They stole someone’s voice after being told not to?

They unleashed a massive new wave of spam and scams and garbage onto the Internet?

Because they’re stealing every single bit of content on the Internet and everywhere else they can get their hands on without paying anything for it and then expect to sell it back to us in chewed up garbage form?

They help single-handedly cause MS to blast past their carbon commitments by 30%? And got everyone else into a big race for how many resources they could waste to power AI nonsense that doesn’t even actually work that well for what people want to use it for?

Perhaps the fact that they don’t seem to care one bit about any of the consequences, legal/moral/ethical/economical/etc. caused by what they’ve done as long as they make money?

I don’t have a grudge against open AI. I have a grudge against the AI industry and the way these kind of SV golden boys seem to think they’re immune from criticism.

Why do you think stealing a professional actor’s voice should be OK and immune from criticism? This is horrible.

> They stole someone’s voice after being told not to?

Stole someone's voice? That's not stealing, let's not pump more power for copyright propaganda even if this case is correct.

Amen. We need ethics and accountability and this wave of “AI” has been sorely lacking those, instead preferring the Uber model of “let’s just get big enough to bully things into working out in our favor.”

It’s important to nip that shit in the bud lest it spread.

it could make life better for a lot of people, but training their models on copyright material, which makes life worse for another set of people.

Creatives will use AI even more than regular people and with better results. What I find dangerous is to protect all paraphrases and variations as well, akin to owning an idea. When not replicating expression ideas should be free, even in copyrights works

Right. If what they’re doing is so incredibly valuable, just pay for the resources you’re using.

If your business model only works if you steal stuff from other people you don’t have a business.

Sounds like you're using the music industry's definition of "steal." Nothing was stolen, because nobody was deprived of the thing.

In this case it just sounds like her , not even a direct copy

Not commenting on open AI specifically, but I feel like actually acquiring the data is borderline impossible if you only follow legal channels.

Where can I insert my money to buy every penguin random house book? How do I pay every deviant art artist whatever amount they're owed?

You could go to Penguin directly. Or perhaps the Authors Guild would help you set something up across publishers.

All of deviant art? Probably not. But do you need to train on all of that? You could certainly run ads telling people you’d be willing to pay a small amount to train on their art and let them choose.

Would it be legal to train against the national archives?

Options exist. No you won’t get as much stuff as you do by taking whatever you want, but people are being compensated for their work or at least being given the choice to opt in.

Ignoring the actual legality of using training data in machine learning, let's look at these "options" in a purely objective-driven way. If you do that, you'll quickly realize that what you describe would strengthen megacorporations to an even greater extent. If training on public data is banned, then the entities who have complete ownership of all their data would be granted a de facto monopoly. Stock image services, media conglomerates, music labels, industry giants would start in the winning position. When one side just gets their way for free and the other has to beg for scraps, do you really think this is a fair proposition?

The reason why open-source AI exists at all is that we've always been allowing use of public data - it was okay when Google did it, it was okay when the Internet Archive did it, it was even okay when text translation services used that same data to train their models - or really, that applies to basically anything ML-driven before generative AI.

There's, like, a sea of reasons to criticize OpenAI for - but arguing for extending IP laws even further and calling out opponents for "literal theft" is one of the weaker options that caught on with many people.

Those sound like really large obstacles. Also, projecting this thinking forward, if we have humanoid robots walking around assisting humans, should they not be able to learn from their environment without paying every time they look at a piece of art or read something?

you're not wrong, and i think the technology exists to accomplish something that did this, and has for a few years. but the end result would be a system that funnels money from large numbers of people, to different large numbers of people. and a lot of overlap and cross payments too. maybe there's a good business in transaction fees on that? but it seems like big numbers going to other people while a much smaller number goes to the party owning the system is not an appealing business in our world.

ipso facto why does it not exist while spotify buys podcasts and kills them

I think majority agrees that we're ok with a few millionaire priviledge actors losing small amount of their value in favor of personal AI assistants for general populace. How is that even a topic worth discussing is trully perplexing.

I don’t know a single person who has ever mentioned wanting an AI assistant, and I know a lot of people who are creeped out by the idea. I live in a swing state and work for a big tech company but most of my friends aren’t in tech. So I’m not sure that a “majority agrees” about anything related to an AI assistant

Yet every single person uses an AI assistant every day when they Google something or ask their phone for who performs the song that's playing in the background. You must know some of these people?

I don’t think that I would call every AI feature an AI Assistant, but sure, if that’s how you define “AI Assistant,” then you’re correct that I do in fact know people who use/want one. But I think that Google+AI or a music player is a pretty different product experience/design/market fit than a “personal AI Assistant” like an AI-powered Siri or Alexa or Google Assistant. I don’t know anyone who uses (or wants to use) the latter group for anything other than “Alexa, play XYZ”, or “Siri, set an alarm” which I wouldn’t really call GPT-4-level AI

Just because LLMs only really existed for a year now and it's still the fastest adopted new tech we ever had. Even iphone took longer to adopt. It'll take time for LLMs to lodge into direct use and thus the move to voice chat by openAI but every single person is already full in AI game from photo editing, to content curation - AI assists us everywhere already. The leap between that and texting to an AI friend is extremely tiny.

No man, a majority do not believe that and it's really weird that you think they do.

Why? The data clearly points that nobody will go out of their way to protect IP laws. In majority of the world nobody could care less about some hollywood actor with tough to spell name getting their voice cloned.

It's really weird that someone would think that IP law is more important than access to information. Must be some dystopian bubble.

Just because companies are violating people's artistic ownership and the State isn't punishing or preventing it fast enough is not an indication that a majority of people "could care less". If anything you can see the fomenting dislike with OpenAI right in front of you.

You can frame it however you like to make it justifiable, but I'm not going to get into the mud with you.

You're building a strawman here. The topic is whether information access is more important in our society than IP protection and the answer is big yes no matter how you look at it and I don't see you ever winning this argument. Take care o/

That's not the topic, that's the topic you want to debate.

I think for most people the answer is “worse”.

Curious, how?

The above comment from MBCook captures it well but basically I would say that for the majority of people I know:

Cons: the rise of scams, carbon emissions, and, some think, existential risk.

Pros: ??? You can be more efficient at the email job you hate. And it gives you advice on gardening and home improvement so you don’t have to call your uncle.

Cons outweigh the pros

Your pros list being empty is the real answer. Basically you don't know the pros because you haven't taken the time to find out.

Kinda delegitimizes your cons list too. I'm not going to bother word-by-word checking your work.

Um, okay. The original question of “curious, why?” didn’t imply that I need respond with any level of rigor. I don’t think that the burden of proof should be on me to explain why ChatGPT is useful when I don’t believe it to be. But please feel free to not bother to pick apart my opinion ”word-by-word”. No one asked you to

Not OP, or the replier, but I think the longer answer here is that if Scarlett Johansson <insert any wealthy and/or popular figure> can't win a lawsuit against a company that has effectively:

(1) Used content she has created (vocal lines) in order to train a generative AI with the ability to create more of that content (vocal lines), without permission or payment, let alone acknowledgement

(2) In doing so removed the scarcity of the content she provides (Generative AI is effectively unlimited in the lines it can produce once effectively trained)

Then no smaller time actor, voice actor, artist, musician, etc, is likely to have any chance defending themselves against the theft of their work for AI purposes.

And, with that precedent set, the legal and financial landscape of art and creativity will have changed in a way that discourages anybody from creating original works for financial gain, because we've systematised the creation of original and derivative works with no legal or financial ramifications.

Maybe, but I don't think it's likely that they used any actual copyrighted material of her voice. It's not illegal to want one voice actor to play a role (or record voice data), then get a different, somewhat (but not actually very) similar sounding voice actor to do it instead.

Sam Altman has a smarmy, borderline vomit inducing face. The fact that I have to see his face every day while scrolling through the interwebs feeds has made my life worse.

See, I don't like Sam Altman either, but this habit of criticizing people for their faces seems wrong-headed. Isn't it his behavior that we should be criticizing?

I could be wrong but in these cases (or when people criticize voices, similarly), people are more put off by expressions than raw features. Nonverbal communication is high emotional bandwidth. I don’t begrudge someone disliking someone else’s self presentation.

Very obvious bias against OpenAI in the comments here. Possible motives: a) there's a visceral human reaction against anyone extraordinarily successful and powerful (Nietzsche wrote about this). b) resentment for OpenAI's advancements in code generation and its possible impact on the job market. I don't think much of the outrage here is motivated by altruism, it's probably more about siding with whoever opposes your perceived enemy.

I propose the following razor:

Never attribute to jealousy that which can be explained by a difference of perspective.

Jealousy can explain any criticism of anybody. That makes it an epistemic hazard; you can always fall back to it, and you can develop a habit of doing so. And then you have deafened yourself. Any substantive criticisms will be lost on you. As will any opportunity to learn from those you disagree with. Your ideas will be hot house flowers, comfortable and safe in their controlled environment, but unable to contend in the wild. Aspire to weeds.

That would be tautological, as 'difference of perspective' is a restatement of the phenomenon at a higher level of abstraction. Someone who is resentful will likely have a different perspective than they would otherwise have. Psychological motives are real and don't disappear by simply assuming a variant of a problem-solving heuristic. Notice also I didn't use the word 'jealousy.' I do think that speculations about psychological motives should be made only after careful consideration and generally remain unprovable. However, the uncertainty of psychological motives shouldn't prevent us from ever addressing them.

You can use whatever high minded references to philosophy and psychology you please, but from what I've read from you in this thread - you're missing the point. You aren't understanding the criticism, and you're addressing the weakest form of the argument. I'm suggesting you aspire to address the strongest form, whether the weakest is present or not.

If you choose to do nothing with that information, that's up to you.

Or maybe the prospect of theft and unpermissioned copying of an extremely personal quality (one's voice) is (correctly) being called out?

People aren't as selfish/petty as you're making them out.

Can you provide the evidence indicating that her voice was stolen? Maybe also an audio analysis of the vocal characteristics involved and the degree of similarity? And wouldn't it be prudent to investigate these matters before making such accusations?

There's any number of people with equivalent voices that Scarlet has stolen the voices of by selling it to movies, and all of those other people who sound the same deserve compensation from her for it

Most people aren’t that selfish or petty. But there are some people who are—and by an unfortunate quirk of human nature, they tend to believe everyone else is just like them.

So your response is ... "No I'm not, you are."

Well. This reaction invites further psychological interpretations, lol.

Uh, what? This is a pretty well-researched phenomenon: A very high percentage of people who engage in pathological behaviors that take advantage of other people believe that “everyone does it” and rely on that as justification. Penn & Teller did a pithy bit on the topic.