Comment by projectileboy
2 years ago
It is incredibly disheartening to see what was born a non-profit dedicated to guiding AI towards beneficial (or at the very least neutral) ends, to predictably fall into the well-worn SV groove of progressively shittier behavior in the pursuit of additional billions. What is victory for Open AI even supposed to look like by now?
> What is victory for Open AI even supposed to look like by now?
Making a shitton of money.
Sorry.
I may be incredibly shallow but personally I am experiencing feelings of joy and validation.
Every time I tried to suggest that maybe, LLMs and GAN tools don't make creativity easier but lazier and emptier or that this technology area is parasitic off human culture, every time an OpenAI junkie told me, "hey, perhaps humans aren't much different from LLMs", or someone said artists are derivative too and don't really deserve any more protections or are "gatekeeping art"...
... my anger at the time is vindicated every time these greedy, cynical wretches that the US tech industry has raced to anoint are taken down a peg because of their own very obvious greed and expedience.
I am loving this.
I may also be shallow in feeling a measure of glee that Microsoft is racing forward to shoehorn this utter toxicity into every corner of their product range, just in time for their customers to fully understand how it reeks of contempt for them.
This is a sentiment I'm starting to see more of, and have really started internalizing in recent months.
For every creative task I've given an LLM in the last 2 years, if I cared at all about the output, I ended up redoing it myself by hand. Even with the most granular of instructions, the output feels like a machine wrote it.
I have yet to meet anyone who felt any kind of emotion from generated art, except for "wow, it's cool that AI can make this". That's because (imo) art comes from experience, and experiencing is absolutely not what LLMs do.
Meanwhile, my dad, whose AI experience amounts to using MS Copilot "two or three times," is sending me articles about Devin, and how it's over for software engineers.
> I have yet to meet anyone who felt any kind of emotion from generated art, except for "wow, it's cool that AI can make this".
Have you ever observed how difficult it is to _remember_ AI generated pictures?
I can think of only one AI-generated art thing that has stuck with me, and it's because of the enormous amount of effort the guy using it went to generating really genuinely creepy fake photos to go with a plausible but fake story (about a lost expedition in the early era of photography).
I thought at the time, OK, maybe people will do creative things with it. Maybe I am wrong.
Except that months on I can't remember any specific detail of any of the photos in enough detail to visualise it. Only the emotion and the feel, which could have been evoked by that talented person entirely without Stable Diffusion.
There is something about AI generated photos, in particular, that confounds my ability to remember the image (as a photographer)
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i’m sorry, i just don’t understand what you’re trying to say. you’re happy that the leading AI firm is full of shit despite promises to the opposite? what makes you happy about that?
I'm happy other people can see what has been obvious to me from day one.
It's not just schadenfreude (which I admit is unattractive, if beguiling.)
It also gives me hope that ordinary people are beginning to get to grips with the idea that they don't have to accept or be excited for new technologies just because they are new technologies, and that the people bringing new technologies don't have to be good people just because they are capable people. Seemingly smart people can be intellectually and morally lazy.
I have no obligation as a techie person to be excited about AI, or to be default-positive about the "leading firm", or to give the benefit of the doubt, or anything like that. There's no moral rule that one should be positive about new technology until it's proved bad. This is a classic tech industry false belief.
OK so the fall is not happening as quickly as Juicero. But it's a start.
What's your case for why should I not be happy?
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They're gloating about being right about SV tech culture. Being right about the heel turn is some cold comfort, I guess.
But parent shouldn't feel too proud of their prognostication skills. OpenAI is a venture of Sam Altman and Elon Musk, so how could it be anything other than what it is? You'd have to be insanely naive about SV (and, more broadly, what "non profits" of billionaires in any sector even are) to assume this was ever born of altruism.
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I can't understand this. It seems like don quixote trying to defeat windmills.
Why? Why is it inevitable that the AI world must do LLMs, must steal all of culture without recompense, and must deride human ability in order to defend the limitations of the replacement technology?
Answer is: it’s not. To all three. And collectively we can decide to be better. This is why artists are pushing back. One day perhaps the tech world will understand that they aren’t Luddites but instead champions for humanity.
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Nothing wrong with a little schadenfreude.
And I am loving the fact that LLMs and generative AI is showing what an absolute nonsense it is for any artist to think that just because they made a shitty drawing or song once other people are not allowed to also make that shitty drawing
Do you make and sell any art?
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From my point of view, the artists are evil!
What's shitty about this?
They approached Johansson and she said no. They found another voice actor who sounds slightly similar and paid her instead.
The movie industry does this all the time.
Johansson is probably suing them so they're forced to remove the Sky voice while the lawsuit is happening.
Nothing here is shitty.
Asking someone to license their voice, getting a refusal, then asking them again two days before launch and then releasing the product without permission, then tweeting post launch that the product should remind you of that character in a movie they didn't get rights to from the actress or film company is all sketchy and -- if similar enough to the famous actress's voice, is a violation of her personality rights under California and various other jurisdictions: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights
These rights should have their limits but also serve a very real purpose in that such people should have some protection from others pretending to be/sound like/etc them in porn, ads for objectionable products/organizations/etc, and all the above without compensation.
I will agree with you if
- they used Johannson's actual voice in training the text to speech model
or
- a court finds that they violated Johannson's likeness.
From hearing the demo videos, I don't think the voice sounded that similar to Johannson.
But hiring another actor to replicate someone you refused your offer is not illegal and is done all the time by hollywood.
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If they didn't use her voice at all, doesn't seem like there would be a case or even concern.
Also, they proceeded to ask her for rights just 2 days before they demoed the Sky voice. It would be pretty coincidental that they actually didn't use her voice for the training at all if they were still trying to get a sign off from her.
If they used her actual voice for training the model that shipped then I agree with you. It seems like they used the voice from another woman who sounds similar though.
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I guess it takes more than a couple of days to organize things with an A list star, esp. if there's a studio recording session involved rather than just using existing material.
This strongly suggests they weren't trying to get her voice until the last minute (would have been too late for the launch) but, rather, they had already used the other actress, and realized they were exposing themselves to a lawsuit due to how similar they were.
It was a CYA move, it failed, and now their ass is uncovered.
Maybe despite not using her voice at all they wanted to give her some money as a gesture of good will and/or derisk the project.
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> The movie industry does this all the time.
Such as? Please give example..
What I'm wondering is why are they doing that in the first place. Why is the best AI company in the world trying to stick a flirty voice into their product?
It pains me to say it, but I really think it pays dividends to consider the very obvious possibility that the people who are doing this are in general just not socially well-adjusted.
Everything about OpenAI speaks of people who do not put great value on shared human connections, no?
Hey, I like that artist. I am going to train a computer to produce nearly identical work as if by them so I can have as many as I like, to meet my own wishes.
Why is it surprising that it didn't really cross their mind that a virtual girlfriend is not a good look?
This is not an organisation that has the feelings of people central to its mission. It's almost definitionally the opposite.
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...because human brains enjoy being talked to in a flirty voice, and they benefit from doing things that their customers like? Doesn't seem that mysterious
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It is incredibly disheartening to see celebrities from traditional media expressing open disdain for the century's most revolutionary piece of technology.
Johansson was foolish to turn this down. This all sounds like she realized the mistake, regretted it, then sent her legal team to pursue this frivolous cease and desist out of spite.
I'm disappointed that OpenAI didn't see this for what it is, and decided to comply instead.
> It is incredibly disheartening to see celebrities from traditional media expressing open disdain for the century's most revolutionary piece of technology.
Even though it threatens their livelihoods and is parasitic off their work?
It's not disheartening at all: it's positive.
> Johansson was foolish to turn this down. This all sounds like she realized the mistake, regretted it, then sent her legal team to pursue this frivolous cease and desist out of spite.
This all sounds like absurd wishful thinking.
Maybe I'm missing obvious, but you seem to think it's disheartening when someone decides to not collaborate with a corporation, and the right choice for the corporation to ignore what the person thinks, "force" the collaboration anyways?! That seems outright crazy to me.
I'm not talking about collaboration or lack thereof. I'm talking about Johansson's foolishness, and her subsequent tantrum after she rightfully regretted that poor judgment.
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> to see celebrities from traditional media expressing open disdain for the century's most revolutionary piece of technology.
Really? AI has lots of potential but so far the big uses of the recent title wave have been an enormous increase in the creation of visual and text-based sludge, barely usable for anything serious most of it, by hustling online marketers and social media spammers.
Even where tools like GPT are used productively by people to simplify their business processes and so forth, every piece of information they claim has to be scrutinized for hallucinations to the point of them being useless as much more than idea generators for contexts where factual correctness isn't important...
Yay!