zlacker

>>richar+(OP)
Well, here are some things that aren't really being disputed:

* OpenAI wanted an AI voice that sounds like SJ

* SJ declined

* OpenAI got an AI voice that sounds like SJ anyway

I guess they want us to believe this happened without shenanigans, but it's bit hard to.

The headline of the article is a little funny, because records can't really show they weren't looking for an SJ sound-alike. They can just show that those records didn't mention it. The key decision-makers could simply have agreed to keep that fact close-to-the-vest -- they may have well understood that knocking off a high-profile actress was legally perilous.

Also, I think we can readily assume OpenAI understood that one of their potential voices sounded a lot like SJ. Since they were pursuing her they must have had a pretty good idea of what they were going after, especially considering the likely price tag. So even if an SJ voice wasn't the original goal, it clearly became an important goal to them. They surely listened to demos for many voice actors, auditioned a number of them, and may even have recorded many of them, but somehow they selected one for release who seemed to sound a lot like SJ.

>>jmull+P12
Clearly an SJ voice was the goal, given that Altman asked her to do it, asked her a second time just two days before the ChatGPT-4o release, and then tweeted "her" on the release day. The next day Karpathy, recently ex-OpenAI, then tweets "The killer app of LLMs is Scarlett Johansson".

Altman appears to be an habitual liar. Note his recent claim not to be aware of the non-disparagement and claw-back terms he had departing employees agree to. Are we supposed to believe that the company lawyer or head of HR did this without consulting (or more likely being instructed by) the co-founder and CEO?!

>>HarHar+r82
They hired the actor that did the voice months before they contacted SJ. The reaction on this site to the news that this story was false is kind of mindbending.

>>tptace+B82
Yeah, but then again, I totally expected this opening the comment threads. Same happened with RMS debacle, same happened with similar events earlier, same happened on many a Musk stories. It seems that a neat narrative with clear person/object to hate, once established, is extremely resilient to facts that disprove it.

>>TeMPOr+gg2
I'm not sure what RMS has to do with Altman. I'm also not sure why you think people just want to hate on Musk when it took a decade of his blatant lies for most people to catch on to the fact that he's a conman (remember, everyone loved him and Tesla for the first 5 or 10 years of lies). But the comparison between Musk and Altman is pretty apt, good job there.

>>Repuls+kG3
Well not sure what you mean by 'Conman'. Wildly successful people do aim high a lot, a lot. They don't meet 80% of their goals, that is perfectly ok. Even as low as 20% success on a lot of these moonshot things sets you ahead of the masses who aim very low and get there 100% of the times.

This whole idea that some one has to comply to your idea of how one must set goals, and get there is something other people have no obligations to measure up to. Also that's the deal about his lies? He can say whatever he wants, and not get there. He is not exactly holding an oath to you or any one that he is at an error for not measuring up.

Musk might not get to Mars, he might end up mining asteroids or something. That is ok. That doesn't make him a conman.

tl;dr. Any one can say, work and fail at anything they want. And they don't owe anybody an explanation for a darn thing.