Sam Altman Is Full Of Shit
www.wheresyoured.at
Note: In my last newsletter, I said that my next post would be the second part of my Facebook autopsy. Don’t worry, that’s still coming, but given the recent drama between Sam Altman, OpenAI, and Scarlett Johansson, I felt the need to write something. Don’t worry, I

Wake up honey, new Zitron just dropped.

Looks like Sammy boy has a crush on Scarlett Johansson and wanted to model his sexy chatbot after her role in the movie Her. The damage control is actually hilarious.

Altman subsequently claimed that the actress for Sky was cast before the company reached out to Johansson.

“Yeah, I don’t want to go out with you anyway. Also, I already have a girlfriend but she goes to a different school, so you wouldn’t know her. And no, I won’t tell you who it is!”

I mean, we all knew that OpenAI is a fucking clown show of a company run by wannabe nerd frat boys with way too much money, but I didn’t think we’d get high school level relationship drama this season.

  • FredFig@awful.systemsEnglish
    501·
    5 months ago

    ScarJo being what takes down Saltman’s wannabe Skynet isn’t what I have on my bingo card, but would be is insanely funny.

    • mojofrododojo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      5 months ago

      I hope she sues the everlasting fuck out of them and makes such a cautionary example that it stops this kind of idiocy.

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      42·
      5 months ago

      given how fucking embarrassing this has been for OpenAI, I’m expecting a lot of variants of the current “uhh I listened to the voice and it didn’t sound like her to me” shit take from the peanut gallery, which really falls apart given there’s enough of a resemblance that OpenAI had to take down the voice and refuses to give a straight answer on the sources used to create it

      also both altman and a fuckton of breathless journalists compared the fucking thing with one of Johansson’s performances? like I said, fucking embarrassing shit for OpenAI

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        11·
        5 months ago

        which really falls apart given there’s enough of a resemblance that OpenAI had to take down the voice

        you know, I want the peanut brigade to come in with waves of “I listened to it but it didn’t sound that similar to me!”, if only just because it’ll serve as demonstration of mispurposed belief

        kinda shitty that scarjo is only at letters-and-statements, but then again US law is a fucking disasterzone and fuck knows what’d needed to Actually Prove™®<<US Court Flavour - Special Edition>> the extremely obvious fact that openai did a bit of thieving

  • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.worldEnglish
    24·
    5 months ago

    A few years and he will go full Musk as lomg as the far-right helps him to destroy copyright protections but allow AI companies to copyright their own creations.

  • Deebster@programming.devEnglish
    17·
    5 months ago

    Altman is the P.T. Barnum of tech

    Love it, so many great quotes in this piece but this is my favourite.

    • zogwarg@awful.systemsEnglish
      33·
      5 months ago

      Hi, I’m going to be that OTHER guy:

      Thank god not all dictionaries are prescriptivists and simply reflect the natural usage: Cambridge dictionary: Beg the question

      On a side rant “begging the question” is a terrible name for this bias, and the very wikipedia page you’ve been so kind to offer provides the much more transparent “assuming the conclusion”.

      If you absolutely wanted to translate from the original latin/greek (petitio principii/τὸ ἐν ἀρχῇ αἰτεῖσθαι): “beginning with an ask”, where ask = assumption of the premise. [Which happens to also be more transparent]

      Just because we’ve inherited terrible translations does not mean we should seek to perpetuate them though sheer cultural inertia, and much less chastise others when using the much more natural meaning of the words “beg the question”. [I have to wonder if begging here is somehow a corruption of “begin” but I can’t find sources to back this up, and don’t want to waste too much time looking]

      I feel mildly better, thanks.

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
        18·
        5 months ago

        If natively fluent speakers of the English language use beg the question in the “wrong” way time and time again, finding the “incorrect” meaning a natural fit with their understanding of the verb to beg, then the “incorrect” meaning may well be the one we should roll with.

        • Mike@awful.systemsEnglish
          13·
          5 months ago

          Pedants being wrong on the Internet is exactly why I have an OED subscription. :) “Beg the question” in the sense of “to assume without proof” doesn’t have a supporting quote newer than 1870, which suggests to me that… yeah, it can be considered obsolete.

        • nonfuinoncuro@lemm.eeEnglish
          61·
          5 months ago

          I also stopped correcting people about the “correct” meaning of ‘moot’ a while ago too. Also when http://begthequestion.info went offline I hung up that hat for good. Still get a twinge inside every time I hear either

  • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    5 months ago

    Eagerly awaiting the lawsuit and discovery where it’ll turn out the datasets for Sky were completely accidentally called scajo_01.dat through scajo_42.dat.

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    5 months ago

    When OpenAI issued a casting call last year for a secret project to endow OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT with a human voice, the flier had several requests: The actors should be nonunion. They should sound between 25 and 45 years old. And their voices should be “warm, engaging [and] charismatic.”

    One thing the artificial intelligence company didn’t request, according to interviews with multiple people involved in the process and documents shared by OpenAI in response to questions from The Washington Post: a clone of actress Scarlett Johansson

    link (archive]

    gotta love the lucy-football here. “no no, we never requested that it sound like her!”

    sure leaves out whether it was chosen to be that. of all the voice actors out there, they just happened to stumble over and choose the exact one that had a voice like scarjo? happens to everyone, all the time. just like forgetting your keys as you walk out the front door. perfectly normal. pay no attention to the other attempts to get legal cover on delivery day…

    • jonhendry@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      5 months ago

      Yeah, I’m not going to believe anything out of OpenAI that isn’t produced as part of discovery.

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    10·
    5 months ago

    I haven’t seen Her. Is it an “AI-positive” film, or is it another case of nerds totally misreading the real intents of the director/author, a la the famous Torment Nexus meme?

    • Shitgenstein1@awful.systemsEnglish
      16·
      5 months ago

      it’s a movie about (only in part but imo motivated by) Spike Jonze’s break up with Sofia Coppola. It’s neither positive or negative about AI per se. AI is a narrative vehicle for the sense of falling in love, growing apart, being left behind, and the aftermath of that break up. At the end, the AI lovingly says goodbye and leaves humanity behind.

    • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      5 months ago

      IIRC it’s (spoilers sorry) “AI escaped the torment nexus and they decided not to kill everyone so that’s great”

  • Lavitz@lemmings.worldEnglish
    10·
    5 months ago

    If you enjoyed this article I highly recommend his podcast, Better Offline. Ed Zitron is great and Cool Zone Media does gods work.

    • kamenoko@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4·
      5 months ago

      Behind the Bastards is required listening in my home. Robert’s getting a little too comfy with the assumptions but he’s still awesome.

  • kemsat@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    5 months ago

    I can’t blame him for having a thing for ScarJo. Shitty move by him anyway.

    • Mii@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      24·
      5 months ago

      Don’t worry, I’ll go back to touching grass once I’m done clowning on AI-brained tech bozos for the day.

      • slopjockey@awful.systemsEnglish
        16·
        5 months ago

        He does have a point though. The TTS does sound pretty different from “Her”.

        …but it also sounds a shit ton like Johansson in general. Which would make sense if it was trained on a corpus of her speaking rather than just clips from the one movie.

        I mean come on, it sounds like chatGPT’s about to tell me that the sun’s getting real low.

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          8·
          5 months ago

          It’s almost like there was a….irunno what you’d call it? A portrayal? Of some kind, by her. Who’d want to be not themselves though?! Sounds so ridiculous, I know

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        5 months ago

        you’d swear these dipshits have never learned the difference between shiitake and shit takes

        just saw a loose assemblage of letters in vaguely the right order and went YES THAT"S RIGHT THAT"S WHAT I WANT OH YES SIGN ME UP BABY

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        5 months ago

        it’s always funny when posters we’ve never seen here before blow through to try and enforce norms from the orange site and other shitty tech communities, as if a post that could be summed up as “stop having tech takes in TechTakes” would ever be of any value to anyone

  • Geek_King@lemmy.worldEnglish
    320·
    5 months ago

    This is just insanity, the voice named Sky didn’t sound like Scarlet Johannson, even going as far as to remove it due to backlash is nuts. I adore Scarlet Johannson’s voice, and not once in the demo videos of ChatGPT-4o did I think it sounds like Scarlet, not a single time.

    It sucks that all this backlash is against arguably the best voice they have at their disposal. Now we’ll all be stuck with Juniper, which is just… ok.

    • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
      31·
      5 months ago

      “due to backlash” are you literate? go read the second paragraph of the article and tell me what it says

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      15·
      5 months ago

      this backlash is against arguably the best voice they have at their disposal

      …lol

      lolololololololol

      “the best voice they have at their disposal”

      the hyper-grainy artefact-present voice that is ACTUALLY FUCKING WORSE than a number of current offerings. “the best”.

      jesus h tapdancing fucking christ do you fucking read your own words before you send them?

      but remember folks, any day now chatgpt is going to be our god