> OpenAI is working to pause the use of the Sky voice from an audible version of ChatGPT after users said that it sounded too much like actress Scarlett Johansson.
Uh?? How can any voice sound /too much/ like Scarlett Johansson?
When I heard it, I thought, wow, they licensed Scarlett Johansson, what an amazing Easter egg.
If they didn't and just cloned her voice, it's more disregard for creators and artists than I would have thought possible. What were they thinking?
Edit after reading the official story... not sure I believe it, seems disingenuous, at best they chose someone because they really really sounded like Scarlett Johansson, and no one said, it might be a problem.
They cannot disclose the identity of the person involved in order to protect their privacy. This is a very convenient cloak, leaving no way to know if they cloned Scarlet Johansson's voice or if it's from someone else.
Fortunately for Scarlett, she can just sue them and force them to tell her. She also isn’t shy to litigate. I was surprised that Sam wanted to poke that particular beehive.
I know trademark litigation is wishy-washy, but can she even claim her voice is unique enough to claim some form of infringement? If I just happen to sound like her, am I a walking infringement?
Voices such as Shatner or Walken are at least as much about speech patterns than the voice, giving you another axis to compare voices against, so I can somewhat see those as being trademarkable. But when I hear the ChatGPT voice, it just sounds like "slightly-flirty generic female voice 03" to me.
Sam Altman and other OpenAI employees have been referencing the movie ahead of the presentation[1][2]. I think it'd be really challenging to prove that they didn't have that exact outcome in mind.
I’m not sure it’s a trademark question so much as an appropriation of likeness question. I just meant that they can’t really train on her actual voice samples and then conceal whether they did it; that’s what discovery is for.
OpenAI is going to do a very good job of pretending that it stealing literally everything on the internet and re-selling it is some unique new activity that's not happened before. That's their core business. What they're not going to be able to do is pretend that hiring a soundalike and then making repeated references to the original voice is ok. This isn't new legal ground no matter how much money you throw at it. Otherwise every advert on TV would have some no-name actor doing impressions of well known actors. They will have to pay ScarJo a lot of money, and probably they'll have to stop using the voice too - because they've pissed her off so much at this point.
Breaking working functionality is not cool. Sure they should perhaps license from Scarlett Johansson directly though. It might cost 1% of their GPU budget though. Pulling the rug though, really gives end users a lack of control of the interface, and harms trust in their product and organisation.
Edit: I know it's not really Scarlett Johansson, but it does sound very similar, and they can do better to make it right, in terms of sound and legality!
> really gives end users a lack of control of the interface
This is the case for all mobile and web apps and has been the norm for over a decade now. If you want control over the UI or functionality, use local software that doesn't check some server for feature flags.
Even if Scarlett Johansson would agree to license her voice, which is a big if, it's not her voice that's being removed. It's a different actress that some users thinks sounds like Scarlett.
I'm pointing out that it harms OpenAI to make users feel this way, I know it's common to give users a lack of control these days and that edge LLM's are not viable for this yet, and good luck with third party ChatGPT clients etc!
I'm not saying it's her voice.
I'm not disputing that they found someone with a similar sounding voice.
But OpenAI should still aim to license from Scarlett Johansson and fine-tune on real licensed audio from her, the real deal, and let users switch to it if they want to.
Because I selected that voice and now it's gone. That was it's job. It no longer does that job and now when I listen to the different voice, it's distracting because it makes me think of all this silly stuff instead.
I don't see why they should license her voice if she didn't provide the voice work. Actresses sometimes sound similar. If there's a demand that voices that sound "too similar" to well known actresses (or actors, obviously) need their okay or licensing that would seriously harm the less known ones ability to make a living with their own voice. Same with the demand to take it down because it sounds too similar. It's someone else, no reason to do something.
I agree but OpenAI wanted to take action. They should license properly if they want to take action, not just take down a legally sourced similar sounding voice.
So now we know that they tried to license from Scarlett Johansson directly but didn't reach agreeable terms. Sam has a lot of plates spinning, other plates are much more important but of course they should have done better from the start, and I'm sure they know it. It's not the best possible voice. Personally I really like a few from the 110 in the VCTK corpus from University of Edinburgh. They're used in a few places, I assume there are no license issues, and they could hire and re-record the best anyway with more emotion samples. It's funny they have a set list of voices rather than a space of voices that people can choose from.
Strange, I didn't hear it, now I can see the resemblance, but doesn't seem like a big deal. It was the only voice I really used. I wonder if Spotify will follow, with their sound-a-like Ice-T voice?
Wonder if there's any legal risk here. It's long been legal to imitate someone's voice as long as you don't try to make people think it really is that person's voice. This is very common in parodies.
In the case of computer-generated voices, there are qualities that are desirable that also happen to be attributes of a real person's voice. How many of these desirable attributes can a computer-generated voice have before it's considered too close to the set of attributes a particular person's voice has?
IMHO a court would accept a waveform comparison that proved beyond all doubt that the two voices are similar, but I doubt you'd find a court that would settle the issue just because the comparison said no.
The cases brought forth by Marvin Gaye's family [1] showed that some judges will declare copyright infringement even if the melody, harmony and rhythm are different. Note that the author saying he reverse-engineered the original song in question probably had something to do with it, so in the end intent and artistic perception will always remain factors that no computer function can compute.
If it was a soundalike then it would be a legal issue obviously, nothing to discuss.
Looking at the HN comments they are told it sounds like Her so that's what they believe. So you can't trust the NPC's to decide, they just regurgitate media headlines.
I suppose it depends on your own perspective. For my part, a world in which people "date" algorithms instead of other human beings certainly seems pretty dystopian.
HEH... ok? I'm not sure that's relevant. The question is - does a human developing a relationship with a post-human sentience make the story automatically dystopian?
Seems to be you'd have to be pretty prejudiced against AI to say "yes".
And then when the algorithm transcended everyone realized that they knew how to love and could simply love the people around them. About the most utopian AI story I’ve ever seen.
Heh, arguably we already date algorithms and break up with real people. It's the disconnect between the two that people are sad about... the matching algos and profiles set impossible standards for regular people.
I’m glad I met my wife before dating apps were a thing. Though I have to ask, why can’t you just meet someone the “normal” way without an app doing it for you?
I'm in a similar position to you, but from singler friends, I've heard two reasons. Firstly, all the other single people are on the apps. Secondly, some are concerned about being seen as a creep when flirting or approaching the "normal" way. Thus, online dating is the new normal, and the old-fashioned talking in person is less common.
I think that when algorithms become as sophisticated as what's shown in Her, we have to come to regard them as people, which means they have rights to do with themselves as they please, including getting romantically involved with humans.
More frightening is Ex Machina, which shows what happens when such an AI isn't regarded as a person by its creator, and sees fit to take personhood for itself.
I agree with you on a personal level, though again I’m sure if I CTRL+F replika subreddit I’d find many people describing their emotions with similar words.
Anyway, let’s say he was negatively affected by that relationship, IIRC.
It's obviously dystopian to be in love with something that doesn't care about you at all. That is not, at all, what Her depicted. Sam clearly felt for Arthur deeply. Breaking up because their life paths were incompatible doesn't mean she didn't feel anything for him.
That made me happy, for once seeing AI getting what it deserves and dating other AI on its own level instead of being forced to "date down" mere humans. It was a story of emancipation for me.
It was pretty subtle dystopian. On surface it was a feel good movie about that guy becoming happy. But there were a few scenes were it was happening to a lot of people. Everyone with a cell phone basically was falling in love with it, and totally controlled by their love.
It was left a little in doubt whether the AI really did reach 'enlightenment' and beam itself to the stars, or the company/government shut it down because society was collapsing.
Guess all good movies leave a lot open to interpretation, but difficult to do it and be good.
Like that "Rebel Moon" on Netflix was how to NOT do it, with tons of stupid exposition spelling out stupid details that didn't make any sense.
Versus "American Sniper" that was so evenly portraying all sides, that Right leaning people thought it was a liberal movie, and Left leaning people thought it was Right Wing propaganda. It was all so well done you could read into it a lot of your own feelings.
So "Her" was about the danger of technology. And at the end there were some scenes that you could read into how a lot of people were falling for this phone app and things were going downhill. But, it wasn't clear cut, the movie is really good at splitting the difference on how the app was also making people be happy, and was helping them.
I am fascinated by this split in interpretation of the movie. It seems clearly dystopian to me, and I was surprised to learn (here on HN) that there were a lot of people who didn't see it that way at all.
I have no insight to draw from this, I'm just fascinated by it.
For me anyway, "dystopian" media is one that conjures a world that is significantly worse than ours in some way. I did not get that from the movie. The movie did not portray the AI as being a malevolent or even a negative presence in the main man's life.
At its core, Her was a beautifully-shot love story between two flawed beings, nothing more.
Wasn't the main guy's job writing personal letters to his clients' friends and lovers? It seemed like a world where no one was connecting with each other anymore.
I'm not sure, but my guess is everyone's got a slightly different "uncanny valley" function.
So for me, this voice had no impact — sure I noticed it seemed a bit "flirty", but that's not a thing that engages me in any way as it feels equally fake when a human does it, and if anything I pattern-matched to the Pierson's Puppeteers in Ringworld; the original Alexa advert was moderately creepy, but I could see they were trying to mimic the computer in Star Trek; but one example I do have of being disturbed by a product advert was the use of a cheerful up-beat soundtrack for "The Robot Dog With A Flamethrower | Thermonator": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj9JSkSpRlM
Look we both know it is Florida man not Florida person in them future headlines and ain't no way the legal system in this brave new world is giving a dude half in the AI divorce.
Agree. I watched "Her" recently and also "Under the Skin" so have SJ's voice in my working memory and Sky, while similar in some ways to SJ's voice, is different enough that this seems 100% defensible.
I'll be honest, I don't hear a close similarity. If I were to pick a celebrity, I'd say it sounds more like Rashida Jones, though Rashida's voice is slightly higher.
Shame they’re pulling Sky. It is the only voice I could tolerate in chats. Also I agree with the others who don’t hear the resemblance. How much of these complaints actually come from users? This saga seems very media-driven.
The similarity to Johansson feels more like a cover for the actual complaints I’ve seen, which are that the voice is far too breathy and flirtatious. It made the demo videos, with somewhat dorky men being complimented on their dress and whatnot, pretty damn uncomfortable. They either should have toned down the flirtation, or else added a more suave and seductive masculine voice to at least balance things out.
Don't waste your time. No one can reason their way out of something they didnt reason their way into in the first place. A lot of people spent way more time than that individual thinking about what would appeal to the generic customer. And it so happens that regardless of gender, sexual preference, and pretty much anything else you can think of, humans prefer to look at human women and also prefer their voices over human men. And this is unlikely to change, ever, no matter how much they disagree with it, if history is anything to go by.
Let someone else swim against the tide if they feel like that's the best use of their time.
I had no idea they sounded alike, not really knowing (or caring) what Scarlett sounds like. I didn't think her voice was part of her celebrity status...
However, I did prefer Sky above the other voices. It didn't come across as seductive or flirty to me, just something that sounded close to the Google Assistant or Alexa. "Neutrally approachable" is how I'd put it, like a good receptionist, a mix of casual warmth and surface level concern. Shrug. I hope they bring her back soon.
> I didn't think her voice was part of her celebrity status
She did the voice for Her, a movie about an AI voice. If you check IMDB she's literally credited as "(voice)". Specifically in the realm of AI, her voice is her entire celebrity status.
I mean…if you check the IMDB page you’ll see she’s done a lot more than that…and is known widely for her role as Black Widow in the Avengers movie series.
So, I think she’s got more to her status than “the voice”.
I’m sure you were trying to say in this OpenAI voice rights context, but I think it’s important to consider she is indeed a bonafide not-just-a-voice A-list Hollywood Celebrity.
In female AI voice we seem to have encountered the overlap between your typical simp and corpo simp.
Funny thing is, when an attractive female goes against a corp... the simps picked the corp... we are well off into a Blade Runner 2 digital girlfriend scenario aren't we?
If any enterprising soul wants to join up and start selling chatGPT enabled anime body pillows, DM me, I have a supplier ready.
> We’ve heard questions about how we chose the voices in ChatGPT, especially Sky. We are working to pause the use of Sky while we address them.
Why?
They take it for granted that there is obviously something wrong here. Are users actually concerned about this? I think most people would not care. Is this just manufactured for the exposure? Is this just another example of OpenAI's condescending moral superiority complex?
Possibly, but that is not what their statement suggests to me, unless those 'questions' came from her/her legal team. I suppose they could also be worried about future legal action from her. Maybe it just isn't worth getting sued, even if you technically did nothing wrong. But I also have a hard time believing they went thru this careful process of voice selection and it never occurred to them that the voice sounded like her, and didn't think about the legal repercussions
> But I also have a hard time believing they went thru this careful process of voice selection and it never occurred to them that the voice sounded like her, and didn't think about the legal repercussions
You do know the whole modus operandi of AI companies is "screw laws, take it all we'll see what happens" right ? That they actively lobby to not respect IP laws because they couldn't exist if they were enforced ? That they do not care about the negative impact they might have on anything ?
I'm no proponent of IP myself but I don't take from others to redistribute for my sole profit.
> You do know the whole modus operandi of AI companies is "screw laws, take it all we'll see what happens" right ? That they actively lobby to not respect IP laws because they couldn't exist if they were enforced ? That they do not care about the negative impact they might have on anything ?
Yeah, for sure, I agree with all that. In this case, openai says they got a voice actor though so I'm not sure if IP applies here. Because of the movie SJ was in, I could honestly see a lawsuit going either way I guess
> In this case, openai says they got a voice actor though so I'm not sure if IP applies here
The effect of the DMCA on youtube has shown that IP seems to apply even if something vaguely looks or sounds like the original. "Apply" not meaning "is true", but "has consequences".
She should be happy she was selected as the voice of such a revolutionary piece of technology. It's a honor for her voice to be selected, she should show some humility and better social awareness in these matters.
So, a completely different actor voluntarily performs voice acting (a job) in exchange for money, using her natural voice (not mimicking Scarlett) and because there are some similarities, this situation is comparable to... Deep fake porn? What the..?
Sorry, did you deliberately skip over a bunch of comments to read mine or something? It feels like you missed some context. The person I was replying to was saying that ScarJo should be happy and grateful that the OpenAI voice was chosen to sound like hers, and that she should feel honored. With that context in mind, my question was whether she should also feel honored when she’s chosen as the subject for somebody’s Deep Fake porn — something she similarly has no control over and is only selected for due to her appearance/voice. I brought up Deep Fake porn specifically because it’s something she has been a victim of in the past.
My guess is that they’ve received a cease and desist letter. It’s not a hill they’re willing to die on, so they removed the voice and issued a public statement.
The Sky voice was obviously flirtatious sounding. It was actually very cringy and embarrassing for OpenAI, and it seemed really like a jump the shark moment TBH
The Sky voice sounded nothing like Scarlet Johansson.
I'm worried that in the future somebody might try to create their own voice to regain it as an accessibility tool after a medical event, and they're going to have their voice literally stolen from them under the fact that it might sound like another famous person 90% of the time.
In the music industry it's actually a known thing that if somebody famous sounds like you, you basically have no real ability to become a star or sell your music without problems. Sure it happens, but it's honestly the same problem many actors that look alike go through but just with sound.
This is pure censorship/money grab, and to make it worse, the voices sounded nothing alike.
We cannot infer from Sam Altman's tweet whether he was referencing the movie Her because gtp-4o enables AI companions in general a la Her, or whether he was specifically referencing Johansson character in the film.
There are other AI companions as well in the film.
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[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 325 ms ] threadUh?? How can any voice sound /too much/ like Scarlett Johansson?
:)
If they didn't and just cloned her voice, it's more disregard for creators and artists than I would have thought possible. What were they thinking?
Edit after reading the official story... not sure I believe it, seems disingenuous, at best they chose someone because they really really sounded like Scarlett Johansson, and no one said, it might be a problem.
https://openai.com/index/how-the-voices-for-chatgpt-were-cho...
Voices such as Shatner or Walken are at least as much about speech patterns than the voice, giving you another axis to compare voices against, so I can somewhat see those as being trademarkable. But when I hear the ChatGPT voice, it just sounds like "slightly-flirty generic female voice 03" to me.
[1] https://x.com/sama/status/1790075827666796666
[2] https://x.com/alex_conneau
Edit: I know it's not really Scarlett Johansson, but it does sound very similar, and they can do better to make it right, in terms of sound and legality!
This is the case for all mobile and web apps and has been the norm for over a decade now. If you want control over the UI or functionality, use local software that doesn't check some server for feature flags.
Even if Scarlett Johansson would agree to license her voice, which is a big if, it's not her voice that's being removed. It's a different actress that some users thinks sounds like Scarlett.
https://openai.com/index/how-the-voices-for-chatgpt-were-cho...
I'm not saying it's her voice. I'm not disputing that they found someone with a similar sounding voice. But OpenAI should still aim to license from Scarlett Johansson and fine-tune on real licensed audio from her, the real deal, and let users switch to it if they want to.
if your product relied on temu scarjo, you never had a product.
In the case of computer-generated voices, there are qualities that are desirable that also happen to be attributes of a real person's voice. How many of these desirable attributes can a computer-generated voice have before it's considered too close to the set of attributes a particular person's voice has?
Real question.
Is there some waveform comparison that a court would accept?
The cases brought forth by Marvin Gaye's family [1] showed that some judges will declare copyright infringement even if the melody, harmony and rhythm are different. Note that the author saying he reverse-engineered the original song in question probably had something to do with it, so in the end intent and artistic perception will always remain factors that no computer function can compute.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharrell_Williams_v._Bridgep...
Her - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ij0ZmgG6wCA
If it was a soundalike then it would be a legal issue obviously, nothing to discuss.
Looking at the HN comments they are told it sounds like Her so that's what they believe. So you can't trust the NPC's to decide, they just regurgitate media headlines.
How do you quantify it?
But I have tried many times. It does sound similar to me. Ask her to recite poetry with natural pauses and expression.
Next we are getting Ex Machina?
Seems to be you'd have to be pretty prejudiced against AI to say "yes".
More frightening is Ex Machina, which shows what happens when such an AI isn't regarded as a person by its creator, and sees fit to take personhood for itself.
I don’t fully recall the ending but doesn’t the AI grow past the guy and “break up” with him, leaving him devastated at the end?
A bit sounds like the Replika AI drama from the last year. </SPOILER>
Anyway, let’s say he was negatively affected by that relationship, IIRC.
Reminds me a bit of this: https://www.uniladtech.com/news/ai/man-married-hologram-no-l... , up to you if you find people developing strong feelings to inanimate objects that can’t care less, dystopic or not.
It was left a little in doubt whether the AI really did reach 'enlightenment' and beam itself to the stars, or the company/government shut it down because society was collapsing.
I do not see how you could interpret the ending of Her this way.
Like that "Rebel Moon" on Netflix was how to NOT do it, with tons of stupid exposition spelling out stupid details that didn't make any sense.
Versus "American Sniper" that was so evenly portraying all sides, that Right leaning people thought it was a liberal movie, and Left leaning people thought it was Right Wing propaganda. It was all so well done you could read into it a lot of your own feelings.
So "Her" was about the danger of technology. And at the end there were some scenes that you could read into how a lot of people were falling for this phone app and things were going downhill. But, it wasn't clear cut, the movie is really good at splitting the difference on how the app was also making people be happy, and was helping them.
I have no insight to draw from this, I'm just fascinated by it.
At its core, Her was a beautifully-shot love story between two flawed beings, nothing more.
[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus
So for me, this voice had no impact — sure I noticed it seemed a bit "flirty", but that's not a thing that engages me in any way as it feels equally fake when a human does it, and if anything I pattern-matched to the Pierson's Puppeteers in Ringworld; the original Alexa advert was moderately creepy, but I could see they were trying to mimic the computer in Star Trek; but one example I do have of being disturbed by a product advert was the use of a cheerful up-beat soundtrack for "The Robot Dog With A Flamethrower | Thermonator": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj9JSkSpRlM
“Florida person finds loophole in system to marry ChatGPT voice assistant”
“ClosedAI back peddles controversial decision to ‘lobotomize’ voice assistance after widespread dislike”
“It is now legal to marry 3D printed humans with AGI in these 25 states”
“Florida person initiates divorce with ChatGPT, claims 50% stake of OpenAI. Florida state courts open to it. OpenAI tumbles at market open by 11%”
https://x.com/sama/status/1790075827666796666
> her
And this one:
https://x.com/prafdhar/status/1790789900650037441
> @alex_conneau: came up with the vision of HER before anyone at OpenAI had, and executed relentlessly!
Let someone else swim against the tide if they feel like that's the best use of their time.
However, I did prefer Sky above the other voices. It didn't come across as seductive or flirty to me, just something that sounded close to the Google Assistant or Alexa. "Neutrally approachable" is how I'd put it, like a good receptionist, a mix of casual warmth and surface level concern. Shrug. I hope they bring her back soon.
She did the voice for Her, a movie about an AI voice. If you check IMDB she's literally credited as "(voice)". Specifically in the realm of AI, her voice is her entire celebrity status.
I mean…if you check the IMDB page you’ll see she’s done a lot more than that…and is known widely for her role as Black Widow in the Avengers movie series.
So, I think she’s got more to her status than “the voice”.
I’m sure you were trying to say in this OpenAI voice rights context, but I think it’s important to consider she is indeed a bonafide not-just-a-voice A-list Hollywood Celebrity.
Funny thing is, when an attractive female goes against a corp... the simps picked the corp... we are well off into a Blade Runner 2 digital girlfriend scenario aren't we?
If any enterprising soul wants to join up and start selling chatGPT enabled anime body pillows, DM me, I have a supplier ready.
Why?
They take it for granted that there is obviously something wrong here. Are users actually concerned about this? I think most people would not care. Is this just manufactured for the exposure? Is this just another example of OpenAI's condescending moral superiority complex?
https://openai.com/index/how-the-voices-for-chatgpt-were-cho...
You do know the whole modus operandi of AI companies is "screw laws, take it all we'll see what happens" right ? That they actively lobby to not respect IP laws because they couldn't exist if they were enforced ? That they do not care about the negative impact they might have on anything ?
I'm no proponent of IP myself but I don't take from others to redistribute for my sole profit.
Yeah, for sure, I agree with all that. In this case, openai says they got a voice actor though so I'm not sure if IP applies here. Because of the movie SJ was in, I could honestly see a lawsuit going either way I guess
The effect of the DMCA on youtube has shown that IP seems to apply even if something vaguely looks or sounds like the original. "Apply" not meaning "is true", but "has consequences".
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/05/20/openai-johansso...
More discussion on official post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40412903
But I'd also argue that flirtatiousness is a very good match for the character of Samatha in "Her" -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV01B5kVsC0&t=84s
I'm worried that in the future somebody might try to create their own voice to regain it as an accessibility tool after a medical event, and they're going to have their voice literally stolen from them under the fact that it might sound like another famous person 90% of the time.
In the music industry it's actually a known thing that if somebody famous sounds like you, you basically have no real ability to become a star or sell your music without problems. Sure it happens, but it's honestly the same problem many actors that look alike go through but just with sound.
This is pure censorship/money grab, and to make it worse, the voices sounded nothing alike.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/104993
Neat
There are other AI companions as well in the film.