Some protected species nobody was allowed to do anything about.
sliders1234
34m ago
I feel like this is an embedded interest rate bet. And you need to heavily discount very long term outcomes to agree with him.
A 51% chance of doubling human happiness with a 49% chance of going to zero doesn’t work because compound interest exists. His path may get us their faster but as long as civilization is moving forward we should have other bets to make in the future or just compound growth.
Any gambler who has an edge wouldn’t take the bet because going to 0 is 0, but he would rightly think he has an edge and can take those other bets too.
I don’t think I’ve seen this argument before. SBF 51%-49% bet sounds ok I get the reasoning but are instincts are it’s stupid to take a 0% possible outcome. And it’s because all our experience is that Humanity continues to grow so the 0% option is far worse.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
38m ago
The idea that we're going to take the statements of a woman selling sex about her sexual history seriously is in itself pretty interesting. This is what you call a gimmick. She's appealing to over-intellectualized lefties in the same way that Aella makes her money appealing to the ratsphere.
Quantumfreakonomics
1hr 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
1hr 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
1hr 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
1hr 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_
1hr 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_
1hr 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
1hr 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
1hr 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.
I mean, there's definitely some male voice actor contributions that turn a piece much more memorable for me (eg, recent NakedSav+SpicyGayDog piece has a 'good puppy', a lot of LewdDev's work), enough that I avoid ASMR/audiobook/RVC stuff because I worry it'll be addictive.
But I don't really want that from a random app, and even as someone who would use (and has used) AI for adult content, I'm hoping that is has uses other than that.
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