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Do Not Mess with Scarlett Johansson

I repeat. Do not mess with Scarlett Johansson. You would think her movies, and her suit against Disney, would make this obvious. Apparently not so. Andrej Karpathy (co-founder OpenAI, departed earlier), May 14: The killer app of LLMs is Scarlett Johansson. You all thought it was math or something.

Paul Feldman( LA Times, May 9, 1990): In a novel case of voice theft, a Los Angeles federal court jury Tuesday awarded gravel-throated recording artist Tom Waits $2.475 million in damages from Frito-Lay Inc. and its advertising agency. If Scarlett Johansson does not have a case here, where OpenAI did everything in their power to make it obvious and she has what it takes to call them on it, then there effectively are very close to no rules and no protections, for creatives or otherwise, except for laws against outright explicitly claimed impersonations, scams and frauds. As Jessa Lingel & I discuss in our journal article on AI agents, there's a long history of using white women's voices to “personalize” a technology to make it feel safe and non-threatening while it is capturing maximum data.

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