- OpenAI approached Scarlett last fall, and she refused.
- Two days before the GPT-4o launch, they contacted her agent and asked that she reconsider. (Two days! This means they already had everything they needed to ship the product with Scarlett’s cloned voice.)
- Not receiving a response, OpenAI demos the product anyway, with Sam tweeting “her” in reference to Scarlett’s film.
- When Scarlett’s counsel asked for an explanation of how the “Sky” voice was created, OpenAI yanked the voice from their product line.
Perhaps Sam’s next tweet should read “red-handed”.
They clearly thought it was close enough that they asked for permission, twice. And got two no’s. Going forward with it at that point was super fucked up.
It’s very bad to not ask permission when you should. It’s far worse to ask for permission and then ignore the response.
Totally ethically bankrupt.
Their hubris will walk them right into federal prison for fraud if they’re not careful.
If Effective Altruists want to speed the adoption of AI with the general public, they’d do well to avoid talking about it, lest the general public make a connection between EA and AI
I will say, when EA are talking about where they want to donate their money with the most efficacy, I have no problem with it. When they start talking about the utility of committing crimes or other moral wrongs because the ends justify the means, I tend to start assuming they’re bad at morality and ethics.