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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Honestly kind of excited for the company blogs to start spitting out their disaster recovery crisis management stories.

    I mean - this is just a giant test of disaster recovery crisis management plans. And while there are absolutely real-world consequences to this, the fix almost seems scriptable.

    If a company uses IPMI (Called Branded AMT and sometimes vPro by Intel), and their network is intact/the devices are on their network, they ought to be able to remotely address this.
    But that’s obviously predicated on them having already deployed/configured the tools.











  • Ironically, a similarity to a real, live person without an agenda is not a legal problem unless there’s an implied endorsement from the person. (Which I think was one of the goals here.)
    But characters in movies and books are subject to copyright and are considered the intellectual property of the rights holders.

    So like, if I wrote a book about Wolverine and used other Marvel X-men, Marvel could sue the shit out of me. Or if I used AI to create Hugh Jackman (as Wolverine) to endorse my bandaid product line, I could also be sued by both Jackman and Marvel.

    I think it’s obvious here that Sky was intended to represent Sam from Her, and is almost certainly trained on her voice data (which is copywritten). After a few days thought however, I’m less certain of the argument this could be seen as a false endorsement scheme, since Johansson isn’t mentioned anywhere. (Despite the character being solely played by her, and the numerous attempts to have Johansson work on the project in an official capacity.)


  • I’m saying practically any voice with the associated bubbly flirty personality is going to make you think of the movie Her in such a context.

    I don’t know about you, but even a flirty Joaquin Phoenix voice would never make me think of Her.

    But if they’d had a “voice actor” do a spot on impression of Paul Bettany, complete with the little pauses and other flourishes of his portrayals of Vision, I’d think they ripped off the character.

    I think you and I differ there.
    As best as I can figure, you’re stuck on the flimsy excuse from Altman that they hired a voice actor. I see a line of events that points to OpenAI/Altman making a conscious effort to glom onto the Her movie, and specifically, the Samantha character to drum up interest, create viral buzz to enrich further themselves (without compensating anyone involved in the movie), and to try to add a veneer of credibility to a fading trend.

    Slight turn.
    In another life I was a photographer, and one of the things that they do not mess around with is model releases. Any person that appears in your photos that distributed must absolutely have a legal agreement in place. Using someone’s likeness for commercial purposes without consent and/or compensation will get you fucked in triplicate.

    There’s also the moral part of it. Artists know that you don’t rip off artists. Inspired by, sure. But there’s a line, and you don’t cross it. It’s as simple as that.

    Okay, and finally, this is based less on facts I know, and more feelings I have about the situation -
    It’s fucking creepy, dude.

    Okay, so the movie Her - an entire society becomes obsessed with their AI companions and falls in love with them, causing tremendous grief and trauma. And that’s like, what they’re going to lengths to brand but not brand this latest version with? What kind of fucked up things are going on in their heads over there?
    It doesn’t make sense.

    The rundown, again. (Sorry, I like to establish context. Yay neurodivergence.).
    Altman is on record saying that Her is his favorite movie, and that it is a major inspiration to him. One of the reasons he got into this field. He spent 9 months trying to convince Johansson to work with him on this, and lend her name/voice to this latest iteration of ChatGPT. He’s been so focused on getting her to lend his name to this, that he continued asking her to join in on this even just a few days before the announcement, which was like, the 13th. And that’s after she’s already turned him down, so he was just ignoring her boundaries and trying to pressure her…
    On the 11th - two days before this announcement, Altman does a Reddit AMA (which he was doing as part of the 4o press junket) and says that he’d like to open up ChatGPT for personal NSFW usage.

    I mean, everyone is focusing on Her, but we probably should also to be thinking about the Lucy Liu Futurama episode, because… well, I’m just going to say it. I think he already fucked the robot. The line of events from A to B is transparent and fucking gross.
    Not the whole fucking a robot thing - people got needs - but that the likeness is obviously stolen from a non-consenting actress that I’m beginning to believe he’s obsessed with.

    So … yeah… I have all the problems with this. I view concerns over the usage of her voice as immaterial to the usage of the character, and I see an inherent difference between an LLM mimicking a random voice that happens to sound like someone, and this situation, where the voice was clearly created to represent the character, and by extension, the actor that played the character. I don’t think there’s a slippery slope here. Most judges are fairly smart, and will be able to articulate something I (a non legal) took as a given from the outset.


  • No matter what they make it sound like, there’s going to be similarities with the movie.

    I don’t follow.
    They literally disabled the ‘Sky’ voice Sunday night and now users can’t pick a voice that sounds like the character from Her.
    And, mind you, this is not a ‘huh, they sorta sound the same’ this is a ‘they sound very similar, and have the same personality’ situation, in addition to the fact that Sam Altman is on the record talking about being obsessed with the movie Her - which is circumstantial. What isn’t circumstantial is they literally referenced the movie’s name in their marketing materials. Sam tweeted a vague hint, and his colleagues confirmed it. It’s not speculative.

    There’s nothing wrong with leaning into these for advertising purposes.

    Actually, intellectual property theft is either wrong or merely only technically illegal, depending on where you stand on copyright, but it’s still wrong, either way. Then there’s trying to mislead the public into thinking that GPT-4o was endorsed in some way by those involved in the Her movie. A false endorsement is also illegal. So - wrong there, too.
    I’m sure an actual lawyer could find more wrong with it, but just those two things are actual, literal crimes.


  • And that’s both fine and valid.

    If an actor was hired, I could see them being treated as a scab or not being offered roles - perhaps because they agreed to take a job that they had no idea would be used in such a way, or with no idea that a controversy would emerge.

    I am dubious, though. It seems that OpenAI pulled the voice shortly after Johansson’s legal team requested information about how the Sky voice was created.
    It’s a fair assumption that I’m biased - and I am. I’m not the biggest fan of ‘big tech.’ So perhaps I’m not as objective as others.

    But I think the voice actor part is still minor. It’s not just the voice, it’s the character, and all the references to the movie, which I think were intended to deceive consumers and create false sense of endorsement.
    Or maybe not, maybe it’s that Sam Altman is a man-child with a crush on Johansson. He’s openly said that Her is his favorite movie, and it’s not a leap to see a CEO cowing his staff into bad decisions.