Comment by pavlov
2 years ago
Surely there’s some kind of difference between “voice impression for a two-line cameo in one episode of an animated sitcom” and “reproducing your voice as the primary interface for a machine that could be used by billions of people and is worth hundreds of billions of dollars.”
Is there a name for this AI fallacy? The one where programmers make an inductive leap like, for example, if a human can read one book to learn something, then it’s ok to scan millions of books into a computer system because it’s just another kind of learning.
If famous actors could sue over the use of a less-famous actor that sounds just like them, what's to stop less-famous actors from suing over the use of a famous actor who sounds just like them in big-budget movies? ... and that's when you discover that "unique voice" is a one-in-a-million thing and thousands of people have the same voice, all asking for their payout.
> what's to stop less-famous actors from suing over the use of a famous actor who sounds just like them in big-budget movies?
Not having idiots (or ChatGPT) for judges.
> Not having idiots (or ChatGPT) for judges.
Always the Achilles heel of software engineers' (not so) clever legal strategies.
That's a common retort on HN but it's information free. Judges are at least theoretically and often in practice bound to follow both written law and logic, even if it yields apparently silly outcomes. The prevalence of openly political judgements in the news makes it seem like this isn't the case, but those judgements are newsworthy exactly because they are shocking and outrageous.
If voices being similar to each other is found to be grounds for a successful tort action then it'd establish a legal precedent, and it's very unlikely that precedent would be interpreted as "whoever the judge heard of first wins".
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Nobody stops anyone from suing, but the less-famous actor would have to make a plausible case that the big-budget movie intended to copy the voice of the less-famous actor.
> for example, if a human can read one book to learn something, then it’s ok to scan millions of books into a computer system because it’s just another kind of learning.
Since this comes up all the time, I ask: What exactly is the number of books a human can ingest before it becomes illegal?
This is a bit like someone saying they don't want cars traveling down the sidewalk because they're too big and heavy, and then having someone ask how big and heavy a person needs to get before it becomes illegal for them to travel down the sidewalk.
It misses the point, which is that cars aren't people. Arguments like "well a car uses friction to travel along the ground and fuel to create kinetic energy, just like humans do", aren't convincing to me. An algorithm is not a human, and we should stop pretending the same rules apply to each.
Is that a good example? People have been arguing in court about that exact thing for years, first due to Segway and then due to e-scooters and bikes. There's plenty of people who make arguments of the form "it's not a car or a bike so I'm allowed on the sidewalk", or make arguments about limited top speeds etc.
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It's easy to explain the difference between a person and a car in a way that's both specific and relevant to the rules.
If we're at an analogy to "cars aren't people", then it sounds like it doesn't matter how many books the AI reads, even one book would cause problems.
But if that's the case, why make the argument about how many books it reads?
Are you sure you're arguing the same thing as the ancestor post? Or do you merely agree with their conclusion but you're making an entirely different argument?
Thank you, love this response.
Then again, bicycles are neither people nor cars, and yet they make claim to both sidewalk and the road, even though they clearly are neither, and are a danger and a nuisance on both.
Depends on similarities between existing data and generative outputs, so minimum is zero. Humans are caught plagiarizing all the time.
Plagiarism is not illegal, it's merely frowned upon, and only in specific fields. Everywhere else, it's called learning from masters and/or practicing your art.
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For a human? Whatever they can consume within their natural life.
Does natural life still count if a person is using an artificial heart?
What about if they have augmentation that allows them to read and interpret books really fast?
It’s not an easy question to answer…
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100 per second.
> Surely there’s some kind of difference between “voice impression for a two-line cameo in one episode of an animated sitcom” and “reproducing your voice as the primary interface for a machine that could be used by billions of people and is worth hundreds of billions of dollars.”
There are too many differences to understand what you're saying. Is the problem too much money is in the company doing it? Fox is also pretty wealthy.
I think the pertinent question is: does having it sound like Scarlett Johansenn mean they get to access billions of people? If not, then while she might get paid out a few million, it'll be from OpenAI's marketing budget and not because of actual value added.
How unique is a voice? I'm sure there's enough people out ther who sounds like Johansson. There's probably some argument for voice + personality + face + mannerisms, some gestalt that's more comparable to copying the likeness "person". But openAI is copying a fictional character played by Johansson, it's not her. Do actor/esses get to monopolize their depiction of fictional characters? Especially when it's not tied to physical represenation. What if OpenAI associate it with an avatar that looks nothing like her. I'm sure hollywood and/or actors union is figuring this out.
> “Do actor/esses get to monopolize their depiction of fictional characters? Especially when it's not tied to physical represenation.”
If Annapurna Pictures (the production company that owns the rights to “Her”) made a sequel where the voice AI is played by someone else than Johansson but sounded the same and was marketed as a direct continuation, I think there would be a lawsuit.
She didn’t write the script or develop the character, but I think there’s enough creative authorship in her voice portrayal that it would be risky for the production company.
But OpenAI isn't making a sequel to Her, which I feel like there would be prexisting legal text in contract about repraising role in event of franchise if johansson has leverage, or ability to cast close facsimile if studio has leverage. Right now Johansson has leverage in court of public opinion, not necessarily law. What if OpenAI used a cartoon cat avatar that sounded like "Her", what if they have one interaction that doesn't comport to "Her" personality from the movie, thereby indicating a different being. Is there some comprehensive method acting documentation outlining the full complexity of a fictional character. Seems like there aremany ways for openAI to make voice sound like her, but not embody "Her" but they'd rather strategically retreat out of optics. But IANAL, but I am interested in seeing how this will get resolved in court.
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It's entirely routine for actors and actresses to be replaced in follow up works. The industry is full of examples, but here's 1 off the top of my head:
In iron man 1, Rhodey is played by terrance howard. For iron man 2, he wanted too much money in the contract, so they replaced with with don cheadle.
Wouldn't it be a dumb world to live in if a single actor in the cast can halt the production of a new work via lawsuit because they own the character?
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/bac...
"How unique is X" is something we can start to get quantitative answers to with strong machine learning models, and for most things people care about, it seems like the answer is "not very unique at all".
I think it's a very similar question to "how unique is your cooking". Most people aren't unique cooks.
Fair use[1]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
It's not a fallacy. Behind the AI are 180M users inputting their own problems and giving their guidance. Those millions of books only teach language skills they are not memorized verbatim except rare instances of duplicated text in the training set. There is not enough space to store 10 trillion tokens in a model.
And if we wanted to replicate copyrighted text with a LLM, it would still be a bad idea, better to just find a copy online, faster and more precise, and usually free. We here are often posting paywalled articles in the comments, it's so easy to circumvent the paywalls we don't even blink twice at it.
Using LLMs to infringe is not even the intended purpose, and it only happens when the user makes a special effort to prompt the model with the first paragraph.
What I find offensive is restricting the circulation of ideas under the guise of copyright. In fact copyright should only protect expression not the underlying ideas and styles, those are free to learn, and AIs are just an extension of their human users.
I know there is some exceptions in US law for use of parody ???.
Sure, but what does that have to do with this?