Under what legal theory is intending to do something which is legal (hiring a person that has a voice you want) becomes illegal because there is another person who has a similar voice?

It's not intending to do something legal, it's intending to do something illegal: Stealing their likeness. The fact you used an otherwise legal procedure to do the illegal activity doesn't make it less illegal.

How can something be illegal if every step towards the objective is legal? This would result in an incoherent legal system where selective prosecution/corruption is trivial.

What's illegal, in general, is not the action itself but the intent to do an action and the steps taken in furtherance of that intent.

Hiring someone with a voice you want isn't illegal; hiring someone with a voice you want because it is similar to a voice that someone expressly denied you permission to use is illegal.

Actually, it's so foundational to the common law legal system that there's a specialized Latin term to represent the concept: mens rea (literally 'guilty mind').

It is legal to buy a gun, and legal to fire a gun, and it can even be legal to fire a gun at someone who is threatening to kill you in the moment, but if you fire a gun at someone with the intention of killing someone that happens to be very, very illegal.

Very well. But in this case the end goal is the end of someone's unique life.

In the case of acquiring a likeness, if it's done legally you acquire someone else's likeness that happens to be shared with your target.

The likeness is shared and non-unique.

If you objective is to take someone's life, there is no other pathway to the objective but their life. With likeness that isn't the case.

OpenAI should hire you as their lawyer.

So? You're merely (correctly) pointing out that the acts have consequences that are of wildly differing severity. Not that one is a legal and the other is not.

Scarlet owns the voice of a stranger that happens to sound like her? That seems absurd.

Just find someone who sounds like her, then hire them for the rights to their voice.

It’s really hard to assume in good faith that you are unfamiliar with the concept of impersonation. Just in case: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impersonator

There is no doubt that the hired actor was an impersonator, this was explicitly stated by scama himself.

> There is no doubt that the hired actor was an impersonator, this was explicitly stated by scama himself.

And here's some caselaw where another major corporation got smacked down for doing the exact same thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

But given how unscrupulous Sam Altman appears to be, I wouldn't be surprised if OpenAI hired an impersonator as some kind half-ass legal cover, and went about using Johansson's voice anyway. Tech people do stupid shut sometimes because they assume they're so much cleverer than everyone else.

The variance in voice is not that great. Just find someone who is very close to her voice naturally.

Doesn't matter if the intent is to make the listener think they're hearing ScarJo

I missed that; where did he say that?

It’s just that her voice by itself is relatively unremarkable. Someone like say, Morgan freeman, or Barack Obama, someone with a distinctive vocal delivery, that’s one thing. Scarlett Johansson, I couldn’t place her voice out of a lineup. I’m sure it’s pleasant I just can’t think of it.

Scarlett Johansson does absolutely have a distinctive and very famous voice. I wouldn’t take your own ignorance (not meant disparagingly) as evidence otherwise.

That’s why she was the voice actor for the AI voice in Her.

>That’s why she was the voice actor for the AI voice in Her.

She was used in Her because she has a dry/monotone/lifeless form of diction that at the time seemed like a decent stand-in for an non-human AI.

IMDB is riddled with complaints about his vocal-style/diction/dead-pan on every one of her movies. Ghost World, Ghost in the Shell, Lost in Translation, Comic-Book-Movie-1-100 -- take a line from one movie and dub it across the character of another and most people would be fooled, that's impressive given the breadth of quality/style/age across the movies.

When she was first on the scene I thought it was bad acting, but then it continued -- now I tend to think that it's an effort to cultivate a character personality similar to Steven Wright or Tom Waits; the fact that she's now litigating towards protection of her character and likeness reinforces that fact for me.

It's unique to her though , that's for sure.

>She was used in Her because she has a dry/monotone/lifeless form of diction that at the time seemed like a decent stand-in for an non-human AI

Do you have a source for this?

You know I took some time to compare versus just reading the analysis and in particular I listened to the OpenAI demo and a scene from “her”.

Yeah not moving from my position at all. Just a very generic featureless female voice. I suppose I hear some similarities in timbre, but it’s such an unremarkable voice and diction that it’s hard to put your finger on anything past “generic low affect American alto”.

It’s a great computer voice. Taking it down is for sure the right call PR wise, regardless of whether they may have done.

Impersonating is defined by intent. "Just find someone who sounds like her" implies intent.

What happens if the remaining space is TRIMMED but routinely accessed? (for example by dd, read only)

If a logical block address is not mapped to any physical flash memory addresses, then the SSD can return zeros for a read request immediately, without touching the flash.

Does the mapping happen on first write? Is TRIM then a command that signals the SSD to unmap that block?

Yes.

You read zeroes.

Not guaranteed by default for NVMe drives. There's an NVMe feature bit for "Read Zero After TRIM" which if set for a drive guarantees this behavior but many drives of interest (2024) do not set this.

Hmmm, when I quick-formatted a drive (which TRIMs the whole thing), then tried reading it back in a disk hex editor, I just saw zeroes.

It seems like that would be a likely common behavior for the FTL, but other options are possible (e.g., reading the old blocks) and it wasn't guaranteed by the spec, which is why they added this NVMe flag (so-called "DZAT") so that you can actually rely on it.

Cancer tends to have an interesting relationship with cellular protein transport. And as a consequence has problems dealing with heat. The protein transport mechanism by which immune surveillance is conducted is shared with cells surviving heat increases via ejection of heat shock proteins.

I once tried to find if there were any studies about incidence of cancer plotted against incidence of high fever in the same individuals but wasn't able to find anything. It may also point to the incidence of cancer actually rising due to suppression of other diseases.

This is plausible due the fact that diseases are a constant in nature and therefore evolution would take their presence as a given as much as the seasons or the sun. It would be very unfortunate if numerous anti-cancer adaptions simply haven't evolved because regular fevers took care of those cancer precursors.

Correct. The incentives for individuals rarely align with the incentives of polities (and it can be argued those entities only exist in history books).

The bombs and their awesome power served to align the incentives of individuals in decision making positions with the incentives ascribed to the polity named Japan to issue surrender.