130 replies
1d9h
It really is incredible how something as small and simple as this gives such incredible bad vibes. This is like early 2010s facebook vibes. It's just... if they're going to steal her voice, what would they do to yours?
But it also points to a wider problem in OpenAI's existence. They're built on theft. If you wrote something on the internet in the last 20 years, they've stolen it. They've stolen it, they're put it into their little magic box and now they want to sell it back to you. OpenAI is amazing technology, and once the equity of the company is redistributed back to the content owners who actually provided the value, it'll be great to see what they can do from there.
Look at the comments, even in this thread, defending Sam. I thought this could be dealt with by the courts. But it clearly needs stronger medicine; there is simply too much hubris. Congress may need to act; let’s start with states’ AGs. (Narrow clarifications on copyright and likeness rights, to start. Prosecution from there. The low-hanging fruit is anyone in Illinois who was enrolled in WorldCoin.)
We, as a community, have been critical of crypto. AI is different—Altman is not. He is a proven liar, and this episode demonstrates the culture he has created at a multibillion-dollar firm that seems destined, in the long run, for—at best—novel conservatorship.
We have a wider problem. It isn’t “alignment.” It’s 19th-century fast-talking fraudsters clothing themselves in the turtlenecks of dead founders.
I don't want to defend Altman. He may or may not be a good actor. But as an engineer, I love the idea of building something magical, yet lately that's not straightforward tinkering - unless you force your way - because people raise all sorts of concerns that they wouldn't have 30 years ago. Google (search) was built on similar data harvesting and we all loved it in the early days, because it was immensely useful. So is ChatGPT, but people are far more vocal nowadays about how what it's doing is wrong from various angles. And all their concerns are valid. But if openai had started out by seeking permission to train on any and every piece of content out there (like this comment, for example) they wouldn't have been able to create something as good (and bad) as ChatGPT. In the early search days, this was settled (for a while) via robots.txt, which for all intents and purposes openai should be adhering to anyway.
But it's more nuanced for LLMs, because LLMs create derivative content, and we're going to have to decide how we think about and regulate what is essentially a new domain and method and angle on existing legislation. Until that happens, there will be friction, and given we live in these particular times, people will be outraged.
That said, using SJ's voice given she explicitly refused is unacceptable. It gets interesting if there really is a voice actor that sounds just like her, but now that openai ceased using that voice, the chances of seeing that play out in court are slimmer.
But why would anyone seek permission to use public data? Unless you've got Terms and Conditions on reading your website or you gatekeep it to registered users, it's public information, isn't it? Isn't public information what makes the web great? I just don't understand why people are upset about public data being used by AI (or literally anything else. Like open source, you can't choose who can use the information you're providing).
In the case being discussed here, it's obviously different, they used the voice of a particular person without their consent for profit. That's a totally separate discussion.
The right to copy public information to read it does not grant the right to copy public information to feed it into a for-profit system to make a LLM that cannot function without the collective material that you took.
That's the debatable bit, isn't it. I will keep repeating that I really don't see a difference between this and someone reading a bunch of books/articles/blog posts/tech notes/etc etc and becoming a profficient writer themselves, even though they paid exactly 0 money to any of these or even asked for permission. So what's the difference? The fact that AI can do it faster?
If people used the correct term for it, "lossy compression", then it would be clearer that yeah, definitely there's a line where systems like these are violating copyright and the only questions are:
1. where is the line that lossy compressions is violating copyright?
2. where are systems like chatgpt relative to that line?
I don't know that it's unreasonable to answer (1) with that even an extremely lossy compression can violate copyright. I mean, if I take your high-res 100MB photo, downsample it to something much smaller, losing even 99% of it, distributing that could still violate your copyright.
Again, how is that different than me reading a book then giving you the abridged version of it, perhaps by explaining it orally? Isn't that the same? I also performed a "lossy compression" in my brain to do this.
That seems like a bad example, I think you are probably free to even read the book out loud in its entirety to me.
Are you able to record yourself doing that and sell it as an audiobook?
What if you do that, but change one word on each page to a synonym of that word?
10% of words to synonyms?
10% of paragraphs rephrased?
Each chapter just summarized?
The first point that seems easier to agree on isn't really about the specific line, just a recognition that there is a point that such a system crosses where we can all agree that it is copying and that then the interesting thing is just about where the boundaries of the grey area are (i.e. where are the points on that line that we agree that it is and isn't copying, with some grey area between them where we disagree or can't decide).
In one case, you are doing it and society is fine with that because a human being has inherent limitations. In other case, a machine is doing it which has different sets of limitations, which gives it vastly different abilities. That is the fundamental difference.
This also played out in the streetview debate - someone standing in public areas taking pictures of surroundings? No problem! An automated machine being driven around by a megacorp on every single street? Big problem.
I think that must be it.
There's an unstated assumption that some authors of blog posts have: if I make my post sufficiently complex, other humans will be compelled to link to my post and not rip it off by just paraphrasing it or duplicating it when somebody has a question my post can answer.
Now with AIs this assumption no longer holds and people are miffed that their work won't lead to engagement with their material, and the followers, stars, acknowledgement, validation, etc. that comes with that?
Either that or a fundamental misunderstanding of natural vs. legal rights.
Quantity has a quality all its own.
human vs. bot is all the difference:
- a human will be an organic visitor that can be advertised to. A bot is useless
- A human can one day be hired for their skills. An AI will always be in control of some other corporate entity.
- volume and speed is a factor. It's the buffet metaphor, "all you can eat" only works as long as it's a reasonable amount for a human to eat in a meal. Meanwhile, a bot will in fact "eat it all" and everyone loses.
- Lastly, commercial value applies to humans and bots. Even as a human I cannot simply rehost an article on my own site, especially if I pretend I read it. I might get away with it if it's just some simple blog, but if I'm pointing to patreons and running ads, I'll be in just as much trouble as a bot.
tangential, but I should note that you in fact cannot just apply/implement everything you read. That's the entire reason or the copyright system. Always read the license or try to find a patent before doing anything commercially.
To me it's more like photocopying the contents of a thousand public libraries and then charging people to access to your private library. AI is different because you're creating a permanent, hard copy of the copyrighted works in your model vs. someone reading a bunch of material and struggling to recall the material.
You state that as a fact. Is that your opinion, or based on a legal fact?
first of all it's not all public data. software licenses should already establish that just because something is on the internet doesn't mean it's free game.
The new york times did:
https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115014893428-Term...
Even if you want to bring up an archive of the pre-lawsuit TOS, I'd be surprised if that mostly wasn't the same TOS for decades. OpenAI didn't care.
no. Twitter is "public information" (not really, but I'll go with your informal definition here). If that's what "public information" becomes then maybe we should curate for quality instead of quantity.
Spam is also public information and I don't need to explain how that only makes the internet worse. and honestly, that's what AI will become if left unchecked.
That's literally what software licenses are for. You can't stop people from ignoring your license, but breaking that license opens you wide open for lawsuits.
Google search linked to your content on your site. It didn't steal your content, it helped people find it.
ChatGPT does not help people find your content on your site. It takes your content and plays it back to people who might have been interested in your site, keeping them on its site. This is the opposite of search, the opposite of helping.
And robots.txt is a way of allowing/disallowing search indexing, not stealing all the content from the site. I agree that something like robots.txt would be useful, but consenting to search indexing is a long, long way from consenting to AI plagiarism.
Point is we couldn't have a way of consenting to ai training until after we had llms. And I'm guessing we will, pretty quickly.
Licenses allowing derivative works without attribution preceded LLMs.
Sure we could have. even if we're talking web 1.0 age, Congress passed a law as early as the early 00's for email, which is why every newsletter has to have a working unsubsribe link. so it's not impossible to do so.
regardless, consent is a concept older than the internet. Have an option of "can we use your data to X?" and a person says yes/no. It's that simple. we can talk about how much we cared 30 years ago, but to be frank that mistrust is all on these tech companies. They abused the "ask for forgiveness" mentality and proceeded to make the internet nearly impossible to browse without an ad blocker. Of course people won't trust the scorpoion one more time.
As an conrast, look at Steam. It pretty much does the same stuff on the inside, but it reinvests all that data back to the platorm to benefit users. So people mind much less (and will even go to war for) having a walled garden of their game library. Short sighted, but I understand where it comes from.
As an engineer, the current state of LLMs is just uninteresting. They basically made a magical box that may or may not do what you want if you manage to convince it to, and fair chance it'll spout out bullshit. This is like the opposite of engineering.
In my opinion, they're extremely interesting... for about a week. After that, you realise the limitations and good-old-fashioned algorithms and software that has some semblance of reliability start to look quite attractive.
Part of that is that we've seen what Google has become as a result of that data harvesting. If even basic search engines are able to evolve into something as cancerous to the modern web as Google, then what sorts of monstrosities will these LLM-hosting corporations like OpenAI become? People of such a mindset are more vocal now because they believe it was a mistake to have not been as vocal then.
The other part is that Google is (typically) upfront about where its results originate. Most LLMs don't provide links to their source material, and most LLMs are prone to hallucinations and other wild yet confident inaccuracies.
So if you can't trust ChatGPT to respect users, and you can't trust ChatGPT to provide accurate results, then what can you trust ChatGPT to do?
It's common to pull things temporarily while lawyers pick through them with fine-toothed combs. While it doesn't sound like SJ's lawyers have shown an intent to sue yet, that seems like a highly probable outcome; if I was in either legal teams' shoes, I'd be pulling lines from SJ's movies and interviews and such and having the Sky model recite them to verify whether or not they're too similar - and OpenAI would be smart to restrict that ability to their own lawyers, even if they're innocent after all.
Google Search linked back to the original source. That was the use case: to find a place to go, and you went there. Way less scummy start than OpenAI.
Sam Altman is a shameless weasel. Guy has no sense of decency. He got caught redhanded a few times already, what does it takes to unseat him? And whoever defends Altman for their love of ChatGPT, it wasn’t Altman who was behind it, it was a large team that is now dissipating away. Altman just wants to enrich himself at your expense
This is were you're very unfortunately missing the point that no, he doesn't, he is after something bigger.
Ok, what is it that he is after?
good question! I don't really know, but you can tell it isn't money; he admitted that himself anyway and reportedly he has no equity in openai[0].
my optimistic hypothesis is he really wants to control AGI because he believes he can make a more efficient use of it than other people. he might even be right and that's what scares me, because I don't trust his measures of efficiency.
I'd rather not let my pessimistic fantasies run wild here.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/24/openai-ceo-sam-altman-didnt-...
It's the same bla as Elon.
Of course it's money. He is a billionaire. What do you think it's about?
1) more money is not necessarily a goal for these people - it's what for they want more money and why they believe they can spend it better than everyone else (regardless if they truly can)
2) in a post-AGI world money may be an obsolete concept
You know that money is a proxy for power.
A proxy yes. But not everyone leverages it that way. So it really depends. Some do just want to hoard as much as possible, others want to lobby, others want fame, others want legacy.
Money helps with all those, but will not passively do that stuff.
He’s so power hungry it’s kinda crazy. He’s also extremely effective at it, like a real machiavelli.
PG said the same- Never has he seen someone which such a capability to gain power.
He said Altman is extremely good at becoming powerful.[1] Did he say what you said also?
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...
It's going to be bitterly ironic when it turns out that it's not the AI, but some crazy human that wants to turn everyone/thing else into paperclips.
"Proven liar promises he's not in it for the money" doesn't seem like a very good refutation.
it's called "power" and money is merely a proxy of it.
we talk dollars all day long but we haven't quantified power nearly as well
Infinite power!!!
Credit where it is due: he corralled and inspired a difficult team. He oversaw the release of ChatGPT. His team wanted him back, because they believed he would make them rich. On that promise, he delivered.
Nobody has committed high crimes in this saga. But the lying has become endemic, from Altman to the culture. The situation screams for oversight, perhaps—most proximately—via consent decree.
This is why honesty is valued. If you look and sound squeaky clean, it's likely that you are honest and trustworthy. If you blatantly steal a famous actress' voice then lie about it, what else will you steal?
The part you’re missing (IMO) is that he’s in that position because folks want him to ‘steal’ for their benefit, and are overlooking that he is likely going to steal to their detriment too.
It’s behind the ‘you can’t con an honest man’ thing.
A lot of people want to take credit for it, but wasn't it started by a guy called Alec Radford ?
"shameless weasel"
lol
We aren't a community. Please stop this constant attempt to create tribes and then (presumably) become the tribe's representative. We are individuals with different opinions. The individuals on HN are more amenable to reason than the average discussion; persuade them into a way of thinking.
HN def is a community, in some sense of the word, but I also dont like the phrasing and emphasis on "we" having done something or we having a problem and whatnot.
HN promotes debate and individual opinions, so statements like in parent just have bad connotations to them.
Fair enough. I cited two we’s.
In the first—where “we, as a community, have been critical of crypto”—I juxtapose this community at large’s scepticism of crypto with its giving the benefit of doubt to people similar to crypto’s worst in AI.
In the second—where “we have a wider problem”—I intended to reference Silicon Valley at large. I did not intend to imply that Sam Altman is HN’s problem to solve. (Though I welcome the help, if you have sway in D.C. or your state capital. I am not sure I have the bandwidth to take on a political project of this magnitude.)
In consideration that Sam Altman was the former president of YCombinator, and Hacker News is financed by this company, it would be true hacker spirit (as in Hacker News) to subvertingly use Hacker News to "solve" the Sam Altman problem. :-D
That use of "we" has been extremely common on HN.
Fantastic to see someone calling it out as BS.
End users who are not "developers"/"tech bros" who read HN cannot possibly be part of this imaginary "we".
Of course we are. That doesn’t coerce anyone into a groupthink, and it doesn’t mean everyone is a part of it. I’m simply asking anyone who held one opinion to find harmonics with another.
We aren't a group-think echo chamber. The original message stands, Most of us are open to changing our mind given the correct information.
I read HN 10x more than reddit just because of this fact.
Why do you equate acknowledging a community with group think?
We are definitely a community. Sadly, "community" has little meaning in he modern day compared to 30+ years ago. I'm in a neighborhood but I don't feel a sense of "community" with most of them. I have a job but don't have a sense of "community" with most of my coworkers.
The world's a lot lonlier these days.
Spoken like a housecat who thinks it’s a Tiger.
I feel as if this is a community. I certainly participate in it, as if it was, and that I have certain personal Responsibilities, as a member of that community.
That does not mean that everyone is on the same page, though. Probably the only thing everyone agrees on, is that this is a valuable personal resource.
If this was groupthink, I'd go somewhere else. BTDT. Got the T-shirt.
The comments are overwhelmingly less defending Sam specifically and more pointing out that the voices don't really sound similar enough to definitively conclude theft from a specific person. Having heard a couple samples, I'm inclined to agree with them.
"We" as a community have come to no such consensus. Speak for yourself.
Who are you? Leave me out of your bullshit.
It is Sam and it's not Sam; it's that attitude that "no" is just "no right now", and that attitude that whittles down people against their will.
I've been working long enough, serious ageism kicks in if I say how long, but in this situation my decades of experience point at Sam as toxic, I can say all it takes is one idiot like Sam to destroy the work of a their entire organization. That "no for now" attitude destroys far far more than the issue they are pushing, it destroys basic trust.
The courts are a lagging indicator.
This is the entire "move fast break things" play, it's legislative arbitrage. If you can successfully ignore the laws, build good will in the public, and brand yourself in an appealing way, then the legal system will warp around whatever you've done and help you pull the ladder up behind you.
On the other hand, if you break a bunch of stuff that people actually like and care about, politicians might feel like they need to do something about that. If you burn all your good will such that both political parties agree that you're a problem, that is when the play can go sideways.
They didn’t steal her voice, they paid someone with a similar voice. It’s still not nice, but not stealing.
They absolutely stole her voice. I don't know if you're being intentionally naive or you really are this way, but either way you need to stop it.
If you think it sounds similar you need your ears cleaned.
That's weird, because her friends and family thought it sounded like her too.
That's weird, because I didn't know it's impossible for 2 humans from the same country to sound anything alike. (or, what makes a fundamental characteristic of a person? Does it change over time? Can they change it deliberately or is this something that can't change? This whole debate is somewhat pointless without definitions)
You're gaslighting. Sam's "her" tweet was a deliberate reference to Scarlett Johansson's likeness, in marketing the release of this feature. OpenAI approached Johansson directly to obtain permission to use her likeness. Your attempt to make me question the nature of reality itself is pathetic in light of the actions taken by Sam Altman.
Gaslighting is not my intent. I don't believe people should be able to control singular words or letters, I don't believe that any one human is so unique or distinct that one single trait can define them, and I don't believe that humans are all that unique even in the aggregate. If we want to discuss what it means to "use someone's voice", then by all means, let's define our terms and have a productive conversation. They got rebuffed, so they used someone else. If they didn't and still used a voice clone of her utterances, then she has legal recourse. Probably the reason they tried again was to head this situation off at the pass, thus saving the world all the bullshit that has spawned, including this thread. I'm sorry your understanding of the nature of reality itself is so shallow that Sam Altman can nudge it(I recommend staying far away from drugs!). But then again, this whole discussion is about people who I will never meet nor care to meet at all(including you, dear reader!), so from my perspective I may as well be talking about imaginary beings.
Do less acid, read more about legal precedent. Should you ever find yourself in court, let a sober lawyer do the talking.
What does legal precedent have to do in an era of corrupt courts? Or, what if precedent was decided incorrectly initially? There are all kinds of ways whereby legal opinions shift over time. This isn't even analogous to the Bette case, where the song could be claimed to be "anchoring" one's perspective to the famous singer. So, I guess we'll see in the coming days. I'll have popcorn and this thread on speed dial.
If this goes to court (it almost certainly won't, OpenAI has enough money to 100x Johansson's net worth without blinking, unless she's principled enough to establish legal precedent) then we'd see on the order of years, not days.
Finally! We find points of agreement! I knew it was possible
They passed off Sky as Johansson’s voice though. It’s highly misleading and passing off is a kind of theft of her persona.
It sounds nothing like johansson, like nothing at all.
https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1cx1np4/voice_...
This whole controversy makes no sense and is obvious that the media is looking for something to attack openai with.
If you read that thread you will see a link to the sky voice outside of the demo voice which is much closer. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RcgV2u9Kxh0
To my ears it sounds similar but not identical - I can tell which is which.
Apparently they selected the actress from auditions in early 2023, a while before the Johansson timeline.
Of course the OpenAI folk would likely have seen Her and may have selected someone sounding like that.
Sounds like they just shifted the voice with some Fast Fourier transforms - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/63339608/change-the-melo...
Indeed. I was looking for a sample this morning and it’s just nonsense. Sounds like a polite American voice actor female. Johansson has many mannerisms and a different accent. Sounds nothing like her.
A technical audit would clear that up.
Because the most obvious thing for OpenAI do would be training the voice on Scarlett Johansson's available body of work, from movies, audiobooks, podcasts etc. Why bother hiring a voice actor?
Maybe because you still have to annotate the parts where she speaks.
Hang on, are you actually suggesting that the hard part for OpenAI is data labeling? Are you arguing from ignorance, or arguing in bad faith?
Well, in general the value is in the data and the silicon.
Anyone can come up with DL networks these days.
Bad faith, then.
That's what Whisper's for
How do you know that? The timeline of events makes it seem fairly clear that they were in fact using her voice. If it was just a soundalike, why suddenly take it down?
Didn't they also ask for permission from her two days before releasing the voice? Why ask permission if it was not her voice?
They refused to provide documentation of how the voice was trained.
To avoid negative PR and legal risk stemming from confusion
Using an impersonator is still stealing. There was this Ford case
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
Image rights are complex and separate from stealing.
If they deliberately used an actress that looks like her in an advert. A bit of makeup, a latex mask, digital touch up, full deep fake; at some point most people can no longer tell the difference.
Exactly. And the name “Open” in OpenAI implies it is open. Open to the world. Open to humanity. Nothing of that came to be. It should have remained non-profit; be good for humanity (yes i know this is up for interpretation).
I think the board should fire Sam Altman again. If the board does not fire Sam Altman it is not doing its duty, so someone should sue the board, or convince attorney general to sue.
Attorney general of Delaware is Kathy Jennings <attorney.general@delaware.gov>. Mail your argument now. Do your civic duty.
While I agree, somehow I doubt it'll happen. The board is probably stacked with people loyal to Sam now. And even if it isn't, they all witnessed the pending mass exodus to Microsoft before he was reinstated. They'll be reluctant to risk something like that happening.
All of these can be true.
1) Sam is a conniving weasel.
2) Sam has made many OpenAI employees rich.
3) The board knows that Sam is toxic and must be removed.
4) The board knows that removing Sam would mean the end of the company.
It is not the first or the last company where people may despise their CEOs character but still stay for the advantages.
Exactly. Most people are simply hypocrites.
Sure. Now. I.e. only until they get sued.
I’m sick to death of hearing this. It’s the antithesis of a substantive argument, in a topic where there’s no shortage of substantive points to be made. Why are we still trotting it out on HN. Arguing about the name basically amounts to “I believe that when you use the word ‘open’ in your company name, they should act like $this”…which is, frankly, absurd. If you want to talk about how they’ve gone back on their word or whatever, can we just stick to that? Getting one’s knickers in a twist over “open” in the name just dumbs down the conversation and gets everyone arguing about semantics.
I think you're looking at the general notion and annoyance that "Open" is misconstrued and misapplied. But there is also a specific annoyance that OpenAI is literally closed, antithetical to its historical promises.
it does have a connotation of advertisement to it, so I think it's worth examining. This isn't like complaining about how Apple doesn't sell food.
"Open" has a very specific meaning in Tech, and OpenAI is a tech company. It'd be the equivalent of Github swiching all of its repositories over to Mercurial tomorrow. They may have no obligation to support Git, but naming your company after such tech will have such expectation. You can definitely have an honest conversation about how using a word like "Open" for a tech company while switching to a closed source, publicly traded mentality is in fact a betrayal of the audiene who were inevitably attracted by the naming scheme.
It has never been and still is not a company. It's a non profit. It doesn't act like that any more, which is the point.
I'm still angry Microsoft isn't producing microfiber cloths.
Open as in open legs, even if you say no?
https://futurism.com/researcher-openai-sex-drug-parties
https://www.themarysue.com/annie-altmans-abuse-allegations-a...
In a way, it's similar to how cable TV started. Early cable relayed free terrestrial channels and charged a fee for it. The selling point was better picture quality in some areas. Cable operators did not pay broadcasters for the content they retransmitted.
https://www.britannica.com/technology/cable-television
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carriage_dispute
They also didn't chop up the broadcasts, store them, rearrange and put together frames from different broadcasts, and then charge an additional fee for help videos, and rebroadcast them upon demand.
It's not even remotely the same.
Altering of received broadcast signals did happen. They did substitute advertising sometimes. But I'm not sure, if it happened without any rights and compensation at any point in history. Quick google search doesn't find any quality sources on the topic.
But the parallel I was trying to draw is that they profited financially from other people's work without any compensation to the IP owners.
Altering of received broadcast signals did happen.
No. It never happened. Instead, legally mandated (in some jurisdictions, such as Canada), or negotiated deals allowed local cable TV providers to insert their own ads. This isn't "altering the broadcasts" without permission, which is 100% what we are discussing here. Instead, it's doing what is legally permitted.
Broadcast law is quite complex, and includes not altering anything at all without permission. It's simply not remotely the same.
You need to find another parallel here, I think. The logic behind cable television is rife with legislation, copyright law, a century of case law, and more. It is also co-mingled with broadcasting over the air, which is considered a public space, the airwaves being auctioned off (no, the internet isn't).
I said I don't know if altering was with or without permission. Just that altering did happen and you said it yourself that it happened with permission.
I don't understand the point you're trying to make about the significance of altering. Are you suggesting that if OpenAI simply served the content without altering it and didn't pay IP holders or obtain permission in any way, that would somehow be acceptable? This is what cable TV did before laws prohibited it.
You aren't altering the broadcast without permission, if you're inserting commercials into allows commercoal areas.
As well, the TV show itself is not altered.
Sounds almost transformative when you put it that way. You’re saying they took the content, and turned it into something completely different than its source? Hm.
No, I'm not saying that.
I can read a book, like it, create a screenplay with changes, and make a movie. It's different, but not completely different, and it is infringement.
I can even create an entirely new story, but using the same canon and characters, that too is infringement.
What people don't get is that you can't play games. TV lawyers are drama, and made up gibberish. Judges won't tolerate mental gymnastics, and attempts to explain away legalities rarely succeed.
"Good artists copy, great artists steal."
This isn't an artist building on the work of previous artists, this is a for-profit company repurposing people's work and mass producing it without permission or paying royalties.
Apple would disagree. Jobs considered himself an artist in the straightforward context or his quote.
Jobs, at the very least, would have stolen competently.
OpenAI asked Johansson for her likeness; she refused. So they trained an AI on a person instructed to mimic her likeness, and then tweeted a mocking reference to the source they stole from [1]. Put aside your views on morality or legality. I’m damning them for being stupid.
[1] https://x.com/sama/status/1790075827666796666?ref_src=twsrc%...
Why do you think it's stupidity? It's a show of power - they can do whatever they want even if you refuse. And they will brag about it.
Another "request" 2 days before release is a bullying, not stupidity.
Fuck around and find out, as they say. Johansson forced Disney to the negotiating table.
Make no mistake: I think lame wannabes steal, competently or not, regardless how successful they become.
And yeah, the techbro culture Sam steeped in results in remarkable stupidity!
Another thought-terminating cliché.
https://bookriot.com/do-great-artists-steal/
Erm... no. https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/112006855076082650
It’s absurd that you think that the benefit that I and others get from, say, Copilot, is somehow thwarted by some ranty social media thread that you’re a fan of. It’s some blogger’s theory arguing with empiricism. It’s a completely empty argument. I’m not sure how you’d expect that this would add to the conversation at all. It certainly doesn’t warrant your snarky tone.
The actual, real, not hype benefit you get from these once the hype quiets down is so little compared to the harm it does to everything.
Just seems incredibly arrogant to claim you know the "real benefit" others are getting
Perhaps you should read it again because you seem to have misunderstood the message. It doesn't even try to claim that LLMs aren't beneficial - it agrees that they're useful in certain situations, but that they're also over-hyped and misrepresented by their creators.
This perfectly matches my experience too. If I know what needs to be done, then all LLMs waste my time on average. However when I'm trying to learn about some new topic then LLMs have been a good way to get me oriented in the right direction and get a really high level overview that allows me to get a jump start and start learning about the topic on my own.
They tend to shine a light on all the "unknown unknowns" (e.g. common terminology and concepts), but they're poor at converting "known unknowns" into real knowledge since they lack any real and deep understanding themselves.
Are LLMs useful? Yes. Do they live up to expectations set by their creators? Not even close.
That is a dumb low effort take that doesn't even try to refute the statement that this is amazing technology, which it very clearly is.
He said "amazing technology" not "AGI that can replace humans". They are not the same.
"They're built on theft."
The "Big Tech" companies trying to compete with OpenAI were built on theft, too.
They do not produce content. They collect data about people and usurp others' content for advertising purposes. This comes at the cost of privacy, "data breaches", teen mental health, journalism, perhaps even civil, democratic society, to name just a few sacrifices.
OpenAI is pushing those companies to be as bad as they can be. As we are seeing, they have no problem going there. It is "in their DNA". Always has been.
This forced showing of "true colors" is the effect of a potential competitor that cannot be merged and acquired.
People from all walks of life are noticing. It's a great time.
Energy waste, water waste, the list of sacrifices is ugly.
A lot can be an amazing company if you're dealing with unlicensed instead of licensed content.
Anyone could beat Netflix or HBO or Disney or whoever if they just could take films and series and sell them without ever having paid licensing fees.
Anyone could beat Spotify or Apple Music if they just could take songs andsell them without ever having paid licensing fees.
etc etc you get the idea
I don't really expect any person or AI to be influenced by what I've written but if were I'm quite pleased. I wouldn't call it stealing.
Is everyone on this forum a thief because they learnt English and much culture without getting permission from those who came up with it?
Of course people on HN are going to defend Sam, why wouldn't they? He has promised us all salvation through AI revolution: The one where finally mankind is saved through technology, hunger is no more and diseases have been cured thanks to ChatGPT; We will have AGI and rogue Terminators are capable of roaming free in the wild.
Altman is a master magician, he has even convinced the Vatican to write a document regarding the dangers of AI; in his path to reach bigger piles mountains of cash, he has thrown out all sense of ethics and integrity.
He has replaced entire board, solidified his position as the CEO, is actively attempting to silence any possible whistle blower or negative feedback internally through legal agreements, attempted regulatory capture to stop opposition, stolen other people's content to train his chat bot and of course now yet another scam, passing on someone else's voice as Scarlet.
It won't end here, he will keep on going and his followers will defend him, because they are truly convinced the man is a revolutionary.
I for one, fear for a world where openAI (open in lowercase is intentional) dominates with Sam at the helm.
How is it stolen if it’s public information?
What's saddest is they will probably impede OpenAI no more than they did Facebook.
We must seize or copy the magic black box and make it free for everyone. It represents a great potential to reduce suffering and knowledge scarcity. It would be a massive injustice to do anything but make it part of the universal human legacy.
Was just thinking that sama managed to frame himself in opposition to the good guy Zuck.
This sounds absurd, but we're here, this is the timeline.