OpenAl is sticking to its story that it never intended to copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice when seeking an actor for ChatGPT’s “Sky” voice mode.
This all “feels personal," the voice actress said, "being that it’s just my natural voice and I’ve never been compared to her by the people who do know me closely.”
This comes at a time when many studios are otherwise intrigued by the idea of using AI for things like digital effects but remain, after a long history of avoiding copyright conflicts, hesitant to connect with any company potentially viewed as stealing artists’ work without consent, Reuters reported.
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The issue is Altman made it murky. If my name is Joe McDonald, I’m allowed to open a hamburger shop. What I can’t do is purposefully confuse customers for my personal gain.
This isn’t parody, it’s image and likeness. It is much less murky when they are promoting it as “Her” as in the movie starring Johansson as the voice of a sentient AI assistant.
What doing satire has to do with the matter?
How do you think it would go if OpenAI had used actors with the voices of Biden or Trump and Altman had tweeted “POTUS” just before the event?
Altman knew exactly what he was doing.
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I strongly feel she has a case. Altman may not have violated criminal law, but he has used backdoor marketing, climbing on her shoulders to sell a product.
For example
https://www.iptechblog.com/2023/06/no-first-amendment-right-to-confuse-consumers-high-court-holds/
Also that he reached out to her to get an agreement just before he went live with the sky voice and tweeted “Her”.
The circumstantial evidence is very high as well. This voice actor saying she doesn’t sound like Scarlett Johanson is absolutely meaningless. Sucks she got pulled into this I guess?
Yeah, that she wasn’t given direction is meaningless when you have editing software. Not to mention that there are a ton of videos showing how easy it is to train LLMs to reproduce a voice given samples.
Provided no “modifications” or “instruction” to make it sound like…
Parody is legal. This is not parody.
To be fair, I have not looked into this case enough to have an opinion. Just wanted to point out the logic error.
So like, can you a record label sue another band for ‘sounding like’ the band that they are promoting?
It was more of a thing in the 90s, but there were always competing follow up bands (Sublime being followed by 311) that chased the sound of another artist.
Like should NSync be sued for being a boy band following in Backstreet Boys wake?
Not parody, but mimicry is fundamental to art.
I suppose my rather extreme views on copyright and up leaves me the outlier here, but I think the whole thing is rather absurdist.
Chat GPT is not art, it is an LLM sold by a business that courted Scarlett Johansson to endorse and/or voice their LLM.
She refused and they released an LLM named Sky with a similar voice and personality to the Sam (Samantha) character she played, while also openly referencing the Her movie with their social media.If I created an “AI” ska band that sounded like Sublime and trained it on Bradley Nowell’s singing voice, with a similar-sounding vocalist to fill in the gaps, I’m pretty sure Sub Lime featuring Badly Novell would get fucked so hard by copyright attorneys that all I would have left is my dog and some weed.
It is not allowed. See Tom Waits vs. Frito Lay. Vocal timbre is considered to part of a celebrities’ “likeness” and reproducing it to imply endorsement will get you landed in court. ScarJo is a huge Tom Waits fan so she knows the story.
That’s not the same thing, they hired an impersonator and copied something really distinct about how he talked. Johansen’s deep mid western accent is not distinct, and Sky was not doing an impression.
Lots of women speak like Scarlet. The first person to become famous cannot copyright a way millions of people speak and act.
The point is they said “we want Scarlett” and when she said no, they went ahead with someone similar and implied a connection. That’s definitely unethical, and arguably illegal.
That said, while she definitely has a case, I fully expect it to be settled fairly quickly, because I don’t think she’d win.
I’m going to say this because it bothers the crap out of me.
Sam Altman has admitted to being a huge Her fan. He says it’s his favorite movie. IIRC, he even said he was ‘obsessed’ with the movie and that it inspired him.
Two days before they announced GPT-4o, which they apparently gave the hard sell to Johansson to try to get her join up on, Sam Altman was on Reddit and said OpenAI was exploring how to allow their service for erotica.
Giiiiiirrll.
ScarJo is a huge Tom Waits fan
My apologies to Tom Waits.
Lol. You should read the reviews of the album. They are decidedly …mixed. Everyone seems to agree that it wasn’t your typical Hollywood vanity project - she took it seriously as an artistic endeavour.
That having been said her singing voice is freakishly low and the mixing is muddy and obscuring. It shows something that can’t be immediately dismissed, but the poor execution doesn’t allow you to grasp exactly what that spark might be.
It’s worth listening to once.
Eta: Town With No Cheer https://youtube.com/watch?v=qsDaaVIvXig
It’s worth listening to once.
Nah I’m good, I don’t give Zionists and illegal settlers my time. Fuck OpenAI, and fuck ScarJo, couldn’t happen to a better person, except maybe Gal Gadot or McShit Rapoport.
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I stand by what i said fuck Zionists especially those who support illegal settlements. And even more so those who profit from their support.
It was murky from the getgo. Open AI immediately came out and stated it was the voice of a hired voice actor and that all four or five voice options were, and that it was the voice actor using her own natural voice. The media has just chose to mostly completely ignore that and instead wanted to run with rumors that they stole ScarJos voice from the movie or by sampling a bunch of her work, because that sounds way more gossipy.
To your 2nd point though. The trump voicing stuff is a clear and apparent “parody” which is protected to be legally used. Even when Weird AL does his music, he doesn’t actually have to get the artists permission. He just always has because he’s a world treasure.
Yes well Sam (I’m a total dipshit, but it’s ok cause I’m rich now) Altman tweeting out “Her” on launch day did not help matters.
Very true right there. It could just as easily be described as him flaunting technology like what was in the movie, though. I posted a side by side a bit ago and the voices are pretty different.
I listen to it and no they’re not that different. The way she speaks is eeriely similar to the way Scarlett Johansson does.
Friendly and flirty?
Yeah this was the case right from the start. I’m not sure why people are just coming around now, I guess it helps that the actual voice actor has spoken out so it’s concrete proof that she at least exists.
What would be neat is if ScarJo sues and wins, could the Jane Doe voice actor then hit ScarJo with an antitrust lawsuit? I mean, if the poor lady can’t get work because the market for “that voice” is dominated by one actor: then what?
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Parody is supposed to be comedic in nature. This is not.
Look up parody in the dictionary, 'cause that isn’t what it means.
I mean maybe you should be looking it up in case law, because what it means in a dictionary is irrelevant relative to case law.
If the voice actor actually made an obvious parody of the HER voice (as an example giving it an over the top southern drawl to subvert expectations about southern ludditism) but parodies can’t just be “like that thing but we hired a cheaper voice actor”.
Setting aside whether soundalikes-hyped-as-the-real-deal is a violation of personal likeness rights…
How do we know what voice(s) they actually used? To my understanding, the process atomizes the input such that you can never actually prove what went into it.
Their whole business seems to be one of selling plausible-deniability engines.
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I think it’s fair to err on the side of shadiness with OpenAI considering their training data controversies with gtp and Sora.
I don’t mean this argumentatively but would you be surprised if it came out that they did use Johansson’s voice to train it?
It would seem weird to have them go through the trouble of hiring this woman only to then not use her recordings in favor of Scarlet Johansson’s voice only to then not claim it is Scarlet Johansson. I’m not a fan of a lot of what is being done with AI but that logic just doesn’t make sense to me.
I don’t think anyone is claiming that they scrapped the hired actor’s voice completely. I’m inclined to think they supplemented the training data with Johansson’s long career.
OpenAI has not been very open about where they source anything and there’s more evidence than not that they’ve used copyrighted material in the past.
I’m inclined to think they supplemented the training data with Johansson’s long career.
But why do that? They’re already paying someone they can have her say everything they need.
They’re paying her for plausible deniability. They tried multiple times to get Johansson to agree to allow her voice to be used, including two days before they released it. They’re covering their ass.
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I don’t think it’s a witch hunt to call it into question, though. I feel bad for the voice actor they hired but what they showed of it is remarkably similar to Johansson’s iconic voice from Her.
It’s akin to (though not nearly on the same level) as having a voice that says “it’s-a-me, Vincenzo! Wahoo!” and saying it’s just a coincidence that it sounds like Mario
Maybe they hired her because of her voice’s the likeness to Johansson. It’s getting 90% of what they wanted but still being legal I’d think.
Maybe. I don’t claim to know the truth, just saying that thinking they’re being shady is an not unfounded thought
Down votes for you being an anti-witchhuntist?
And most of those headlines are spread by the tech companies… So we don’t have much reason to trust them
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It’s kind of funny. This lawsuit is the same kind of “criti-hype” that they’ve been pushing since day one.
I’m guessing probably because she was never cast as the friendly-sounding voice of an AI, what with that being something people associated Scarlett Johansson’s voice with?
I’m guessing that the multiple people who took over for Bug Bunny’s voice after Mel Blanc died were not compared to Mel Blanc before they took on the role.
I’m guessing she won’t say otherwise because if her voice is canceled she probably won’t get paid as much.
Maybe, but she also may not have even known that she had that quality when she was hired. Casting directors don’t necessarily tell you why you got a role. I did VO for quite some time. Sometimes I knew I was being hired to sound like someone else- generally a fictional character, but occasionally to dub in some dialogue when an actor was unavailable if I could do a good enough impression- but who knows about any of the other times? I’ve never been compared to Dan Aykroyd, but maybe someone thought I sounded enough like him that I got hired for a role which they wanted a voice like his for. They wouldn’t have told me and I wouldn’t have asked.
Voice actors are usually paid for the work they do, not the performance of the final product.
Is that something people associate her with? Everything I’ve seen her in she sounds pretty dry to me. Even when she’s being nice in a role. I can’t think of an example where she sounded “friendly”.
Yes, people associate her with being the voice of an AI because she played the voice of an AI in a very popular film which won Best Original Screenplay at the Oscars.
For anyone interested, here’s a comparison. They really don’t sound the same at all.
Here’s a longer video I came across. Sky sounds pretty different to me, but we’ll see what the courts think. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdrgFCldvrA
It sounds pretty similar. Like it was inspired by.
There’s a popular tiktok account where the guy is constantly trying to get the ChatGPT voice to admit she’s Scarlett Johansson and that was waaaaay before this lawsuit.
The AI voice sounds like Siri but only slightly less robotic and very clearly nothing like Scarlet Johansson’s except for being female.
Must be nice to operate a business on the bleeding edge where there are no effective requirements or regulations… My, albeit limited, understanding of how these things work is that sometimes no rules are made unless legal challenges like this lawsuit are made. In that way, win or lose, I think it is important to proceed in order to provide definition to a new industry (assuming a lot about functioning legal and legislative systems, lack of corruption, blah blah… bunch of stuff that doesn’t actually exist, etc.).
There’s already voice and likeness protections on the books. They got a similar sounding voice actress, but the voices are definitely distinguishable. ScarJo shouldn’t get to own any semi robotic voice that sounds fairly close to her own from a 10 year old movie. If every actor and actress gets to start making these claims against every voice actor or actress, that’s going to just screw over opportunities for the voice actors. Everybody sounds somewhat like one famous person or another.
They approached her to do the voice because of the movie. She declined. Then they announce the new voice and make a bunch of public references to the movie.
I may not have have a great ear, but I have excellent pattern recognition.
Yeah, but you can also argue it away by him just advertising out selling something like the AI from “Her”. If you listen to any of the side by side youtube videos the voices sound pretty different. It obviously would have been great advertising to have the Sci fi tech voiced by scarjo to become the real tech, voiced by scarjo.
It’s pretty much the only place left to operate. Protectionism has stopped innovation everywhere else.
Lol what? Where has innovation “stopped” because of “protectionism”?
Any consumer electronics is difficult to get into. Certainly the auto industry. Railroads. It’s difficult to start an ISP, even a non profit one. I think the list goes on.
Tbh, I didn’t hear the similarity in the GPT4o demos. Not saying OpenAI did right or wrong, just that I wouldn’t have guessed that the Sky voice was meant to be ScarJo.
I don’t disagree - I think this lawsuit is likely going to focus more on the fact that OpenAI tried to contract with ScarJo and then specifically got budget ScarJo and that Sam Altman is a dummy hype boi who tweeted a dumb thing right before the presentation. He basically pulled an Elon.
Wow cause she looks just like her
/s
Thank you, good lord are there a lot of Johansen simps. They’re acting like they’ve never heard another mid western woman speak.
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Done thank you
