Your immediate acceptance that a timeline that represents the best spin of a deep-pocketed company in full crisis PR mode proves the story "false", full stop, no caveats is... I wouldn't say mind-bending, but quite credulous at a minimum. The timeline they present could be accurate but the full picture could still be quite damning. As Casey Newton wrote today [1]:
> Of course, this explanation only goes so far. We don’t know whether anyone involved in choosing Sky’s voice noted the similarity to Johansson’s, for example. And given how close the two voices sound to most ears, it might have seemed strange for the company to offer both the Sky voice and the Johansson voice, should the latter actor have chosen to participate in the project. [...] And I still don’t understand why Altman reportedly reached out to Johansson just two days before the demonstration to ask her to reconsider.
They absolutely have not earned the benefit of the doubt. Just look at their reaction to the NDA / equity clawback fiasco [2], and their focus on lifelong non-disparagement clauses. There's a lot of smoke there...
> Of course, this explanation only goes so far. We don’t know whether anyone involved in choosing Sky’s voice noted the similarity to Johansson’s, for example. And given how close the two voices sound to most ears, it might have seemed strange for the company to offer both the Sky voice and the Johansson voice, should the latter actor have chosen to participate in the project. [...] And I still don’t understand why Altman reportedly reached out to Johansson just two days before the demonstration to ask her to reconsider.
They absolutely have not earned the benefit of the doubt. Just look at their reaction to the NDA / equity clawback fiasco [2], and their focus on lifelong non-disparagement clauses. There's a lot of smoke there...
[1] https://www.platformer.news/openai-scarlett-johansson-chatgp...
[2] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/351132/openai-vested-equi...