Comment by resolutebat
2 years ago
I'm genuinely not sure what you're trying to say here. Are you claiming that this was somehow engineered by Altman on purpose to draw attention, because all publicity is good publicity? Or engineered by his enemies to throw mud at Altman, because if you throw enough some of it will stick?
Occam's Razor argues that Sam simply wanted ScarJo's voice, but couldn't get it, so they came up with a legally probably technically OK but ethically murky clone.
> they came up with a legally probably technically OK but ethically murky clone.
Isn't what OpenAI does all the time? Do ethically murky things, and when people react, move the goal posts by saying "Well, it's not illegal now, is it?".
I would like to think that a normal person, having not been able to hire voice work from a specific well-known actor, and wanting to avoid any image of impropriety, would use a completely different voice instead. Sam isn't dumb, he knew the optics of this choice, but he chose it anyways, and here we all are, talking about OpenAI again.
"Talking about OpenAI again" yes. But also reinforcing the "too questionable for me to ever willingly use" image I have of Sam, OpenAI, and their projects.
Maybe that's just me, and it is a win for them on the whole. Hopefully not.
IDK, we were talking about OpenAi regardless. I think this will be a hit on him as a leader. How big? I don't know. It seems to me this is not a brilliant move.
Yeah but we were also talking about the competitors.
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It's not a clone. What is ethically murky about it?
You want Brad Pitt for your movie. He says no. You hire Benicio Del Toro because of the physical resemblence. Big deal.
Having seen "Her" and many other Scarlet Johansson movies, I didn't think for a second that GPT-4o sounded like her. On the contrary, I wondered why they had chosen the voice of a middle aged woman, and whether that was about being woke. It wasn't until social media went hysterical, I realized that the voices were sort of similar.
If it's a sequel and Brad Pitt was in the first movie and you use trickery to make people think he's in the second movie, there's a case. See Crispin Glover, the dad from Back to the future, which was NOT the upside-down dad in BTTF2. They settled for 760k USD.
Openai never claimed it was Scarlett Johansson though. They didn't trick anyone.
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> I wondered why they had chosen the voice of a middle aged woman
AIs and automated systems, real and fictional, traditionally use women more than men to voice them. Apparently there was some research among all-male bomber crews that this "stood out", the B-58 was issued with some recordings of Joan Elms (https://archive.org/details/b58alertaudio ) and this was widely copied.
(obvious media exception: HAL)
You then tweet out, "look its Brad Pitt in my movie".
They never claimed it was Scarlett Johansson's voice though.
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> I wondered why they had chosen the voice of a middle aged woman, and whether that was about being woke
really weird line of reasoning. Siri, Alexa, Google Home… etc.