Comment by TeMPOraL

> A lot of the argument here comes down to whether the article does refute that.

It clearly refutes the claims that they got a Johansson impersonator. The article says this is a voice actress, speaking in her normal voice, who wasn’t told to mimic Johansson at all. You can say that you personally think she was chosen because people thought she sounded similar to Johansson, even though there’s no evidence for that at this point. But the claim - which was made several times in discussions on here before - that she is a Johansson impersonator is factually incorrect.

> But in my view, it requires a pretty absurd level of benefit of the doubt to think that they didn't set out to make a voice that sounds like the one from the movie.

I tried it several times in the past and never once thought it sounded like Johansson. When this controversy came out I looked at videos of Her, because I thought Johansson could have been using a different voice in that movie, but no - the voice in her is immediately recognizable as Johannson’s. Some have said Sky’s was much closer to Rashida Jones, and I agree, though I don’t know how close.

> they said they wanted to protect their privacy

This very well could be a contractual obligation.

Have you listened to both voices in the comparisons floating around? There is no way any of SJ's closest friends or family would be fooled if that voice called them up pretending to be SJ.

> You're creating a causal connection without a proof of one. We don't know why Altman referenced "Her", but I feel it's more likely because the product works in a way eerily similar to the movie's AI, not that because it sounds like it.

There's no proof needed. A marketer doesn't market something for no reason.

We are all capable of interpreting his statement and forming an opinion about its intent. Indeed, the entire point of making any statement is for others to form an opinion about it. That doesn't make our opinion invalid - nor does the whining and backpedaling of the person who made the statement.

Your opinion may be different than others, but I doubt that would be the case if you were truly approaching this situation in an unbiased way.

You want to say that the dispute here is over ignoring objective facts, but it isn't. I haven't seen anybody here ignoring the facts laid out by this article.

The dispute is instead about statements just like your We don't know why Altman referenced "Her", which, on the one hand, you're right, the mind of another personally is technically unknowable, but on the other hand, no, that's total nonsense, we do indeed know exactly why he referenced the movie, because we're a social animal and we absolutely are frequently capable of reasoning out other people's motivations and intentions.

This is not a court of law, we don't have a responsibility to suspend disbelief unless and until we see a piece of paper that says "I did this thing for this reason", we are free to look at a pattern of behavior and draw obvious conclusions.

Indeed, if it were a court of law, that's still exactly what we'd be asked to do. Intent matters, and people usually don't spell it out in a memo, so people are asked to look at a pattern of behavior in context and use their judgement to determine what they think it demonstrates.

The objective parts don’t disprove that OpenAI set out to make an AI that sounded like Scarlett Johanson to use as a marketing ploy. In fact, I’d argue it’s more likely that’s exactly what the evidence suggests they did. But maybe a judge will get to rule on whose interpretation of the facts is correct.

I mostly agree with you, but would ask: Why are you here, reading this thread? This isn't, like, a thread about something interesting that is being tragically drowned out by all this gossip. It's just an entirely bad thread that we should (and probably do) all feel bad about getting sucked into.

But the tiny sliver of disagreement I have with "this is a bad thing to discuss here and we should all feel bad" is that some people who frequent this site are sometimes some of the people involved in making decisions that might lead to threads like this. And it might be nice for those people to have read some comments here that push back on the narrative that it's actually fine to do stuff like this, especially if it's legal (but maybe also if it isn't, sometimes?).

The way I see this particular discussion is: outside the tech bubble, regardless of the new facts in this article, people see yet another big name tech leader doing yet another unrelatable and clearly sleazy thing. Then what I see when I come to the thread is quite a few of the tech people who frequent this site being like "I don't get it, what's the problem?" or "this article totally refutes all of the things people think are a problem with this". And I feel like it's worth saying: no, get out of the bubble!

It's not aiming high when anyone competent and informed can tell him there's no way, and he pays many competent and informed people to tell him.

He can set all the goals he wants. Setting a goal is not the same as telling people the company that you are dictator of is going to do something.

He's not setting goals, he is marketing, and he does it very well.

As far as how he's a conman https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40462194 although you already know that full well so you'll continue thinking he's some sort of hero.