- 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”.
The really concerning part here is that Altman is, and wants to be, a large part of AI regulation [0]. Quite the public contradiction.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-openai-artificial...
Like some intern’s idea to train the voice on their favorite movie.
And then they’ve decided that this is acceptable risk/reward and not a big liability, so worth it.
This could be a well-planned opening move of a regulation gambit. But unlikely.
The general public doesn’t understand the details and nuances of training an LLM, the various data sources required, and how to get them.
But the public does understand stealing someone’s voice. If you want to keep the public on your side, it’s best to not train a voice with a celebrity who hasn’t agreed to it.
Any criticism of AI is being met with "but if we all just hype AI harder, it will get so good that your criticisms won't matter" or flat out denied. You've got tech that's deeply flawed with no obvious way to get unflawed, and the current AI 'leaders' run companies with no clear way to turn a profit other than being relentlessly hyped on proposed future growth.
It's becoming an extremely apparent bubble.