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Comment by zemo | Hacker News Reader

you’re using “he loves the movie” as some sort of defense, when the movie is a pretty standard sci fi cautionary tale. You know the saying:

sci-fi author: I wrote about the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

tech bros: Finally we have built the Torment Nexus from beloved sci fi story “Do not build the Torment Nexus”

Enjoying a story is not justification for recreating any artifact that occurs within the story. Her is quite clearly a cautionary tale, not meant to be instructive. https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/why-is-sam-altman-so-obs...

so yes I do think it’s very relevant that when you say “he liked the film”, the contents of the film is an admissible area of inquiry.

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This is real life not fiction. Perhaps we shouldn't crucify people for this sort of vague association.

there’s a huge gulf between saying “I think that guy is wrong” on a web forum and sentencing them to death in an extremely public and slow and painful manner. Nobody is being crucified here. It is intellectually dishonest to see criticism as crucifixion.

This isn't criticism, it's a witch hunt. Your argument here boils down to "he's evil" because of his movie preferences.

No, that's long been established. His movie preferences just illustrate it further.

What's been "long established"?

> > > "he's evil"

1. It stands to reason Sam could be held criminally liable over using someone else's likeness to promote his product. CEOs have been lost in federal court over sillier Tweets, and assuming Sam is in the right here is a silly move for any of us since nobody in this comment section has meaningful oversight of the OpenAI board.

2. If someone dedicated their life's work to building the Bioelectric Battery from The Matrix, I am going to call them evil. It's not because I hate The Matrix, it's because I consider the net worth of such a tool to be negative and object to it's creation entirely. If someone's vision is based on the wrong moral takeaways from a piece of media, then people will rightfully demonize them for it. That's society.

"The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future but sometimes to prevent it." - Frank Herbert

#1 is fine assuming such a crime was committed. But for as much as people assume this to be true, actually looking at the evidence it doesn't seem like it. OpenAI would have to be explicit in copying the likeness. Something may still come out in discovery but anything discussed here is just vague supposition.

#2 Is begging the question. It starts with with the premise that AI is evil and therefore Sam Altman is committing evil by promoting it.

> OpenAI would have to be explicit in copying the likeness.

Unless you are privy to the last 10 months of OpenAI's closed-door meeting notes, I don't think you have the authority to explicitly deny this. Time will tell what comes of it, but the obsession with namedropping Her among OpenAI employees feels like the final nail in the coffin. If OpenAI fully complies with the discovery process I don't have faith that Sam Altman was as sneaky as he's made-out to be.

Did I explicitly deny this? By the same token, unless you are privy to the last 10 months of OpenAI's closed-door meeting notes you have no authority to assert it. But without those closed-door meeting notes, the evidence we do have isn't pretty unconvincing of any wrong doing. The time-frame is off and the voices actually don't sound alike if you compare them directly.

> but the obsession with namedropping Her among OpenAI employees feels like the final nail in the coffin.

I don't see why this the nail in the coffin. Why is this about the voice and not the technology involved in creating a natural voiced AI assistant just like was demonstrated popular movie?

Plenty of technologies have been inspired by science fiction including, most obviously, the cell phone. And comparing those technologies to the science fiction version is equally common.

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