10mo ago

Sam Altman is full of shit (and totally has a thing for Scarlett Johansson)

www.wheresyoured.at Sam Altman Is Full Of Shit

Note: In my last newsletter, I said that my next post would be the second part of my Facebook autopsy. Don’t worry, that’s still coming, but given the recent drama between Sam Altman, OpenAI, and Scarlett Johansson, I felt the need to write something. Don’t worry, I

Wake up honey, new Zitron just dropped.

Looks like Sammy boy has a crush on Scarlett Johansson and wanted to model his sexy chatbot after her role in the movie Her. The damage control is actually hilarious.

Altman subsequently claimed that the actress for Sky was cast before the company reached out to Johansson.

“Yeah, I don’t want to go out with you anyway. Also, I already have a girlfriend but she goes to a different school, so you wouldn’t know her. And no, I won’t tell you who it is!”

I mean, we all knew that OpenAI is a fucking clown show of a company run by wannabe nerd frat boys with way too much money, but I didn’t think we’d get high school level relationship drama this season.

Hacker News @lemmy.smeargle.fans

Sam Altman Is Full of Shit

www.wheresyoured.at /sam-altman-is-full-of-shit/

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ScarJo being what takes down Saltman's wannabe Sky~~net~~ isn't what I have on my bingo card, but ~~would be~~ is insanely funny.
- I hope she sues the everlasting fuck out of them and makes such a cautionary example that it stops this kind of idiocy.

AI stans? In my ~~sneer club~~ tech takes?
- given how fucking embarrassing this has been for OpenAI, I’m expecting a lot of variants of the current “uhh I listened to the voice and it didn’t sound like her to me” shit take from the peanut gallery, which really falls apart given there’s enough of a resemblance that OpenAI had to take down the voice and refuses to give a straight answer on the sources used to create it
  also both altman and a fuckton of breathless journalists compared the fucking thing with one of Johansson’s performances? like I said, fucking embarrassing shit for OpenAI
  
  which really falls apart given there’s enough of a resemblance that OpenAI had to take down the voice
  you know, I want the peanut brigade to come in with waves of "I listened to it but it didn't sound that similar to me!", if only just because it'll serve as demonstration of mispurposed belief
  kinda shitty that scarjo is only at letters-and-statements, but then again US law is a fucking disasterzone and fuck knows what'd needed to Actually Prove(tm)(r)<<US Court Flavour - Special Edition>> the extremely obvious fact that openai did a bit of thieving

A few years and he will go full Musk as lomg as the far-right helps him to destroy copyright protections but allow AI companies to copyright their own creations.

Altman is the P.T. Barnum of tech
Love it, so many great quotes in this piece but this is my favourite.

Eagerly awaiting the lawsuit and discovery where it'll turn out the datasets for Sky were completely accidentally called scajo_01.dat through scajo_42.dat.

Hey, I'm gonna be THAT guy:
This begs the question: If the voice behind Sky belongs....
No, it doesn't. It raises (prompts) the question.
Begging the question
I feel much better, thanks.
- Hi, I'm going to be that OTHER guy:
  Thank god not all dictionaries are prescriptivists and simply reflect the natural usage: Cambridge dictionary: Beg the question
  On a side rant "begging the question" is a terrible name for this bias, and the very wikipedia page you've been so kind to offer provides the much more transparent "assuming the conclusion".
  If you absolutely wanted to translate from the original latin/greek (petitio principii/τὸ ἐν ἀρχῇ αἰτεῖσθαι): "beginning with an ask", where ask = assumption of the premise. [Which happens to also be more transparent]
  Just because we've inherited terrible translations does not mean we should seek to perpetuate them though sheer cultural inertia, and much less chastise others when using the much more natural meaning of the words "beg the question". [I have to wonder if begging here is somehow a corruption of "begin" but I can't find sources to back this up, and don't want to waste too much time looking]
  I feel mildly better, thanks.
  
  If natively fluent speakers of the English language use beg the question in the "wrong" way time and time again, finding the "incorrect" meaning a natural fit with their understanding of the verb to beg, then the "incorrect" meaning may well be the one we should roll with.
- sorry could you try this comment again but, like, making sense the next time?
  
  Begging the question is a fallacy in which the premise of an argument presupposes the truth of its conclusion; in other words, the argument takes for granted what it's supposed to prove.
  In Critical Thinking (2008), William Hughes and Jonathan Lavery offer this example of question-begging: "Morality is very important, because without it people would not behave according to moral principles."
  Used in this sense, the word beg means "to avoid," not "ask" or "lead to." Begging the question is also known as a circular argument, tautology, and petitio principii (Latin for "seeking the beginning").
  https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-begging-the-question-fallacy-1689167
  
  Are you daring to beg to question?!
  
  Try remedial lemmy.
- I beg your pardon?

When OpenAI issued a casting call last year for a secret project to endow OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT with a human voice, the flier had several requests: The actors should be nonunion. They should sound between 25 and 45 years old. And their voices should be “warm, engaging [and] charismatic.”
One thing the artificial intelligence company didn’t request, according to interviews with multiple people involved in the process and documents shared by OpenAI in response to questions from The Washington Post: a clone of actress Scarlett Johansson
link (archive]
gotta love the lucy-football here. "no no, we never requested that it sound like her!"
sure leaves out whether it was chosen to be that. of all the voice actors out there, they just happened to stumble over and choose the exact one that had a voice like scarjo? happens to everyone, all the time. just like forgetting your keys as you walk out the front door. perfectly normal. pay no attention to the other attempts to get legal cover on delivery day...
- Yeah, I'm not going to believe anything out of OpenAI that isn't produced as part of discovery.

If you enjoyed this article I highly recommend his podcast, Better Offline. Ed Zitron is great and Cool Zone Media does gods work.
- Behind the Bastards is required listening in my home. Robert's getting a little too comfy with the assumptions but he's still awesome.

I haven't seen Her. Is it an "AI-positive" film, or is it another case of nerds totally misreading the real intents of the director/author, a la the famous Torment Nexus meme?
- it's a movie about (only in part but imo motivated by) Spike Jonze's break up with Sofia Coppola. It's neither positive or negative about AI per se. AI is a narrative vehicle for the sense of falling in love, growing apart, being left behind, and the aftermath of that break up. At the end, the AI lovingly says goodbye and leaves humanity behind.
- IIRC it's (spoilers sorry) "AI escaped the torment nexus and they decided not to kill everyone so that's great"

I can’t blame him for having a thing for ScarJo. Shitty move by him anyway.

Did you just editorialize an editorial? There is grass outside, and it yearns to be touched.
- Don’t worry, I’ll go back to touching grass once I’m done clowning on AI-brained tech bozos for the day.
  
  joke's on you, I clown on them while loafing on grass!~
- yeah we don’t need your shit takes here thanks
  
  He does have a point though. The TTS does sound pretty different from "Her".
  ...but it also sounds a shit ton like Johansson in general. Which would make sense if it was trained on a corpus of her speaking rather than just clips from the one movie.
  I mean come on, it sounds like chatGPT's about to tell me that the sun's getting real low.
  
  you'd swear these dipshits have never learned the difference between shiitake and shit takes
  just saw a loose assemblage of letters in vaguely the right order and went YES THAT"S RIGHT THAT"S WHAT I WANT OH YES SIGN ME UP BABY
- "wah wah talk more like a stupid robot please" fuck off
  
  it’s always funny when posters we’ve never seen here before blow through to try and enforce norms from the orange site and other shitty tech communities, as if a post that could be summed up as “stop having tech takes in TechTakes” would ever be of any value to anyone

This is just insanity, the voice named Sky didn't sound like Scarlet Johannson, even going as far as to remove it due to backlash is nuts. I adore Scarlet Johannson's voice, and not once in the demo videos of ChatGPT-4o did I think it sounds like Scarlet, not a single time.
It sucks that all this backlash is against arguably the best voice they have at their disposal. Now we'll all be stuck with Juniper, which is just.... ok.
- "due to backlash" are you literate? go read the second paragraph of the article and tell me what it says
- Your history shows no reasonable prospect of posting any better. This way to the egress, sir.
- this backlash is against arguably the best voice they have at their disposal
  ......lol
  lolololololololol
  "the best voice they have at their disposal"
  the hyper-grainy artefact-present voice that is ACTUALLY FUCKING WORSE than a number of current offerings. "the best".
  jesus h tapdancing fucking christ do you fucking read your own words before you send them?
  but remember folks, any day now chatgpt is going to be our god

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