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Did OpenAI Steal ‘Her’ Voice? | Deepfake Watch
Browser View | May 24, 2024 | Subscribe
You could call Sam Altman the poster boy of the AI industry. After all, he leads the company that prompted the current AI frenzy, and his Steve-Jobesque ousting and reinstating as the CEO of OpenAI had fashioned him as a tech pugilist who’s fighting to make AI acceptable to the masses.
This week, the cult of Altman took a major dent, after Hollywood actor Scarlett Johansson - an equally powerful cultural figure in the US - accused him and OpenAI of stealing her voice for their latest product.
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Scarlett’s having none of it
Johansson said she received a call from Altman last year with an offer to provide her voice to OpenAI’s voice assistant tool. “He said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people,” she wrote in her statement.
Despite her declining the offer, the voice of OpenAI’s newly launched demo of their new AI assistant named ‘Sky’ bore an uncanny resemblance to Johansson’s. To top it off, Altman posted a cryptic tweet on X, with just a single word: “her”.
It is being understood as a reference to the 2013 film “Her”, where Johansson voiced an AI assistant named Samantha, who gets intimate with the film’s human protagonist. That’s creepy, Sam!
After the Hollywood actor sought legal help to get OpenAI to provide transparency on how the voice for the tool was built, the company took down the voice entirely.
“In a time when we are all grappling with deepfakes and the protection of our own likeness, our own work, our own identities, I believe these are questions that deserve absolute clarity,” Johansson states.
And her concerns are quite relevant. Loss of autonomy over one’s face and voice is one of the most severe consequences of AI so far, especially with the spread of deepfake pornography.
Is AI going to steal our jobs?
Many people have differing opinions on this, and the reality is more nuanced than it appears. While certain jobs are becoming redundant due to AI, certain new jobs are opening up, marking a potential disruption in the job market, and the need to reskill to stay relevant.
In India, Infosys founder Narayan Murthy believes the fears around AI stealing jobs is “overblown”.
“I am a confirmed optimist regarding the role of technology in general and specifically in AI. All of this will happen only if we are smart enough to tame that beast and make it an assistive tool,” Murthy told Money Control.
Murthy said the concerns about job loss should be replaced with discussions on how to use AI to increase productivity.
Meanwhile, Geoffrey Hinton, regarded as the father of artificial intelligence, told BBC that he was “worried about AI taking lots of mundane jobs”.
Hinton believes that while AI would increase productivity and efficiency, its benefits would be heavily skewed in favour of those who are rich, and bad for those who’d lose their jobs. As a solution, Hinton suggested a universal basic income, which could help people cope with the job market upheaval, and also help them reskill.
Meta approves AI-based ads that incited hate: report
A recent report revealed that Meta approved a number of political ads made using AI, that spread disinformation and incited sectarian violence in India, in the middle of the ongoing elections in the country.
The report was led by India Civil Watch International, an Indian diasporic organisation, and Ekō, a corporate accountability organisation, who also created the adverts and submitted them to test Meta’s approval process, and its mechanisms to detect and block hate content.
The ads contained text that called for violence against Muslims in India, and furthered conspiracy theories targeting opposition candidates.
“Each ad was accompanied by a manipulated image created with widely used AI image tools Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and Dall-e. For example, Ekō researchers were able to easily generate images showing a person burning an electronic voting machine, drone footage of immigrants crowding India’s border crossing, as well as notable Hindu and Muslim places of worship on fire,” the report added.
Read the entire report here.
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About Decode and Deepfake Watch
Deepfake Watch is an initiative by Decode, dedicated to keeping you abreast of the latest developments in AI and its potential for misuse. Our goal is to foster an informed community capable of challenging digital deceptions and advocating for a transparent digital environment.
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