Postscript: The Dog Will Eat Your Homework, Too
AI and the demeaning little thieves and thugs that run the companies.
Scarlett Johansson Found Out. 1
[The above image was taken from the NBC story I will quote here. I’m citing fair use as no money will be made from my writing. No offence is intended in using the image.]
20 May, 2024 — not an aeon ago, but easily forgotten in the snowstorm tornado of cultural insanity and the shiny new things that steal one’s attention and memory daily — Kat Tenbarge, journalist at NBC News, reported the following:
’Actor Scarlett Johansson said Monday that OpenAI used an "eerily similar" voice to hers for their new GPT-4o chatbot despite having declined the company's request to provide her voice.
‘Earlier in the day, OpenAI announced it would no longer be using the voice, but did not indicate why.
‘ "Last September, I received an offer from Sam Altman, who wanted to hire me to voice the current ChatGPT 4.0 system," Johansson wrote in a statement, which a representative shared with NBC News. "He told me that he felt that by my voicing the system, I could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and AI. He said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people."
‘ "After much consideration and for personal reasons, I declined the offer," she continued. "Nine months later, my friends, family and the general public all noted how much the newest system named 'Sky' sounded like me."‘
2
Of course, it is easy to speculate that fanboy Altman wanted Johansson’s voice for at least two reasons: 1) She is the object of fanboy fantasies due to her appearance in many “superhero” themed Marvel/Disney movies — and AI as an idea and in terms of actual creation is, if nothing else, significantly powered by infantilized fanboy fantasies; 2) In specific, Johansson voice acted in the movie HER, involving an AI Chatbot, “Samantha” that a lonely, emotionally stunted human male comes to believe he has an intimate relationship with. Well, him and thousands of others, to his surprise, when the human discovers a disembodied, non-living entity mimicking human thought and feeling is not “monogamous.”
[I will hesitate a guess, somewhat sarcastically, Sam Altman wasn’t drawn to Johansson’s wonderful performances in Lost In Translation or Asteroid City, nor her voice in either.]
Turns out, there’s evidence for reason 2.
’ ”Johansson voiced an artificial intelligence chatbot in the 2013 movie “Her,” which OpenAI CEO Sam Altman referenced in relation to the company's new voice offerings — something Johansson noted in her statement.
‘ "When I heard the released demo, I was shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference," Johansson wrote in the statement. Altman’s announcement of the new product was posted on X on the same day of the product demonstration and is still live. Her statement continued, "Mr. Altman even insinuated that the similarity was intentional, tweeting a single word 'her' - a reference to the film in which I voiced a chat system, Samantha, who forms an intimate relationship with a human." ‘3
The actual Altman tweet's location; it's still up.
So, Altman took a straight run at a major popular Hollywood star, ignored her choice not to participate in selling her voice, simply stole and used it for his cash generating app (one has to pay extra to get ChatGPT to talk to you, I understand) — thus generating a great deal of buzz, free press, before “reluctantly,” taking down the Johansson voice while admitting to nothing.
As an actor, one of Scarlett Johansson’s major marketable assets is, aside from her image, her voice. If machines can simply mimic a Johansson voice at command, needless to say, Ms. Johansson’s career is damaged, not to mention her private life. She is an actor, an artist — and part of that is her voice and image have to be her own. She may choose to lease these and her skills for your movie or commercial or whatever; but they remain not only hers, but essential parts of who she is. Just as your voice and my voice and our skills are parts of us, except in this case, the voice is part of Johansson’s livelihood.
Altman acted in no better a fashion than AI pornographers using Taylor Swift’s image in sexually explicit fake videos.4
Obviously, Altman and OpenAI is banking on being able to buy their way out of this transgression in the short run until their technology becomes so pervasive as to normalize it, even legalize it for the corporations’ benefit… and the artists’ and sources’ detriment.
Let’s pull out a bit to see the broader picture.
Mira Murati, OpenAI’s CTO (notably, she claims to be an “artificial intelligence ethics advocate”) gave an interview showing her general attitude towards humans that AI’s use will detrimentally affect. To sum up:
"Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn't have been there in the first place."5
[The full source interview from Dartmouth that provided the above quote.]
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Myself, I don’t feel very empowered by any of this, but I don’t believe I’m the intended audience. I’m analog, hand-made, Neanderthal-ish. Baloney without the mayo, yesterday’s garbage. I got hauled offstage on The Gong Show in 1979. Maybe I’m part of the category of people who did creative jobs that “never should have existed in the first place.”
But what about Scarlett Johansson?
Is her career — and let’s confine ourselves to her voice for the moment as OpenAI hasn’t generated her likeness yet and claimed it’s not really her image — is her voice acting career, as I was saying, one of these “creative jobs” that not only will go away, but “maybe… shouldn't have been there in the first place”?
OpenAI certainly treated her that way. Not only her, but untold other artists, visual, written, and otherwise, whose work was digitally scraped, copied, and used to create the training models for these AIs… all without granting credit to the creators, all without compensating the creators, copyright laws be damned. They rammed straight ahead — just as they did with Johansson — stole the material, and then bet on being able to buy their way out of any trouble before, as I said, their technology becomes all-pervasive and above criticism. Along with the CEOs, CTOs, programmers and researchers whose jobs about which no one will ever be seriously allowed to say: “maybe they shouldn't have [existed] in the first place.”
The instance with Ms. Johansson, I think, intentionally or unintentionally, was an attempt to push the boundaries, to see what OpenAI and their ilk can get away with, and how much meaningful resistance they might get. Like any good psychopath, the tech dudes took a hard run at standards, violated them, and are now standing around shrugging, saying, “What?! What are you gonna do about it? Maybe that sort of job or law or guideline never should have existed in the first place.”
To hell with the affected people.
To quote another paragon of virtue: “Move fast and break things.” Things and people are here to be broken by the super-wealthy, the super-powerful, the utterly careless. Get used to it if you aren’t one of them. Who did you think you were to imagine deserving better?
21 June 2024
Richard Van Ingram
A stranger in a very strange land.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/scarlett-johansson-shocked-angered-openai-voice-rcna153180
Ibid.
Ibid.