But while many hear an eerie resemblance between “Sky” and Johansson’s “Her” character, an actress was hired to create the Sky voice months before Altman contacted Johansson, according to documents, recordings, casting directors and the actress’s agent.
> But while many hear an eerie resemblance between “Sky” and Johansson’s “Her” character,
I wonder to what extent it is because they were prompted to listen for that. Would they still hear the resemblance if they didn't know who to compare it to?
It seems increasingly difficult for common people to protect their voices, especially when even Scarlett Johansson can't manage it. As a part-time voice actor with a unique voice, I'm concerned about what I should do if my voice is used without permission and the company denies it. How can I protect myself in such a situation?
A voice can be zero shot encoded to a few hundred kb vector. Timbre, prosody, lots of characteristics. That's less information than a fingerprint. And more importantly, that's something you can dial in with a few knobs by simply listening by ear.
It's why your brain can easily hear things in other people's voices. They're not hard signals to reproduce. Some people with flexible vocal ranges can even impersonate others quite easily.
I'm sure most people have gotten, "you sound like X" once or twice. Not unlike the "you look like Y" comments.
Voices really aren't that fingerprint-y.
If we really want to split hairs and argue from biology, who "owns" the voice of a set of identical twins?
But still there are some voices that are just highly associated with just one person in everyone's minds, like David Attenborough. For example, if I heard Attenborough speaking my local train announcements, but it would be an impersonator, I think I would feel like the company is taking advantage of Attenborough's voice. I.e. they would be using the fact that everyone knows this voice to their advantage, without actually paying Attenborough.
While voices aren't technically that unique, when linked to certain situations or when heard by enough people, they become unique in that context. I'm sure no one cares about Attenborough's voice 100 years from now.
Or hm, maybe AI voice tools will keep his voice alive forever in Planet Earth spinoffs, just like Sinatra has been resurrected for mashups.
There are only 330m US Americans. Just having American throat development patterns narrow you down to a group of less than 4% of population, and it only goes down from there - e.g. PNW has only 13m people total, half that by gender, that makes someone from there belonging to a group of 0.08% of the world.
You might think voice is something you're born with. It's not, it rather partially comes from languages and your backgrounds. So random chances of someone literally sounding by DNA from half a world away is quite low.
You're talking about literal identical voice due to throat development and cultural background etc - which is obviously technically true, but I imagine a number of people who sound 99% like you(where a casual listener can't tell the difference) must be quite large.
Case in point - my wife has two twin brothers. Even though I've been interacting with them for over 10 years now, they sound exactly the same to me. If I close my eyes then there is zero chance I could tell them apart by voice alone. I know, it's an anecdote - but while I'm sure you could tell them apart by some really small thing that they do, to someone who isn't actively looking for those cues they are - for all intentions and purposes - the same.
I don't have helpful advice for what you asked (spend the money to get a legal expert's opinion would be my advice), but if I was a voice actor, I would see three paths:
1. Push forward legislation/regulation/lawsuits/public opinion via whatever method is available, probably unions or other collective power.
2. Embrace the technology. Maybe build a voice model of yourself, sell the license affordably and broadly to those that want to take advantage of the convenience and scalability (as in number of phrases) of voice AI but don't want the mess of wading into unsettled legal territory. Or learn what voice AI is good at and what it is bad at and find your niche. Survive by being at the cutting edge of this new world, setting the standards and being knowledgable.
3. Walk away from an industry that is either dying or about to become unrecognizable.
This whole industry is built on top of ripped off content, appropriated from many sources without compensation. A few big lawsuits and things could take an unpredictible turn.
What are the unique aspects of a sound? A lot of people look and sound stunningly alike.
As a recent example Baldur’s Gate 3, Andrew Wincott voiced Raphael, an npc-antagonist, who to my untrained ear sounded exactly like Charles Dance, and the character model had more than a passing semblance to Mr. Dance as well.
It was not a Charles Dance carbon copy but all aspects of the character were strongly aligned with him.
I’m wondering where is the line in style and personal aspects of one’s craft drawn.
Some of this is probably part of personal perception.
Wincott and Dance and are both British actors that began their careers on stage, so they have similar accents, cadences, and vocal mannerisms common to stage actors. For example, both of them speak like Patrick Stewart, another English who also began his career on stage. But otherwise they all clearly have very different voices: they have different timbres, vocal fry, and only one of them (Dance) can sing well and he has a surprisingly large vocal range (see his performance as the Phantom in Phantom of the Opera).
In this case, the actress selected for OpenAI was clearly selected for similarity to SJ. And that by itself would have been okay, because the actress is speaking in her natural voice, and SJ doesn't have a monopoly on voice acting...but OpenAI went further, and had the unknown[1] actress base her inflections, cadence, and mannerisms on SJ's performance in the movie Her. And Altman even tweeted the movie's name to advertise the connection.
The problem is that there is a well-settled case law stretching back over several decades that makes this a slam-dunk case for SJ, because it doesn't matter that OpenAI didn't "steal" her voice, they stole her likeness.[2] It wasn't just some unknown actress speaking in her own voice, it was an actress with a voice similar to SJ given lines and directing by OpenAI with the clear intent of mimicking SJ's voice performance in one of her more-famous roles.
[1] There is a very short list of a few actresses who both sound like SJ and do voice-over work circulating around Hollywood, so a lot of people have a pretty good idea of who it is, but nobody will identify the actress unless she identifies herself, out of solidarity.
[2] Likeness rights are quite strong in the U.S. They're even stronger in Europe.
Every single thing in your second paragraph is directly contradicted by the article at hand, yet you say them like they are established facts as opposed to things you just made up.
WaPo's reporting states that the individual in charge of the interaction, Jang, modeled it after Hollywood movies, and worked with a film director specifically to accomplish this goal. And the executive responsible for the artistic decisions, CTO Murati, was conveniently not made available for WaPo to interview.
OpenAI has no credibility here, given its extensive history of dissembling as a company. If Her and SJ weren't the driving inspiration for the Sky voice, they would have made Murati available to explicitly refute those claims. Her absence speaks volumes.
And OpenAI dropping Sky immediately speaks even louder. It means that somewhere there is a smoking gun that would destroy them in court. [Edit: it turns out the smoking guns were already public: in addition to the CEO's Her tweet, his co-founder Karpathy explicitly linked the voice product to SJ. Game. Set. Match.]
Try loading random voice file done by real (voice)actors into Audacity, switch view to spectrogram mode, drag down to expand, and compare it to yours. Professionally done voice should look like neatly arranged salmon slices, yours will look like PCIe eye diagrams.
You can also obviously compare multiple voice files recorded with similar sounding but different individuals, they rarely look similar on spectrograms.
Sure, except literally no one actually does this. You listen to a voice and it sounds similar in your head? That's who you picture when you hear it. Unless you're a robot I guess.
I don't see how that's relevant here - court cases about situations like these are decided on the criteria of "if you show this to an average person on the street would they be able to tell the difference" not "if you load this up in a specialized piece of software and look at the spectrograph is there a difference".
I don't understand why you are being sarcastic right now. Trademark cases are always decided on "if a person was shown this logo/song/whatever could they mistake it for the trademarked property of another company", not "well if you load it up in Paint you can see that some pixels around the edges are different so it's technically not the same logo your honour!".
so... your position is now in favor of SJ? I don't see consistency in your comments other than that the aim is to downplay uniqueness of voice to justify OAI's actions after the fact.
No, my position hasn't changed - the average person on the street might think this voice sounds like SJ, but since SJ doesn't own exclusive rights to anyone else in the world sounding like her I don't think she has a legal ground to stand on, unless OpenAI pretended it is actually her. But I know for certain that the case will not be decided on spectographs of the voice.
There's nothing that can be done technically. Near perfect voice changing model can be built from 3-5 minutes of conversation on top of a base model, if all the user wants is voice indistinguishable from yours.
But, IMO, the value of mud sludge on a table indistinguishable from sandwiches is tiny. Fake Chanels are 10^2-5 cheaper than the real thing no matter the closeness. Don't listen to people begging you for life to join the counterfeiter ring, they don't make much anyway.
1) Your income depends on a physical quality you have.
2) Your ability to mine cash off this physical quality depends on the inability of this quality to be reproduced.
3) This quality can now be reproduced.
I would think very hard and very long about staying in this particular business. Personally I think there is still plenty of work left because not everyone is happy with going full sci-fi dystopia, but it will be niche and scrappy.
"I have unique characteristics that make me an excellent programmer. I earn money by tweaking for-loops. Recently, GPT is being able to tweak for-loops better, faster and more cheaply than I can. How can I protect myself in case companies decide to replicate my unique abilities?"
I don’t think this will be a concern for long. Either the tech isn’t good enough and it lacks emotive nuance to the point where human is still preferred, or it is good enough and there is no point in basing off a human actor in the first place vs using an original wholly fabricated voice or appearance.
If the tech actually works well enough to stand in for humans, I think we will very quickly see recording real humans in fictional pieces as old fashioned.
A 'lie' that OpenAI themselves believed enough to take the voice down from their app to check.
Presumably they trained this voice, and then wanted an official celebrity endorsement to make it better for marketing. At some point the people at OpenAI forgot it wasn't actually Scarlett. I don't think you can be critical of HN for believing it too in that case.
You are getting confused by an implementation detail. They wanted to copy her voice, and they did it. They asked for permission and she said no. So they went ahead and did it anyway.
So I didn't know about this case, and indeed, it's an interesting one. I think the key difference here is that Ford hired an impersonator to sing Midler's song, so you know....the default assumption is that it's Midler singing. In OpenAI case unless they presented the voice as being the voice of Johanson, then I don't see how hiring someone who merely sounds like her would be an issue. The "her" tweet from Altman is of course problematic in this light, but I guess it will be left up to court to decide.
Sure, but until she made that information public it had no role in OpenAi's advertising of their features. It's like as if Ford hired a Midler's impersonator to sign any other song not originally by her and then she pointed out "well Ford actually wanted to hire me some time ago but I said no". It's like....ok? But you provided no services for them, they didn't use any of your lines, songs or anything else than you produced, the only "crime" here is that they hired someone who sounds like you.
> I think the key difference here is that Ford hired an impersonator to sing Midler's song, so you know....the default assumption is that it's Midler singing
It's funny how uncritical protecting of mr Altman became a kind of religion for some, probably because such people might have certain hopes with his product, so they uncontrollably loose themselves in this view that everything he does needs to be cool & right.
But no, he's a human making mistakes. A lot of mistakes, as it turns out
I was perusing some Simpsons clips this afternoon and came across a story to the effect of "So and so didn't want to play himself, so Dan Castellaneta did the voice." It's a good impression and people didn't seem very upset about that. I am not sure how this is different. (Apparently this particular "impression" predates the Her character, so it's even easier to not be mad about. It's just a coincidence. They weren't even trying to sound like her!)
I read a lot of C&D letters from celebrities here and on Reddit, and a lot of them are in the form of "I am important so I am requesting that you do not take advantage of your legal rights." I am not a fan. (If you don't want someone to track how often you fly your private jet, buy a new one for each trip. That is the legal option that is available to you.
But I digress...)
Surely there’s some kind of difference between “voice impression for a two-line cameo in one episode of an animated sitcom” and “reproducing your voice as the primary interface for a machine that could be used by billions of people and is worth hundreds of billions of dollars.”
Is there a name for this AI fallacy? The one where programmers make an inductive leap like, for example, if a human can read one book to learn something, then it’s ok to scan millions of books into a computer system because it’s just another kind of learning.
> for example, if a human can read one book to learn something, then it’s ok to scan millions of books into a computer system because it’s just another kind of learning.
Since this comes up all the time, I ask: What exactly is the number of books a human can ingest before it becomes illegal?
"But what if a person was so thoroughly replaced with robot parts to be just like a computer" is just "if my grandma had wheels, she would be a truck, therefore it's not so easy to say that cars aren't allowed to drive inside the old folks home".
People and software are different things, and it makes total sense that there should be different rules for what they can and cannot do.
This is a bit like someone saying they don't want cars traveling down the sidewalk because they're too big and heavy, and then having someone ask how big and heavy a person needs to get before it becomes illegal for them to travel down the sidewalk.
It misses the point, which is that cars aren't people. Arguments like "well a car uses friction to travel along the ground and fuel to create kinetic energy, just like humans do", aren't convincing to me. An algorithm is not a human, and we should stop pretending the same rules apply to each.
It's easy to explain the difference between a person and a car in a way that's both specific and relevant to the rules.
If we're at an analogy to "cars aren't people", then it sounds like it doesn't matter how many books the AI reads, even one book would cause problems.
But if that's the case, why make the argument about how many books it reads?
Are you sure you're arguing the same thing as the ancestor post? Or do you merely agree with their conclusion but you're making an entirely different argument?
Then again, bicycles are neither people nor cars, and yet they make claim to both sidewalk and the road, even though they clearly are neither, and are a danger and a nuisance on both.
Is that a good example? People have been arguing in court about that exact thing for years, first due to Segway and then due to e-scooters and bikes. There's plenty of people who make arguments of the form "it's not a car or a bike so I'm allowed on the sidewalk", or make arguments about limited top speeds etc.
> first due to Segway and then due to e-scooters and bikes
Those aren't cars.
But you've identified that the closer something comes to a human in terms of speed and scale, the blurrier the lines become. In these terms I would argue that GPT-4 is far, far removed from a human.
Legally they're vehicles sometimes, and sometimes technically supposed to not drive on sidewalks. Perhaps that's Segway equivalent to fair use scientific researches on crawled web data.
Yes. It is pertinent not only to this particular instance (or instances, plural; AI copyright violations and scooters on sidewalks), but illustrates for example why treating corporations as "people" in freedom-of-speech law is misguided (and stupid, corrupt, and just fucking wrong). So it is a very good example.
Plagiarism is not illegal, it's merely frowned upon, and only in specific fields. Everywhere else, it's called learning from masters and/or practicing your art.
How unique is a voice? I'm sure there's enough people out ther who sounds like Johansson. There's probably some argument for voice + personality + face + mannerisms, some gestalt that's more comparable to copying the likeness "person". But openAI is copying a fictional character played by Johansson, it's not her. Do actor/esses get to monopolize their depiction of fictional characters? Especially when it's not tied to physical represenation. What if OpenAI associate it with an avatar that looks nothing like her. I'm sure hollywood and/or actors union is figuring this out.
> “Do actor/esses get to monopolize their depiction of fictional characters? Especially when it's not tied to physical represenation.”
If Annapurna Pictures (the production company that owns the rights to “Her”) made a sequel where the voice AI is played by someone else than Johansson but sounded the same and was marketed as a direct continuation, I think there would be a lawsuit.
She didn’t write the script or develop the character, but I think there’s enough creative authorship in her voice portrayal that it would be risky for the production company.
But OpenAI isn't making a sequel to Her, which I feel like there would be prexisting legal text in contract about repraising role in event of franchise if johansson has leverage, or ability to cast close facsimile if studio has leverage. Right now Johansson has leverage in court of public opinion, not necessarily law. What if OpenAI used a cartoon cat avatar that sounded like "Her", what if they have one interaction that doesn't comport to "Her" personality from the movie, thereby indicating a different being. Is there some comprehensive method acting documentation outlining the full complexity of a fictional character. Seems like there aremany ways for openAI to make voice sound like her, but not embody "Her" but they'd rather strategically retreat out of optics. But IANAL, but I am interested in seeing how this will get resolved in court.
They aren't making a sequel, they are doing an unlicensed video game conversion.
Reading all these musings here about a possible "there is no bad publicity" approach, I'm starting to wonder if the plan for if Johansson signed up was achieving court drama publicity by getting sued by Annapurna Pictures. "Can a three-letter tweet be the base of a copyright case?"
It's entirely routine for actors and actresses to be replaced in follow up works. The industry is full of examples, but here's 1 off the top of my head:
In iron man 1, Rhodey is played by terrance howard. For iron man 2, he wanted too much money in the contract, so they replaced with with don cheadle.
Wouldn't it be a dumb world to live in if a single actor in the cast can halt the production of a new work via lawsuit because they own the character?
"How unique is X" is something we can start to get quantitative answers to with strong machine learning models, and for most things people care about, it seems like the answer is "not very unique at all".
If famous actors could sue over the use of a less-famous actor that sounds just like them, what's to stop less-famous actors from suing over the use of a famous actor who sounds just like them in big-budget movies? ... and that's when you discover that "unique voice" is a one-in-a-million thing and thousands of people have the same voice, all asking for their payout.
That's a common retort on HN but it's information free. Judges are at least theoretically and often in practice bound to follow both written law and logic, even if it yields apparently silly outcomes. The prevalence of openly political judgements in the news makes it seem like this isn't the case, but those judgements are newsworthy exactly because they are shocking and outrageous.
If voices being similar to each other is found to be grounds for a successful tort action then it'd establish a legal precedent, and it's very unlikely that precedent would be interpreted as "whoever the judge heard of first wins".
> it's very unlikely that precedent would be interpreted as "whoever the judge heard of first wins"
No, it's whoever's voice is famous. The voice per se isn't valuable, its fame is. Personality rights are precedented [1].
> voices being similar to each other is found to be grounds for a successful tort action then it'd establish a legal precedent
It's not about similarity. It's about property. Johansson developed her voice into a valuable asset. It's valuable because it's Scarlet Johansson's voice.
Tweeting Her explicitly tied it to Johansson, even if that wasn't the case up to that point.
Yeah, but it's not Scarlett Johansson's voice and therefore not her property. It's one that sounds similar, but is different, and thus belongs to the true voice actress.
> it's not Scarlett Johansson's voice and therefore not her property
It's not her voice. But it may have been intended to sound like her voice. (I believe this less than twenty-four hours ago, but I'm hesitant to grant Altman the benefit of doubt.)
If it were her voice, would you agree that seems distasteful?
> one that sounds similar, but is different, and thus belongs to the true voice actress
They marketed it as her voice when Altman tweeted Her.
> They marketed it as her voice when Altman tweeted Her.
Even that is not open and shut. He tweeted one word. He certainly wanted an association between the product and the movie, but it is a much more specific assertion that that one word demonstrates an intent to associate the product's voice actress with the voice actress who portrayed the comparable product's voice actress in the movie.
>> It's valuable because it's Scarlet Johansson's voice.
> I think demonstrating that this is a substantial part of the attraction of OpenAI's tech will be difficult.
I think it's totally irrelevant if her voice "is a substantial part of the attraction of OpenAI's tech." What matters is they took something from her that was her valuable property (her likeness). It doesn't matter if what they took makes op 99% of the value or 0.00001%.
It does when it comes to this being a useful topic.
They didn't take her likeness; they recorded someone else. The only claim she has is that someone who sounds like her will add value to their product more than if the person didn't sound like her. At which point the question is: how much value?
(Even that isn't a claim in and of itself, of course, but it might be the basis for a "I'll make people not like you so pay me restitution from your marketing budget to avoid a court case" shakedown.)
> The timeline may not matter as much as OpenAI may think, though. In the 1990s, Tom Waits cited Midler's case when he won a $2.6 million lawsuit after Frito-Lay hired a Waits impersonator to perform a song that "echoed the rhyming word play" of a Waits song in a Doritos commercial. Waits won his suit even though Frito-Lay never attempted to hire the singer before casting the soundalike.
----
> The only claim she has is that someone who sounds like her will add value to their product more than if the person didn't sound like her. At which point the question is: how much value?
That may be relevant when damages are calculated, but I don't think that's relevant to the question of if OpenAI can impersonate her or not.
Nobody stops anyone from suing, but the less-famous actor would have to make a plausible case that the big-budget movie intended to copy the voice of the less-famous actor.
It's not a fallacy. Behind the AI are 180M users inputting their own problems and giving their guidance. Those millions of books only teach language skills they are not memorized verbatim except rare instances of duplicated text in the training set. There is not enough space to store 10 trillion tokens in a model.
And if we wanted to replicate copyrighted text with a LLM, it would still be a bad idea, better to just find a copy online, faster and more precise, and usually free. We here are often posting paywalled articles in the comments, it's so easy to circumvent the paywalls we don't even blink twice at it.
Using LLMs to infringe is not even the intended purpose, and it only happens when the user makes a special effort to prompt the model with the first paragraph.
What I find offensive is restricting the circulation of ideas under the guise of copyright. In fact copyright should only protect expression not the underlying ideas and styles, those are free to learn, and AIs are just an extension of their human users.
> Surely there’s some kind of difference between “voice impression for a two-line cameo in one episode of an animated sitcom” and “reproducing your voice as the primary interface for a machine that could be used by billions of people and is worth hundreds of billions of dollars.”
There are too many differences to understand what you're saying. Is the problem too much money is in the company doing it? Fox is also pretty wealthy.
I think the pertinent question is: does having it sound like Scarlett Johansenn mean they get to access billions of people? If not, then while she might get paid out a few million, it'll be from OpenAI's marketing budget and not because of actual value added.
Just to clarify for people who don't read it, the article isn't claiming this was trained on the voice of someone doing a Scarlett Johannson impression. It says it was trained on the natural voice of someone who sounds similar to Johannson's, hired months before Altman reached out to her.
> I was perusing some Simpsons clips this afternoon and came across a story to the effect of "So and so didn't want to play himself, so Dan Castellaneta did the voice."
IANAL, but parody and criticism are covered under Fair Use doctrine for Copyright law in the United States [1]. The Simpsons generally falls into that category, which is why they rarely get into trouble.
The current system where you're allowed to "exploit" other people's image, but only if it's parody seems like a bit of an absurd loophole. Arnold as president in the Simpsons is okay, but Arnold as AI generated president in an action movie - suddenly not okay
Both arguably contributing the same minuscule amount to the "public discourse"..
I had similar thoughts based on a podcast I listened to once about voice actors hired for film spin off merchandise and whatnot. It's very common to look for voices that approximate a fictional character's voice, that was originally done by a different actor or actress.
Thinking about that episode, I imagine the legal risk is less in trying to sound like Scarlett Johansson, and more in trying to sound like Samantha, the AI character in Her. Warner Brothers or Spike Jonze probably has some legal rights to the character, and an argument could be made that OpenAI was infringing on that. The viability of that argument probably depends on how much people conflate the two or believe that the one was meant to represent the other.
That example isn't really pertinent, because in the case of the Simpsons it's fairly certain that the actors and actresses sign away the rights to their likeness to the company, otherwise there'd be major issues if one ever quit, became unable to work, just wanted a bunch of money, or whatever. There's probably some poor analogy with how if you write software, your company [generally] owns it.
For something more general look at Midler vs Ford [1], and lots of other similar cases. Ford wanted to use get Midler to sing some of her songs (that Ford owned the copyright to) for a commercial. She refused, so they hired an impersonator. They never stated it was Midler in the commercial, but nonetheless were sued and lost for abuse of 'rights of personality' even for content they owned the copyright to! Uncopyrightable characteristics highly associated with a person are still legally protected. Similar stuff with fight refs. Various trademark lines like 'Let's get it on!' or 'Let's get readddy to rumble.' are literally trademarked, but it's probably not even strictly necessary since it would be implicitly protected by rights of personality.
I know it’s pendantic, but Ford did not own the copyright to either the original Bette Midler performance recording nor the lyrics/melody of the song. The marketing company that prepared the ‘Yuppie Campaign’ for Ford did negotiate a license for the lyrics/melody from the copyright holder. It doesn’t make a substantial difference, but commenters have been using wide ranging analogies in this thread and I wanted to make sure nobody jumped on a flawed foundation when arguing about the precedent case.
"The agent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to assure the safety of her client, said the actress confirmed that neither Johansson nor the movie “Her” were ever mentioned by OpenAI."
This sort of thing happens a lot, and is of course legal even if it isn't polite. I remember a decade or so ago when having "celebrity" voices for your GPS was a thing and there was an interview by the actor Michael Caine about how some company wanted him to do a GPS voice but he declined and later he found out that they then used an impersonator to make a voice that obviously was supposed to be his.
- the original report by Scarlett said she was approached months ago, and then two days prior to launch of GPT-4o she was approached again
Because of the above, my immediate assumption was that OpenAI definitely did her dirty. But this report from WaPo debunks at least some of it, because the records they have seen show that the voice actor was contacted months in advance prior to OpenAI contacting Scarlett for the first time. (also goes to show just how many months in advance OpenAI is working on projects)
However, this does not dispel the fact that OpenAI did contact Scarlett, and Sam Altman did post the tweet saying "her", and the voice has at least "some" resemblance of Scarlett's voice, at least enough to have two different groups saying that it does, and the other saying that it does not.
Yeah, sus af because of the call 2 days before they released it to the world. And they were just asking for it when they tweeted the frickin "her". I mean, come on.
Yes, but it changes the narrative from “they couldn’t get Scarlett to record the voice, so they copied her voice” to something much less malicious. Contacting Scarlett, when you already have voice recordings ready but would prefer someone famous, isn’t that bad of a thing imho.
> Yes, but it changes the narrative from “they couldn’t get Scarlett to record the voice, so they copied her voice” to something much less malicious.
I don't think it's less malicious if they decided to copy her voice without her consent, but just didn't tell her until the project was underway, then continued even after she said no.
There's legal precedent that hiring a copycat is not OK, so it's not like proving it was a copycat salvages their situation.
I wouldn't be surprised if the real reason they hired a copycat early is because they realized they'd need far more of Johansson's time than she'd be willing to provide, and the plan was typical SV "ask forgiveness not permission, but do it anyway regardless."
It seems like the key difference is that the advertisements in those cases involved people who sounded like particular musical artists, singing songs that those artists were well-known for singing. If you hired the woman who voiced Sky to say lines that Scarlett had in some of her movies, that would be similar. The fact that this is a chatbot makes it somewhat of an echo of those cases, but it strikes me (a former lawyer) as being a bridge too far. After all, you have to balance Scarlett's rights against the rights of someone who happens to have a voice that sounds like Scarlett's (it would be different if this were someone doing an impersonation of Scarlett, but whose natural voice sounds different).
It's not an impersonation it is the actor using their own natural voice.
"We believe that AI voices should not deliberately mimic a celebrity's distinctive voice — Sky's voice is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson but belongs to a different professional actress using *her own natural speaking voice*"
With the law, it is often about intent. If OpenAI had the intent to make a voice that sounded like Scarlett Johansson's in her, then I think that might be problematic for OpenAI. I am not a lawyer though.
Ford commissioned a cover of a 1958 song[1] using a singer that would clearly be mistaken for Bette Midler's existing cover of that song, as part of an advertisement campaign where they first tried to get the rights to the original songs.
If you listen to the imitation version linked from that Wikipedia article and the original 1958 you'll hear that they didn't only find a singer that sounded like her, but copied the music and cadence from Bette's version.
I think that's way past what whatever OpenAI did in this case. It would be analogous if they were publishing something that only regurgitated lines Scarlett Johansson is famous for having said in her movies.
But they're not doing that, they just found a person who sounds like Scarlett Johansson.
This would only be analogous to the Ford case if the cover artist in that case was forbidden from releasing any music, including original works, because her singing voice could be confused with Bette Midler's.
Now, would they have done this if Scarlett Johansson wasn't famous? No, but we also wouldn't have had a hundred grunge bands with singers playing up their resemblance to Kurt Cobain if Nirvana had never existed.
So wherever this case lands (likely in a boring private settlement) it's clearly in more of a gray area than the Ford case.
If the goal was to make the voice sound like the one from Her, then it's still illegal.
Same way you can't get someone who sounds like a famous celebrity to do voice in a commercial and just let people think it's the famous celebrity when it's not
I don't know, to me, it's just sounds like they know how to cover all their bases.
To me, it sounds like they had the idea to make their AI sound like "her". For the initial version, they had a voice actor that sounds like the movie, as a proof of concept.
They still liked it, so it was time to contact the real star. In the end, it's not just the voice, it would have been the brand, just imagine the buzz they would have got if Scarlett J was the official voice of the company. She said no, and they were like, "too bad, we already decided how she will sound like, the only difference is whether it will be labelled as SJ or not".
In the end, someone probably felt like it's a bit too dodgy as it resemblance was uncanny, they gave it another go, probably ready to offer more money, she still refused, but in the end, it didn't change a thing.
Agreed — seems like they had a plan, and probably talked extensively with Legal about how to develop and execute the plan to give themselves plausible deniability. The tweet was inadvisable, and undoubtedly not part of the actual plan (unless it was to get PR).
I think this possibility doesn't receive enough attention, there is a class of people who've figured out that they can say the most scandalous things online and it's a net positive because it generates so much exposure. (As a lowly middle class employee you can't do this - you just get fired and go broke - but at a certain level of wealth and power you're immune from that.) It is the old PT Barnum principle, "They can say whatever they want about me as long as they spell my name right." Guys like Trump and Musk know exactly what they're doing. Why wouldn't Sam?
Johansson's complaint is starting to look a little shaky especially if you remove that "her" Tweet from the equation. I wouldn't put this past Altman at all, he knows exactly what happened and what didn't inside OpenAI, so maybe he knew she didn't have a case and decided to play Sociopathic 3D Chess with her (and beat her in one round)
As a lowly middle class employee it could be interpreted externally as “representing the company” which is why you see disclaimers like “all views are my own” on some social media profiles. Sam is the company, so they can’t get mad at him, and beyond that he’s a private individual saying whatever he wants on social media without lying.
In order to sue, there need to be damages, and if they didn’t copy the voice then the rest doesn’t matter, which sam and team clearly knew and were fast to work with the news. I agree that smart people take advantage of what they can get away with, but this controversy couldn’t have turned out better for increasing brand awareness good or bad (as you say, just like trump and musk know how to do)
Johansson might not win a lawsuit, but she isn't looking bad at all. She is totally standup in the Arts vs BigTech AI cultural battle. (See also, Apple's recent iPad crushes all artist material" commercial.)
Nothing in this article changes the essence of her complaint.
The only real, though partial, rebuttal to her is that OpenAI copied a work product she did for a movie, and the movie was was more than her voice, so it's not totally her own work. So maybe the movie team as a whole has a stronger complaint than the voice actor alone.
She didn't lose any game of wits. She just got done dirty by someone who got away with it.
She doesn't need money from them. She has respect from people who matter, SAM and OpenAI behaved badly like big tech always does.
If OpenAI permanently stops using Johansson-like Sky voice, she'll win what she wanted.
Of course, anyone whose voice sounds like an AI has the unpleasantness of that experience, and a rich person is more able to endure it than a regular Johansson.
I can't say much about that particular voice because I almost never used chatGPT's voices. They are too slow.
I need 1.5x speeds even if I have to use a worse voice. I am a TTS power user, listening to all online text since 2010s. Maybe GPT-4o has a more flexible voice, perhaps you can just ask it to speak faster.
> In the end, someone probably felt like it's a bit too dodgy as it resemblance was uncanny
What if it wasn’t a computer voice model but rather a real-life voice actress that you could pay a few cents to try to imitate Scarlett Johansson’s voice as best as she could?
That’s effectively what’s happening here, and it isn’t illegal.
It guess it also leads to the bigger question: do celebrities own their particular frequency range? Is no one allowed to publicly sound like them? Feels like the AACS DVD encryption key controversy all-over again.
This is correct, and is very different from both the Midler and Waits cases. The courts are never going to tell a voice actor she can't use her real voice because she sounds too much like a famous person.
And besides, it sounds more like Rashida Jones anyway. It's clearly not an impersonation.
> Your can point to the "Her" tweet, but it's a pretty flimsy argument.
I'm not making arguments which are not already explicitly written in my post.
My argument is simple: jorvi commented that you can hire "a real-life voice actress" to "try to imitate Scarlett Johansson’s voice as best as she could", and that is not illegal.
I said that the legality of that is more complicated. What jorvi describes might or might not be illegal based on various factors. And I pointed them towards the two references to support my argument.
I explicitly didn't say in that comment anything about the OpenAI/ScarJo case. You are reacting as if you think that I have some opinion about it. You are wrong, and it would be better if you would not try to guess my state of mind. If I have some opinion about something you will know because I will explicitly state it.
people are allowed to sound like other people. But if you go to actor 1 and say we want to use your voice for our product, and then they say no, and then you go to actor 2 and tell them I want you to sound like actor 1 for our product, and then you release a statement hey you know that popular movie by actor 1 that just used their voice in a context extremely reminiscent of our product?!? Well, listen to what we got: (actor 2 voice presented)
on edit: assuming that reports I am reading that the actress used for the voicework claimed not to have been instructed to sound like Her vocal work it sounds like it is probably not likely that a suit would be successful.
The other actress wasn't the only one involved in the production; she provided input but OpenAI building a voice model would involve a lot of data and input. They had to have a model of her ready to go when they asked her for permission immediately before launching; possibly they had one that had been built from her, and another legal-approved that they had converged to be close to the first one but that didn't include her as a direct source.
> What if it wasn’t a computer voice model but rather a real-life voice actress that you could pay a few cents to try to imitate Scarlett Johansson’s voice as best as she could?
> That’s effectively what’s happening here, and it isn’t illegal.
Profiting from someone else's likeness is illegal.
Right of publicity. Profiting of their image without their permission will get you sued. Even if you use an impersonator. If there is a chance the public will connect it with them, you are probably screwed.
> In the end, someone probably felt like it's a bit too dodgy as it resemblance was uncanny, they gave it another go, probably ready to offer more money, she still refused,
That was just a few days before launch, right? What was their plan if she said yes at that point? Continue using the "not-her" voice but say it was her? Or did they also have her voice already cloned by then and just needed to flip a switch?
> Continue using the "not-her" voice but say it was her? Or did they also have her voice already cloned by then and just needed to flip a switch?
One or the other. It doesn't really matter as SJ herself would not have necessarily been able to make sure it is not her and not a glitch in how the tech work with her voice.
I think at the moment it's the opposite: It seems based on how many celebrities talk. When we watch them on TV, youtube, tiktok whatever they're not real people but just playing a role. It's not how they really are in their real life. The overacted enthusiasm is like a marketing tool.
As people tend to look up at celebrities and admire them they start associating this with good things and I think this is why they adopted such styles for chatbots.
A more charitable scenario might be that they hire the voice actor and it sounds a bit like her. Someone suggests why don't we just get Scarlett to do it properly, wouldn't that be cooler? They reach out and she says no. They decide to continue with the one that sounds a bit like her.
I think the way I would split the difference here is that your point should inform how we think about regulation and investigation. How we write rules, how we decide to proceed in terms of investigating things.
But when it comes to specific questions that hinge on evidence, I think you have to maintain the typical presumption of innocence, just to balance out the possibilities of mob psychology getting out of control.
Yes, because the courts have yet to decide whether OpenAI has been "recklessly taking other people's IP" in an illegal way. Right now, it's only something believed by people who wish it to be true; legally, it's not clear just yet. In contrast, actually doing SJ impersonation here would be a much clearer violation. There's a huge gap between the two deeds, and I don't see the reason to just assume OpenAI crossed it.
It's like, the people dropping leaflets in your physical mailbox are delivering spam, but you wouldn't automatically assume those same people are also trying to scam you and your neighbors by delivering you physical letters meant to trick people into parting with their savings. In both cases, the messages are spam, but one is legal, other is not, and there's a huge gap between them.
Exactly wrong; it's the job of the law to "be careful," not of the people.
Those of us accusing and talking about it have no power -- thus there is literally no harm, and possible good in, putting them on the defense about this.
edit: In fact, the First Amendment of the Constitution essentially directly upholds the idea of "people saying whatever they want" in this regard.
I think we owe people outside of a commercial environment the presumption of innocence and benefit of the doubt. But we owe profit-seeking corporations (or their officers) neither, and the assumption should be that they are simply amorally doing whatever maximizes profit. As soon as someone hangs their shingle out there as a business, our presumptions should change.
Because it follows the legal principle of innocent untill proven guilty? Unlike the "OpenAI must have cloned Scarlett Johansson's voice" wild dystophia speculations.
That's the same thing, in fewer words. It doesn't change that the beginning and the end are still imitating the original, and this is a billion dollar corporation, not an Elvis personator doing a little show.
How? This kind of thing is already illegal. If I’m producing a commercial for Joe’s Hot Dogs, and I hire a voice actor who sounds like Morgan Freeman, and he never says “I’m Morgan Freeman” but he’s the main voice in the commercial and the cartoon character he’s voicing looks like Morgan Freeman… well, many consumers will be confused into thinking Morgan Freeman likes Joe’s Hot Dogs, and that’s a violation of Morgan Freeman’s trademark.
no, that's definitely not illegal. Voices are not trademarkable, only jingles (melody, words + tone), and of course specific recordings of voices are copyrighted. The ONLY way they get in trouble is if they claim to be Morgan Freeman.
"Trademark" is not the correct way to talk about it, but commercial use of an impersonation can be a breach of the right of publicity, even if they don't actually say they're the person.
But they are subject to right of publicity in many US jurisdictions.
Which, while more like trademark than copyright (the other thing that keeps getting raised as if it should dispose of this issue), is its own area of law, distinct from either trademark or copyright.
> The ONLY way they get in trouble is if they claim to be Morgan Freeman.
That’s…not true. Though such an explicit claim would definitely be a way that they could get in trouble.
> In the United States, no federal statute or case law recognizes the right of publicity, although federal unfair competition law recognizes a related statutory right to protection against false endorsement, association, or affiliation
The important word in that quote is “federal”. In the US, right of publicity is a state law right in many states (often of particular note because of the concentration of tech and entertainment industries, it is a state law right in California.)
It's in the very article
> He compared Johansson’s case to one brought by the singer Bette Midler against the Ford Motor Company in the 1980s. Ford asked Midler to use her voice in ads. After she declined, Ford hired an impersonator. The U.S. appellate courts ruled in Midler’s favor, indicating her voice was protected against unauthorized use.
There's a gray area. If Ford Motor Company hired an actor happened to sound a lot like Bette Midler using their normal speaking voice, Ford would have had a much better chance in defending their case.
As I understand it, that's essentially OpenAI's defense here.
That's a bit of a strawman: you're twisting the scope and arguing for it.
A more similar context would be: they ask Tom Hanks to create a voice similar to Woody, the cowboy from Toy Story . Tom Hanks says no, Disney says no. Then they ask you to voice their cowboy voice. It's obviously related: they tried the OG, failed, they're going for a copycat after.
But if never approached Tom Hanks or Disney, then there would be room for deniability - without mentions to real names, it would require someone to judge if it's an unauthorized copycat or just a random actor voicing a random cowboy voice.
This sort of thing happens all the time though doesn’t it? Take any animated film that get a TV show spinoff, their voice actors get replaced all the time, and I really can’t imagine that spinoff tv shows are dependent on getting all the original voice actors to grant permission. How many different actors have voiced looney toons characters over the years? Didn’t Ernie Hudson audition to play his own character for the Ghost Busters cartoon and lose out to someone else? And these are all cases where there is clear intent to sound as close to the original actor as possible.
I Am Not An Entertainment Lawyer either, so I can’t answer with too much certainty, but I’d suspect the actors have a clause in the contract they sign allowing the character to be played by someone else post-contract. Think about how many clauses were in the last employment contract you signed.
Sure, I would imagine such clauses exist to make this sort of thing a lot cleaner and easier. I also don't see how it could be reasonable to assert that in the absence of such a clause, an actor owns the rights to the voice of that character and no one else can portray that character with the same or similar voice without their express consent. Not everyone who creates something is signing Hollywood acting contracts with their hired actors, and I just can't see any court asserting that "CoolTubeProductions YouTube Channel" can't continue to produce more animations with their "Radical Rabbit" character just because they didn't have that sort of clause when they hired a voice actor at their college for the first year.
So in your opinion, if a movie needs to have a tall, skinny red head, and then they approach someone who has those qualities and the role is turned down, then it would be illegal to get any other different tall skinny red head.
That sounds absurd to me. If you have a role, obviously the role has qualities and requirements.
And just because person 1 who happens to have those qualities turns you down, it is still valid to get a different person who fulfils your original requirements.
Yeah I think the person you’re responding to gave a bad example. I like to give examples involving commercials because they center the issue of celebrity endorsement of and association with a brand, which is the thing at issue in this OpenAI case (public corporate keynotes are essentially just multi-hour commercials).
> they gave it another go, probably ready to offer more money, she still refused, but in the end, it didn't change a thing.
That's not what she said happened. She said they released it anyway before she and Sam could connect, after Sam had reached out, for the second time, two days prior to the release.
Unless they can clearly demostrate reproducing the voice from raw voice actor recordings, this could be just a parallel construction to cover their asses for exactly this sort of case.
Which is not as similar as people keep saying though: both that case, and Bette Midler's involved singers, who perform as themselves and are their own brand.
Consider when a company recasts a voice actor in something: i.e. the VA Rick and Morty have been replaced, Robin Williams was not the voice of genie in Aladdin 2 or the animated series.
That's an impersonation of a parody song in his style. This is a voice actor who has a voice that's kinda similar to ScarJo and kinda similar to Rashida Jones but not quite either one doing something different.
Cases are not a spell you can cast to win arguments, especially when the facts are substantially different.
In both cases the companies are specifically trading on creating confusion of a celebrity’s likeness in an act that celebrity trades in, and with the motivation of circumventing that very celebrity’s explicit rejection of the offer for that very work.
Just because one is a singer and the other is an actor isn’t the big difference you think it is. Actors do voice over work all the time. Actors in fact get cast for their voice all the time.
Yelling, “Parody!” Isn’t some get out of jail free card, particularly where there is actual case law, even more particularly when there are actual laws to address this very act.
> In both cases the companies are specifically trading on creating confusion of a celebrity’s likeness in an act that celebrity trades in, and with the motivation of circumventing that very celebrity’s explicit rejection of the offer for that very work.
Are they? Where did they advertise this? The voice doesn't even sound that much like ScarJo!
> Just because one is a singer and the other is an actor isn’t the big difference you think it is. Actors do voice over work all the time. Actors in fact get cast for their voice all the time.
It's a very big difference when the jurisprudence here rests on how substantial the voice is as a proportion of the brand, especially in the presence of the other disanalogies.
> Yelling, “Parody!” Isn’t some get out of jail free card, particularly where there is actual case law, even more particularly when there are actual laws to address this very act.
Sure -- If you read that back, I'm clearly not doing that. An impression in a parody in the artist's unique style (Waits) was a case where it was a violation of publicity rights. This is radically different from that. It's not clear that Midler and Waits have much bearing on this case at all.
When discovery happens and there’s a trail of messages suggesting either getting ScarJo or finding someone that sounds enough like her this isn’t going to look good with all the other events in timeline.
>> When discovery happens and there’s a trail of messages suggesting either getting ScarJo or finding someone that sounds enough like her this isn’t going to look good with all the other events in timeline.
I'm not a lawyer, but this seems unfair to the voice actor they did use, and paid, who happens to sound like ScarJo (or vice versa!)
So if I sound like a famous person, then I cant monetize my own voice? Who's to say it isnt the other way around, perhaps it is ScarJo that sounds like me and i'm owed money?
There isn't an unfairness to the voice actor. She did her job and got paid.
The problem here is that someone inside of OpenAI wanted to create a marketing buzz around a new product launch and capitalize on a movie. In order to do that they wanted a voice that sounded like that movie. They hired a voice actor that sounded enough like ScarJo to hedge against actually getting the actor to do it. When she declined they decided to implement their contingency plan.
If they're liable is for a jury to decide, but the case precedent that I've seen, along with the intent, wouldn't look good if I were on that jury.
>> There isn't an unfairness to the voice actor. She did her job and got paid.
If her customers can get sued for using her voice, then this voice actor can never get another job and can never get paid again -- all because she happens to sound like ScarJo. That seems unfair to the voice actor.
It is not that the voice is similar to Scarlett, it is that it appears that Scarlett's identity was intentionally capitalized on to market the voice.
If you had a voice like Scarlett, and you were hired to create the voice of an AI assistant, there's no legal problem - as long as the voice isn't marketed using references to Scarlett.
However, in this case, the voice is similar to Scarlett's, AND they referenced a popular movie where Scarlett voiced an AI assistant, and named the assistant in a way that is evocative of Scarlett's name, and reached out to Scarlett wanting to use her voice. It is those factors that make it legally questionable, as it appears that they knowingly capitalized on the voice's similarity to Scarlett's without her permission.
It is about intent, and how the voice is marketed. Voice sounds like a famous person = fine, voice sounds like a famous person and the voice is marketed as being similar to the famous person's = not fine.
It is not a clear-cut 'this is definitely illegal' in this case, it is a grey area that a court would have to decide on.
>> How is it unfair to the voice actor? Is she getting sued? Is she paying damages? Is she being prevented from doing her work? No.
Seems she is prevented from doing work, if companies can get sued for hiring/using voice actors who sounds like ScarJo, then any voice actor who sounds like ScarJo has effectively been de-platformed. Similarly, imagine I look very much like George Clooney -- if George Clooney can sue magazines for featuring my handsome photos, then I lose all ability to model for pay. (Strictly hypothetical, I am a developer, not a fashion model.)
>> It seems like you don't get the fundamental principal underlying "right of publicity" laws if you are asking this question.
Totally, i have no idea of the laws here, but very curious to understand what OpenAI did wrong here.
You are skipping past intent and turning it into strict liability. That's not the case.
>Totally, i have no idea of the laws here, but very curious to understand what OpenAI did wrong here.
It is illegal to profit off the likeness of others. If it wasn't, what's to stop any company from hiring any impersonator to promote that company as the person they are impersonating?
I'm not sure if that's enough to protect OAI, it feels like they wanted SJ, found a similar voice actor as a version 1, tried to "officially" get SJ's voice, and when it failed instead of pulling it continued on. It still feels quite a deliberate move to use her likeness, and the "contact 2 days before" sounds like they really wanted to get her okay before using the other VA's voice.
A plausible alternative explanation for asking Johansson:
(1) They cast the current actor to test the technology and have a fallback. The actor sounds somewhat different from Johansson but the delivery of the lines is similar.
(2) They then ask Johansson because they want to be the company that brought “Her” to life. She declines.
(3) They try again shortly before the event because they really want it to happen.
(4) They proceed with the original voice, and the “her” tweet happens because they want to be the ones that made it real.
Asking shortly before the release is the weakest link here. It’s possible they already had a version trained or fine tuned on her voice that they could swap in at the last minute. That could explain some of the caginess. Not saying it’s what happened or is even likely, but it feels like a reasonable possibility.
My unsubstantiated theory: They have a voice trained on Johansson's body of work ready to go, but didn't release it because they didn't get her permission. This explains why they were still asking her right up to the ChatGPT-4o release. Then people (including Johansson) associate this Sky voice with Johansson and Her. OpenAI realizes it looks bad, despite not being intentional, so they pull Sky for PR reasons.
Sounds more plausible that someone pointed out to them internally they could be in a heap of trouble if Scarlett objected after they released it. It doesn’t matter if it was actually her voice or not it matters if people think it was her voice. If someone pointed this out late in the process than yeah there would have been a mad scramble to get Scarlett to sign off. When she didn’t then that put them in a bad spot.
> Is it a crime for voice actors to sound similar to, say, James Earl Jones?
And the answer is, of course: It depends. For one thing, it depends on whether the company using the sound-alike's voice are in a business closely related to the theme of Star Wars, and whether they market whatever it is they're marketing by referring to Jones' iconic performance as Vader. ("<PANT> ... <PANT>") If they do that, then yes, it most likely is.
No, I specifically asked about Darth Vader, the fictional character that has been voiced by various voice actors (including the original trilogy, clone wars, etc). Presumably Earl Jones does not sound like Darth Vader in his day to day life, but this is not about Earl Jones, it is about the character.
"She worked closely with a film director hired by OpenAI to help develop the technology’s personality."
So you are trying to tell me there was zero chance that this film director was not aware of the movie "Her" and may have been influenced by it?
Why doesn't the voice sound like the Enterprise's computer from TNG? I don't mean sound, I mean cadence, more professional and not like a sexline operator.
What's your point here? Did they or did they not use another voice actor who gave them permission to use their voice? The voice is similar to Johansson's, sure, but it's not her voice and it wasn't an AI generated version of her voice. I'm failing to see what OpenAI did wrong here.
Let’s say I want to shoot a movie. Id love to have Scarlett star in it. But I can’t afford her, so I hire some b actress that kind of looks like her. What’s wrong with that?
The only way I could see this being wrong is if they then processes the voice of this different person to make it sound more like Scarlett.
Making the voice similar enough that the public will associate it with the recognition and popularity of the movie is obviously capitalizing on the movie, including Johansson's performance. If they did that intentionally, they owe Johansson (and the movie studio) recompense for that. And Altman's tweet rather obviously shows it can at the very least be argued that such intent was present.
> Let’s say I want to shoot a movie. Id love to have Scarlett star in it. But I can’t afford her, so I hire some b actress that kind of looks like her. What’s wrong with that?
Depends on intent. If that's all you do, then fine. But if you dress your movie up to heavily imply it's a sequel to a movie with Johansson in it, and put the actual name of your "B actress" down in the fine print(1), and then tweet the name of the Johansson movie when yours is released... Do you think movie makers get away with shit like that? Or that they should?
What is it about this that you don't understand? Do you genuinely not see that those are two different things, distinguished by intent? Or did you just not know that intent is often a rather vital part of whether something is legal or not?
___
(1): Or omit it altogether, like this allegedly-existing Sky voice actress is still (last I read, before the weekend) anonymous.
so how would the process of training a speaking AI go ? would you input the actor voice samples and subtitles from a movie, then train it till the output is similar enough to the actors voice from the movie ?
Just couple minutes of data through 10-20 minutes of training with RVC WebUI[0] on included base model into VC Client[1] gets you to 90% there. But that's nearly an year old method, so I'm sure OAI has its own completely novel architecture for extra 5% fidelity.
I can't help but think that this was all planned. It is a very intricately planned, and geniously executed marketing ploy to make sure everyone knows about the company, the new release, that there is voice now, and even makes everyone look into it just to "see for themselves".
Whether this was in with ScarJo in the loop or not, does not really change the outcome, but would be a nice information we probably will never get, in order to understand how cut-throat whoever came up with this idea actually is.
While I cannot say you're right or wrong, we both share similar thought! So much so that I feel like this is not the first time OpenAI has done this level of antics just to get more exposure. Seriously... I have spent pondering the same every time they get into news on the basis of drama.
It's either our delusion (you and me) or they have someone in the marketing department who has a really good grasp of how to ride the news cycle wave.
As a result of the negative publicity, most people know OpenAI as the company that steals things from other people. Most of them will never hear that this one time, OpenAI didn't actually do the thing they were accused of doing.
That's the problem with having a repeat liar as a CEO: you lose any credibility for those rare instances when you're actually telling the truth.
Regardless of legal outcome, there now exists a corpus of public text from news coverage of this incident, upon which OpenAI will be trained, which correlates SJ's name to reporting on a 2024 OpenAI voice.
Appears to be all planned, as they know ScarJo likes to sue. If they win this case, it will be free play in future for them to hire voice actor/actress that sound like established celebrities.
This is some Trump supporter levels of copium. Loads of people now think Sama is a dick to SJ and doesn't care about the consent of artists, no matter what the records show. Tweeting "Her" was fucking moronic, and just releasing a product that bloody worked would have been far better for OAI and the whole AI industry.
> an actress was hired to create the Sky voice months before Altman contacted Johansson
> the actress confirmed that neither Johansson nor the movie “Her” were ever mentioned by OpenAI. The actress’s natural voice sounds identical to the AI-generated Sky voice, based on brief recordings
Given this I don't think anyone at OpenAI did anything wrong in this instance except Sam Altman. After getting explicitly rejected by Johansson he should not have asked again and definitely should not have referenced her character in that tweet. And this whole thing could have been avoided if they just used a different voice for the demo instead of their voice that happened to sound the most like her.
They should have learned from Weird Al. Famously, he technically doesn't need permission to do song parodies but he asks anyway and respects the artist's wishes if they say no.
>> an actress was hired to create the Sky voice months before Altman contacted Johansson
>> the actress confirmed that neither Johansson nor the movie “Her” were ever mentioned by OpenAI. The actress’s natural voice sounds identical to the AI-generated Sky voice, based on brief recordings
> Given this I don't think anyone at OpenAI did anything wrong in this instance except Sam Altman.
Not necessarily. The OpenAI people could had the internally stated goal of making a soundalike of Johansson, sorted through the applicants to find actress who sounded closest to Johansson, then gave direction to steer the actress's performance to be similar to Johansson's in Her. All the while never mentioning Johansson or her movie to the actress directly.
Maybe they were trying to mimic the precedent of Compaq reverse engineering and cloning the PC BIOS using a "Clean Room."
it was an opportunity for the representatives of soon to be extinct professions to bash the technology that spells their doom. the inconvenient fact that the AI didn't actually sound like the actress didn't matter.
That may be your opinion but we have plenty of social media conversations about it when the voice first came out 7 months ago, before any of this was a controversy, and the only two names that are consistently brought up are Scarlett Johansson and Rashida Jones for who the voice reminds them of.
Maybe because they are famous, every voice sounds like them? Regardless, Johansson has a characteristic hoarseness in her voice which is not in the robot voice
Anyone who thought OpenAI would just take SJ voice isn’t thinking things thoroughly but anyone that doesn’t see the request as a courtesy and the follow-up as a ‘get behind this or get nothing’ is blind. This was a strong arm move with SJ’s concept was always optional. It’d of been good press. Now that it’s the opposite, they’ll still get the voice they wanted but everyone will forget why a shitty move this within a month. To me, the worst part is how this makes Sam Altman to be a completely asshole with no sympathy. SJ made a movie, she wanted to live it at that. Sam Altman forced her to represent a product, forever. That’s fucked up.
> Sam Altman forced her to represent a product, forever. That’s fucked up.
He never mentioned her by name, he pointed out how the AI demo OpenAI created is similar to the _character_ from Her.
If you don't want to be linked to a character forever, maybe don't act? It's just such a ridiculous statement to make. Like making an argument that no one should talk about Obi Wan because Alec Guinness didn't like being recognized from Star Wars.
It’s my understanding he directly asked twice: once early on and then again right before the unveiling.
And your example is absurd. A fictional character about fantasy vs a fictional product were on the cusp of creating. I’ve never watched her so can’t comment more.
I am assuming they deliberately wanted the voice to sound like Her (the movie) for marketing so copied the voice then tried to get Johansson's permission once the legal department raised some objections. They went through with it anyway when they did not get permission. Altman has shown time again he will ignore all the rules and laws if they hamper his goals.
This what I think happened I am not saying it did and I could be wrong
I don’t think OpenAI has a chance to win this in open court.
They are very likely to settle out of court. Investors get a bit anxious with pending litigation.
But I honestly hope Johansson does not. She certainly has the runway to take it all the way. Make them look like fools in open court. Show the people their real colors.
Copying by hiring a sound-alike/impersonator is an implementation detail. They knew full well that they were trying to copy her voice. Then they asked. And they got a no. And then they did it anyway.
I don't see how the implementation details matter at all.
I think the optics of this aren't great. You ask someone to copy their voice, they say no and then (maybe coincidentally) you release a voice designed to sound very similar. Legally this may well be fine but come on, didn't anyone think this might make them look bad?
Sure, but to me it looks bad from the other perspective too if this is made into a problem. A person's natural voice is their voice and some celebrity should NOT be able to dictate how it is used.
The VA has not been identified, but I bet that she has a showreel in which you can hear at least ten different natural voices that are not at all like SJ's performance in 'her'. A sad read for the local undertaker. A maniacal shouty ad for the monster truck rally. A motherly read for baby formula. Some fun accents. A dramatic read.
Here's an alternative explanation that fits the same facts. Sam tweeted "her", not due to the voice, but due the existence of a conversational system that resembled the system in the movie. This primed people to hear Scarlett Johansson's voice in a generically cheerful female voice actor who was contracted over half a year ago. Scarlett's lawyers encourage her to write a public letter, helping Scarlett with the wording, in order to steer the public narrative, in order to place pressure on OpenAI to settle with her financially out of court.
I wondered about this also. Maybe they pulled it temporarily so that their side of the story could get out in circulation. Then they'll reinstate the voice after a while on the grounds that "as we all know, this was developed separately and in advance of any conversations with Scarlett".
If they had kept the voice then it might seem like they were reacting and possibly caught off-guard. Instead, it looks like they're stepping back, assessing the facts, and proceeding with due caution.
IMO that's consistent with them trying to look like they're being responsible and considerate (even though they plan to re-release the voice in a short while, after their side of the carefully-planned story is out).
In general, I assume anything a CEO says after a scandal breaks is whatever the crisis management people told him to say.
You can hear both voices for yourself and tell they are different, but y'all such NPCs you just believe the bullcrap the media spoon-feeds you not the literal sounds in your ears.
New theory, HN is a honey pot for dumb people that Y Combinator studies how to make money from.
Previous theory it was a Alzheimer's style "Fake bus stop" used to round up imposter hackers and keep them contained while the real Hackers did stuff.
I'm losing faith in Hacker News commenters too. Such an incredible display of lack of critical thinking ("oh, he tweeted Her? Must be because he's trolling ScarJo, not because the movie is literally like the real life product") and bandwagoning over this piece of news, all because HN wants to hate OpenAI.
Not to mention, on the AI Paint thread, there was this heavily upvoted guy saying its servers are paid for by the stock market and tech bubble like some kind of conspiracy theorist, completely ignoring that it's run locally.
I don't know why I keep coming here. I guess it's because I'm addicted. At least on Reddit you could leave subreddits and block people when they get too incomprehensible from your own perspective.
For what it's worth, sometimes I get very frustrated with HN, but I think the reason I keep coming back is because it provides me with a lot of context. Eg, I pick up a lot of information about techniques people have applied to certain problems, which I recall when I recognize a similar problem, and that gives me a place to start.
But I have had to cut myself off from a given community because my relationship became unhealthy with it many times. I get that.
Personally I think it's dilluted the hackers from other sites (like me). But your theory sounds much stronger. A lot of new sites and ideas are not pay to win, they are buy to belong. Crypto, 3D printers, gaming forums, PC hardware forums, AI. These communities manifest free marketing and updates in products to convince you they're good for you to buy them.
I found HN great for some things but you did click this link too. This is a celebrity gossip thread and you joined. I found John walkers site from here didn't know about it. https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
'Real hackers' are live on git, maybe twitch. Chill out and listen to what your general peer has to say here and imagine non hackers discussing it. Nobody outside here cares about this drama except Twitter bots. Check out Google trends. https://trends.google.com/trends/trendingsearches/daily?geo=...
I thought this was a right-of-publicity case where the "her" tweet basically misled people to believe the voice is of Scarlett Johansson, who's against the use of AI tech like any other Hollywood people?
If it goes to court I’m sure discovery will unearth a bunch of emails and slack messages pertaining to this as well as documentation about the make up of their training sets and casting and performance notes for the voice talent. Hopefully they’re under legal hold now.
1. They're not actively malicious and have the emotional capacity to feel embarrassed
2. They know they were talking about her voice and making comparisons and that this is A Bad Look and they've had a terrible week PR-wise already
3. Might be a trademark violation, I'm not sure how that law works (in general let alone voice) but there's a reason why Pear Computer had to change their logo
1 is possible, 2 strikes me as unlikely (how bad of a week was it? I didn't get that sense). 3 doesn't make sense — this has nothing to do with trademark law. A logo is a 'mark' that identifies a brand, but a voice is not a 'mark.'
#2 because they're humans and humans act emotionally — it's entirely possible for them to just go "aaaa" like all the people in comments sections do regularly.
#3 famous people do seem to have some control over their likeness; I don't know how real that control is or anything about how it works, just that it looks like this from the outside. IANAL, so treat that as a claim of analogy not literal.
Exactly. All this reporting says is that the actress wasn’t explicitly told to copy “Her”. We still don’t know about the intentions of OpenAI throughout all of this. With Sam’s seeming obsession with the movie, are we really supposed to believe that the company never discussed it internally?
There is nothing new about people forming their own opinions without following the rules of courts of law. Indeed, it wouldn't have been so important to enshrine the "innocent until proven guilty" principle into legal systems, if it were already the normal way for people to react to things.
It's ok for people to just be people. Courts should be held to a higher standard, but that doesn't mean regular people should be expected to act like courts.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 395 ms ] threadBut while many hear an eerie resemblance between “Sky” and Johansson’s “Her” character, an actress was hired to create the Sky voice months before Altman contacted Johansson, according to documents, recordings, casting directors and the actress’s agent.
I wonder to what extent it is because they were prompted to listen for that. Would they still hear the resemblance if they didn't know who to compare it to?
https://x.com/search?q=scarjo+until%3A2024-05-14&src=typed_q...
https://x.com/search?q=johansson+until%3A2024-05-14&src=type...
Maybe the courts can decide, rather than the court of popular opinion, when we don't have access to the actual evidence?
If they're that confident, why did they take the voice down?
What will they do if she continues legal action?
They can say anything, and all we know for sure, is that they're not honest, usually. So... lets see how it goes in court huh?
...but, I guess it won't; because they do not want that discovery. (:
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40421225
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40414249
>OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show
>>A different actress was hired to provide the voice for ChatGPT’s “Sky,” according to documents and recordings shared with the Washington Post.
A voice can be zero shot encoded to a few hundred kb vector. Timbre, prosody, lots of characteristics. That's less information than a fingerprint. And more importantly, that's something you can dial in with a few knobs by simply listening by ear.
It's why your brain can easily hear things in other people's voices. They're not hard signals to reproduce. Some people with flexible vocal ranges can even impersonate others quite easily.
I'm sure most people have gotten, "you sound like X" once or twice. Not unlike the "you look like Y" comments.
Voices really aren't that fingerprint-y.
If we really want to split hairs and argue from biology, who "owns" the voice of a set of identical twins?
But still there are some voices that are just highly associated with just one person in everyone's minds, like David Attenborough. For example, if I heard Attenborough speaking my local train announcements, but it would be an impersonator, I think I would feel like the company is taking advantage of Attenborough's voice. I.e. they would be using the fact that everyone knows this voice to their advantage, without actually paying Attenborough.
While voices aren't technically that unique, when linked to certain situations or when heard by enough people, they become unique in that context. I'm sure no one cares about Attenborough's voice 100 years from now.
Or hm, maybe AI voice tools will keep his voice alive forever in Planet Earth spinoffs, just like Sinatra has been resurrected for mashups.
Choose a different career, like maybe public-opinion influencer.
Is your voice truly unique out of the 8 billion out there in the world? Nobody could plausibly pass as you?
You might think voice is something you're born with. It's not, it rather partially comes from languages and your backgrounds. So random chances of someone literally sounding by DNA from half a world away is quite low.
Case in point - my wife has two twin brothers. Even though I've been interacting with them for over 10 years now, they sound exactly the same to me. If I close my eyes then there is zero chance I could tell them apart by voice alone. I know, it's an anecdote - but while I'm sure you could tell them apart by some really small thing that they do, to someone who isn't actively looking for those cues they are - for all intentions and purposes - the same.
1. Push forward legislation/regulation/lawsuits/public opinion via whatever method is available, probably unions or other collective power.
2. Embrace the technology. Maybe build a voice model of yourself, sell the license affordably and broadly to those that want to take advantage of the convenience and scalability (as in number of phrases) of voice AI but don't want the mess of wading into unsettled legal territory. Or learn what voice AI is good at and what it is bad at and find your niche. Survive by being at the cutting edge of this new world, setting the standards and being knowledgable.
3. Walk away from an industry that is either dying or about to become unrecognizable.
The genie's not going back in the bottle.
As a recent example Baldur’s Gate 3, Andrew Wincott voiced Raphael, an npc-antagonist, who to my untrained ear sounded exactly like Charles Dance, and the character model had more than a passing semblance to Mr. Dance as well.
It was not a Charles Dance carbon copy but all aspects of the character were strongly aligned with him.
I’m wondering where is the line in style and personal aspects of one’s craft drawn.
Some of this is probably part of personal perception.
In this case, the actress selected for OpenAI was clearly selected for similarity to SJ. And that by itself would have been okay, because the actress is speaking in her natural voice, and SJ doesn't have a monopoly on voice acting...but OpenAI went further, and had the unknown[1] actress base her inflections, cadence, and mannerisms on SJ's performance in the movie Her. And Altman even tweeted the movie's name to advertise the connection.
The problem is that there is a well-settled case law stretching back over several decades that makes this a slam-dunk case for SJ, because it doesn't matter that OpenAI didn't "steal" her voice, they stole her likeness.[2] It wasn't just some unknown actress speaking in her own voice, it was an actress with a voice similar to SJ given lines and directing by OpenAI with the clear intent of mimicking SJ's voice performance in one of her more-famous roles.
[1] There is a very short list of a few actresses who both sound like SJ and do voice-over work circulating around Hollywood, so a lot of people have a pretty good idea of who it is, but nobody will identify the actress unless she identifies herself, out of solidarity.
[2] Likeness rights are quite strong in the U.S. They're even stronger in Europe.
WaPo's reporting states that the individual in charge of the interaction, Jang, modeled it after Hollywood movies, and worked with a film director specifically to accomplish this goal. And the executive responsible for the artistic decisions, CTO Murati, was conveniently not made available for WaPo to interview.
OpenAI has no credibility here, given its extensive history of dissembling as a company. If Her and SJ weren't the driving inspiration for the Sky voice, they would have made Murati available to explicitly refute those claims. Her absence speaks volumes.
And OpenAI dropping Sky immediately speaks even louder. It means that somewhere there is a smoking gun that would destroy them in court. [Edit: it turns out the smoking guns were already public: in addition to the CEO's Her tweet, his co-founder Karpathy explicitly linked the voice product to SJ. Game. Set. Match.]
As for Scarlett Johansson, I remember her from the Ghost in the Shell the live action movie controversy. Not fondly.
You can also obviously compare multiple voice files recorded with similar sounding but different individuals, they rarely look similar on spectrograms.
But, IMO, the value of mud sludge on a table indistinguishable from sandwiches is tiny. Fake Chanels are 10^2-5 cheaper than the real thing no matter the closeness. Don't listen to people begging you for life to join the counterfeiter ring, they don't make much anyway.
2) Your ability to mine cash off this physical quality depends on the inability of this quality to be reproduced.
3) This quality can now be reproduced.
I would think very hard and very long about staying in this particular business. Personally I think there is still plenty of work left because not everyone is happy with going full sci-fi dystopia, but it will be niche and scrappy.
"I have unique characteristics that make me an excellent programmer. I earn money by tweaking for-loops. Recently, GPT is being able to tweak for-loops better, faster and more cheaply than I can. How can I protect myself in case companies decide to replicate my unique abilities?"
If the tech actually works well enough to stand in for humans, I think we will very quickly see recording real humans in fictional pieces as old fashioned.
I hope Sam feels fine after so much baseless harassment.
Presumably they trained this voice, and then wanted an official celebrity endorsement to make it better for marketing. At some point the people at OpenAI forgot it wasn't actually Scarlett. I don't think you can be critical of HN for believing it too in that case.
The voice actor involved is irrelevant.
Quite the contrary, unless you believe that Scarlett Johanson owns the rights to the voice of anyone who sounds like her?
Check out the Tom Waits case.
But no, he's a human making mistakes. A lot of mistakes, as it turns out
I have the same instinct to criticize hate mobs against him as I have when they're against Anita Sarkeesian or Brianna Wu.
I read a lot of C&D letters from celebrities here and on Reddit, and a lot of them are in the form of "I am important so I am requesting that you do not take advantage of your legal rights." I am not a fan. (If you don't want someone to track how often you fly your private jet, buy a new one for each trip. That is the legal option that is available to you. But I digress...)
Is there a name for this AI fallacy? The one where programmers make an inductive leap like, for example, if a human can read one book to learn something, then it’s ok to scan millions of books into a computer system because it’s just another kind of learning.
Since this comes up all the time, I ask: What exactly is the number of books a human can ingest before it becomes illegal?
What about if they have augmentation that allows them to read and interpret books really fast?
It’s not an easy question to answer…
People and software are different things, and it makes total sense that there should be different rules for what they can and cannot do.
Natural life is plenty simple in this context.
It misses the point, which is that cars aren't people. Arguments like "well a car uses friction to travel along the ground and fuel to create kinetic energy, just like humans do", aren't convincing to me. An algorithm is not a human, and we should stop pretending the same rules apply to each.
If we're at an analogy to "cars aren't people", then it sounds like it doesn't matter how many books the AI reads, even one book would cause problems.
But if that's the case, why make the argument about how many books it reads?
Are you sure you're arguing the same thing as the ancestor post? Or do you merely agree with their conclusion but you're making an entirely different argument?
Those aren't cars.
But you've identified that the closer something comes to a human in terms of speed and scale, the blurrier the lines become. In these terms I would argue that GPT-4 is far, far removed from a human.
Yes. It is pertinent not only to this particular instance (or instances, plural; AI copyright violations and scooters on sidewalks), but illustrates for example why treating corporations as "people" in freedom-of-speech law is misguided (and stupid, corrupt, and just fucking wrong). So it is a very good example.
You were conditioned to give that response.
If I ask an AI about the book Walden Two, for example, it can reproduce and/or remix that. Knowing is copying.
[Why Walden Two? BF Skinner. And an excellent book about how the book was lived: https://www.amazon.com/Living-Walden-Two-Behaviorist-Experim... ]
If Annapurna Pictures (the production company that owns the rights to “Her”) made a sequel where the voice AI is played by someone else than Johansson but sounded the same and was marketed as a direct continuation, I think there would be a lawsuit.
She didn’t write the script or develop the character, but I think there’s enough creative authorship in her voice portrayal that it would be risky for the production company.
Reading all these musings here about a possible "there is no bad publicity" approach, I'm starting to wonder if the plan for if Johansson signed up was achieving court drama publicity by getting sued by Annapurna Pictures. "Can a three-letter tweet be the base of a copyright case?"
In iron man 1, Rhodey is played by terrance howard. For iron man 2, he wanted too much money in the contract, so they replaced with with don cheadle.
Wouldn't it be a dumb world to live in if a single actor in the cast can halt the production of a new work via lawsuit because they own the character?
Not having idiots (or ChatGPT) for judges.
Always the Achilles heel of software engineers' (not so) clever legal strategies.
If voices being similar to each other is found to be grounds for a successful tort action then it'd establish a legal precedent, and it's very unlikely that precedent would be interpreted as "whoever the judge heard of first wins".
No, it's whoever's voice is famous. The voice per se isn't valuable, its fame is. Personality rights are precedented [1].
> voices being similar to each other is found to be grounds for a successful tort action then it'd establish a legal precedent
It's not about similarity. It's about property. Johansson developed her voice into a valuable asset. It's valuable because it's Scarlet Johansson's voice.
Tweeting Her explicitly tied it to Johansson, even if that wasn't the case up to that point.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights
It's not her voice. But it may have been intended to sound like her voice. (I believe this less than twenty-four hours ago, but I'm hesitant to grant Altman the benefit of doubt.)
If it were her voice, would you agree that seems distasteful?
> one that sounds similar, but is different, and thus belongs to the true voice actress
They marketed it as her voice when Altman tweeted Her.
Even that is not open and shut. He tweeted one word. He certainly wanted an association between the product and the movie, but it is a much more specific assertion that that one word demonstrates an intent to associate the product's voice actress with the voice actress who portrayed the comparable product's voice actress in the movie.
I think demonstrating that this is a substantial part of the attraction of OpenAI's tech will be difficult.
> I think demonstrating that this is a substantial part of the attraction of OpenAI's tech will be difficult.
I think it's totally irrelevant if her voice "is a substantial part of the attraction of OpenAI's tech." What matters is they took something from her that was her valuable property (her likeness). It doesn't matter if what they took makes op 99% of the value or 0.00001%.
They didn't take her likeness; they recorded someone else. The only claim she has is that someone who sounds like her will add value to their product more than if the person didn't sound like her. At which point the question is: how much value?
(Even that isn't a claim in and of itself, of course, but it might be the basis for a "I'll make people not like you so pay me restitution from your marketing budget to avoid a court case" shakedown.)
Those aren't mutually exclusive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co. Also, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/sky-voice-actor-...:
> The timeline may not matter as much as OpenAI may think, though. In the 1990s, Tom Waits cited Midler's case when he won a $2.6 million lawsuit after Frito-Lay hired a Waits impersonator to perform a song that "echoed the rhyming word play" of a Waits song in a Doritos commercial. Waits won his suit even though Frito-Lay never attempted to hire the singer before casting the soundalike.
----
> The only claim she has is that someone who sounds like her will add value to their product more than if the person didn't sound like her. At which point the question is: how much value?
That may be relevant when damages are calculated, but I don't think that's relevant to the question of if OpenAI can impersonate her or not.
I suppose in this case the claim has to be something like: "They hired someone who sounds like my impersonation of a character in a film called Her".
And if we wanted to replicate copyrighted text with a LLM, it would still be a bad idea, better to just find a copy online, faster and more precise, and usually free. We here are often posting paywalled articles in the comments, it's so easy to circumvent the paywalls we don't even blink twice at it.
Using LLMs to infringe is not even the intended purpose, and it only happens when the user makes a special effort to prompt the model with the first paragraph.
What I find offensive is restricting the circulation of ideas under the guise of copyright. In fact copyright should only protect expression not the underlying ideas and styles, those are free to learn, and AIs are just an extension of their human users.
There are too many differences to understand what you're saying. Is the problem too much money is in the company doing it? Fox is also pretty wealthy.
I think the pertinent question is: does having it sound like Scarlett Johansenn mean they get to access billions of people? If not, then while she might get paid out a few million, it'll be from OpenAI's marketing budget and not because of actual value added.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
IANAL, but parody and criticism are covered under Fair Use doctrine for Copyright law in the United States [1]. The Simpsons generally falls into that category, which is why they rarely get into trouble.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
Both arguably contributing the same minuscule amount to the "public discourse"..
Thinking about that episode, I imagine the legal risk is less in trying to sound like Scarlett Johansson, and more in trying to sound like Samantha, the AI character in Her. Warner Brothers or Spike Jonze probably has some legal rights to the character, and an argument could be made that OpenAI was infringing on that. The viability of that argument probably depends on how much people conflate the two or believe that the one was meant to represent the other.
For something more general look at Midler vs Ford [1], and lots of other similar cases. Ford wanted to use get Midler to sing some of her songs (that Ford owned the copyright to) for a commercial. She refused, so they hired an impersonator. They never stated it was Midler in the commercial, but nonetheless were sued and lost for abuse of 'rights of personality' even for content they owned the copyright to! Uncopyrightable characteristics highly associated with a person are still legally protected. Similar stuff with fight refs. Various trademark lines like 'Let's get it on!' or 'Let's get readddy to rumble.' are literally trademarked, but it's probably not even strictly necessary since it would be implicitly protected by rights of personality.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
- the original report by Scarlett said she was approached months ago, and then two days prior to launch of GPT-4o she was approached again
Because of the above, my immediate assumption was that OpenAI definitely did her dirty. But this report from WaPo debunks at least some of it, because the records they have seen show that the voice actor was contacted months in advance prior to OpenAI contacting Scarlett for the first time. (also goes to show just how many months in advance OpenAI is working on projects)
However, this does not dispel the fact that OpenAI did contact Scarlett, and Sam Altman did post the tweet saying "her", and the voice has at least "some" resemblance of Scarlett's voice, at least enough to have two different groups saying that it does, and the other saying that it does not.
I don't think it's less malicious if they decided to copy her voice without her consent, but just didn't tell her until the project was underway, then continued even after she said no.
There's legal precedent that hiring a copycat is not OK, so it's not like proving it was a copycat salvages their situation.
I wouldn't be surprised if the real reason they hired a copycat early is because they realized they'd need far more of Johansson's time than she'd be willing to provide, and the plan was typical SV "ask forgiveness not permission, but do it anyway regardless."
That doesn't matter because it's an impersonation. Ford lost, even though they didn't use Bette Midler's voice either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
"We believe that AI voices should not deliberately mimic a celebrity's distinctive voice — Sky's voice is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson but belongs to a different professional actress using *her own natural speaking voice*"
If you listen to the imitation version linked from that Wikipedia article and the original 1958 you'll hear that they didn't only find a singer that sounded like her, but copied the music and cadence from Bette's version.
I think that's way past what whatever OpenAI did in this case. It would be analogous if they were publishing something that only regurgitated lines Scarlett Johansson is famous for having said in her movies.
But they're not doing that, they just found a person who sounds like Scarlett Johansson.
This would only be analogous to the Ford case if the cover artist in that case was forbidden from releasing any music, including original works, because her singing voice could be confused with Bette Midler's.
Now, would they have done this if Scarlett Johansson wasn't famous? No, but we also wouldn't have had a hundred grunge bands with singers playing up their resemblance to Kurt Cobain if Nirvana had never existed.
So wherever this case lands (likely in a boring private settlement) it's clearly in more of a gray area than the Ford case.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_You_Want_to_Dance
Same way you can't get someone who sounds like a famous celebrity to do voice in a commercial and just let people think it's the famous celebrity when it's not
To me, it sounds like they had the idea to make their AI sound like "her". For the initial version, they had a voice actor that sounds like the movie, as a proof of concept.
They still liked it, so it was time to contact the real star. In the end, it's not just the voice, it would have been the brand, just imagine the buzz they would have got if Scarlett J was the official voice of the company. She said no, and they were like, "too bad, we already decided how she will sound like, the only difference is whether it will be labelled as SJ or not".
In the end, someone probably felt like it's a bit too dodgy as it resemblance was uncanny, they gave it another go, probably ready to offer more money, she still refused, but in the end, it didn't change a thing.
I think this possibility doesn't receive enough attention, there is a class of people who've figured out that they can say the most scandalous things online and it's a net positive because it generates so much exposure. (As a lowly middle class employee you can't do this - you just get fired and go broke - but at a certain level of wealth and power you're immune from that.) It is the old PT Barnum principle, "They can say whatever they want about me as long as they spell my name right." Guys like Trump and Musk know exactly what they're doing. Why wouldn't Sam?
Johansson's complaint is starting to look a little shaky especially if you remove that "her" Tweet from the equation. I wouldn't put this past Altman at all, he knows exactly what happened and what didn't inside OpenAI, so maybe he knew she didn't have a case and decided to play Sociopathic 3D Chess with her (and beat her in one round)
In order to sue, there need to be damages, and if they didn’t copy the voice then the rest doesn’t matter, which sam and team clearly knew and were fast to work with the news. I agree that smart people take advantage of what they can get away with, but this controversy couldn’t have turned out better for increasing brand awareness good or bad (as you say, just like trump and musk know how to do)
Nothing in this article changes the essence of her complaint.
The only real, though partial, rebuttal to her is that OpenAI copied a work product she did for a movie, and the movie was was more than her voice, so it's not totally her own work. So maybe the movie team as a whole has a stronger complaint than the voice actor alone.
She didn't lose any game of wits. She just got done dirty by someone who got away with it. She doesn't need money from them. She has respect from people who matter, SAM and OpenAI behaved badly like big tech always does. If OpenAI permanently stops using Johansson-like Sky voice, she'll win what she wanted.
Of course, anyone whose voice sounds like an AI has the unpleasantness of that experience, and a rich person is more able to endure it than a regular Johansson.
I need 1.5x speeds even if I have to use a worse voice. I am a TTS power user, listening to all online text since 2010s. Maybe GPT-4o has a more flexible voice, perhaps you can just ask it to speak faster.
What if it wasn’t a computer voice model but rather a real-life voice actress that you could pay a few cents to try to imitate Scarlett Johansson’s voice as best as she could?
That’s effectively what’s happening here, and it isn’t illegal.
It guess it also leads to the bigger question: do celebrities own their particular frequency range? Is no one allowed to publicly sound like them? Feels like the AACS DVD encryption key controversy all-over again.
It is more complicated than that. Check out Midler v. Ford Motor Co, or Waits V. Frito Lay.
She's allowed to be a voice actor using her real voice.
Your can point to the "Her" tweet, but it's a pretty flimsy argument.
And besides, it sounds more like Rashida Jones anyway. It's clearly not an impersonation.
I'm not making arguments which are not already explicitly written in my post.
My argument is simple: jorvi commented that you can hire "a real-life voice actress" to "try to imitate Scarlett Johansson’s voice as best as she could", and that is not illegal.
I said that the legality of that is more complicated. What jorvi describes might or might not be illegal based on various factors. And I pointed them towards the two references to support my argument.
I explicitly didn't say in that comment anything about the OpenAI/ScarJo case. You are reacting as if you think that I have some opinion about it. You are wrong, and it would be better if you would not try to guess my state of mind. If I have some opinion about something you will know because I will explicitly state it.
people are allowed to sound like other people. But if you go to actor 1 and say we want to use your voice for our product, and then they say no, and then you go to actor 2 and tell them I want you to sound like actor 1 for our product, and then you release a statement hey you know that popular movie by actor 1 that just used their voice in a context extremely reminiscent of our product?!? Well, listen to what we got: (actor 2 voice presented)
Then you may run into legal problems.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
on edit: assuming that reports I am reading that the actress used for the voicework claimed not to have been instructed to sound like Her vocal work it sounds like it is probably not likely that a suit would be successful.
> That’s effectively what’s happening here, and it isn’t illegal.
Profiting from someone else's likeness is illegal.
e.g.
Vanna White vs Samsung - https://w.wiki/AAUR
Crispin Glover Back to the Future 2 lawsuit - https://w.wiki/AAUT#Back_to_the_Future_Part_II_lawsuit
That was just a few days before launch, right? What was their plan if she said yes at that point? Continue using the "not-her" voice but say it was her? Or did they also have her voice already cloned by then and just needed to flip a switch?
One or the other. It doesn't really matter as SJ herself would not have necessarily been able to make sure it is not her and not a glitch in how the tech work with her voice.
Though admittedly, so does Johansson in "Her". I don't think the voices are very similar but the style is.
As people tend to look up at celebrities and admire them they start associating this with good things and I think this is why they adopted such styles for chatbots.
Why in the world would one expect the more charitable scenario?
It's not necessarily what will prove true at the end of the day but I think we owe people the presumption of innocence.
But when it comes to specific questions that hinge on evidence, I think you have to maintain the typical presumption of innocence, just to balance out the possibilities of mob psychology getting out of control.
It's like, the people dropping leaflets in your physical mailbox are delivering spam, but you wouldn't automatically assume those same people are also trying to scam you and your neighbors by delivering you physical letters meant to trick people into parting with their savings. In both cases, the messages are spam, but one is legal, other is not, and there's a huge gap between them.
Those of us accusing and talking about it have no power -- thus there is literally no harm, and possible good in, putting them on the defense about this.
edit: In fact, the First Amendment of the Constitution essentially directly upholds the idea of "people saying whatever they want" in this regard.
No, you do not owe "corporations, especially those with a tendency, incentive, and history of being ruthless in this way."
Wise up, people.
People don't need to be careful just talking; in fact we generally support the idea of "people saying whatever" in the form of the First Amendment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
But they are subject to right of publicity in many US jurisdictions.
Which, while more like trademark than copyright (the other thing that keeps getting raised as if it should dispose of this issue), is its own area of law, distinct from either trademark or copyright.
> The ONLY way they get in trouble is if they claim to be Morgan Freeman.
That’s…not true. Though such an explicit claim would definitely be a way that they could get in trouble.
https://www.inta.org/topics/right-of-publicity/#:~:text=In%2....
As I understand it, that's essentially OpenAI's defense here.
A more similar context would be: they ask Tom Hanks to create a voice similar to Woody, the cowboy from Toy Story . Tom Hanks says no, Disney says no. Then they ask you to voice their cowboy voice. It's obviously related: they tried the OG, failed, they're going for a copycat after.
But if never approached Tom Hanks or Disney, then there would be room for deniability - without mentions to real names, it would require someone to judge if it's an unauthorized copycat or just a random actor voicing a random cowboy voice.
It was a bad play from their part.
So in your opinion, if a movie needs to have a tall, skinny red head, and then they approach someone who has those qualities and the role is turned down, then it would be illegal to get any other different tall skinny red head.
That sounds absurd to me. If you have a role, obviously the role has qualities and requirements.
And just because person 1 who happens to have those qualities turns you down, it is still valid to get a different person who fulfils your original requirements.
That's not what she said happened. She said they released it anyway before she and Sam could connect, after Sam had reached out, for the second time, two days prior to the release.
Consider when a company recasts a voice actor in something: i.e. the VA Rick and Morty have been replaced, Robin Williams was not the voice of genie in Aladdin 2 or the animated series.
Copying a famous actor’s voice without any kind of agreement at all is something else.
Cases are not a spell you can cast to win arguments, especially when the facts are substantially different.
Just because one is a singer and the other is an actor isn’t the big difference you think it is. Actors do voice over work all the time. Actors in fact get cast for their voice all the time.
Yelling, “Parody!” Isn’t some get out of jail free card, particularly where there is actual case law, even more particularly when there are actual laws to address this very act.
Are they? Where did they advertise this? The voice doesn't even sound that much like ScarJo!
> Just because one is a singer and the other is an actor isn’t the big difference you think it is. Actors do voice over work all the time. Actors in fact get cast for their voice all the time.
It's a very big difference when the jurisprudence here rests on how substantial the voice is as a proportion of the brand, especially in the presence of the other disanalogies.
> Yelling, “Parody!” Isn’t some get out of jail free card, particularly where there is actual case law, even more particularly when there are actual laws to address this very act.
Sure -- If you read that back, I'm clearly not doing that. An impression in a parody in the artist's unique style (Waits) was a case where it was a violation of publicity rights. This is radically different from that. It's not clear that Midler and Waits have much bearing on this case at all.
When discovery happens and there’s a trail of messages suggesting either getting ScarJo or finding someone that sounds enough like her this isn’t going to look good with all the other events in timeline.
If it goes to court, they’ll settle.
I'm not a lawyer, but this seems unfair to the voice actor they did use, and paid, who happens to sound like ScarJo (or vice versa!)
So if I sound like a famous person, then I cant monetize my own voice? Who's to say it isnt the other way around, perhaps it is ScarJo that sounds like me and i'm owed money?
The problem here is that someone inside of OpenAI wanted to create a marketing buzz around a new product launch and capitalize on a movie. In order to do that they wanted a voice that sounded like that movie. They hired a voice actor that sounded enough like ScarJo to hedge against actually getting the actor to do it. When she declined they decided to implement their contingency plan.
If they're liable is for a jury to decide, but the case precedent that I've seen, along with the intent, wouldn't look good if I were on that jury.
If her customers can get sued for using her voice, then this voice actor can never get another job and can never get paid again -- all because she happens to sound like ScarJo. That seems unfair to the voice actor.
If you had a voice like Scarlett, and you were hired to create the voice of an AI assistant, there's no legal problem - as long as the voice isn't marketed using references to Scarlett.
However, in this case, the voice is similar to Scarlett's, AND they referenced a popular movie where Scarlett voiced an AI assistant, and named the assistant in a way that is evocative of Scarlett's name, and reached out to Scarlett wanting to use her voice. It is those factors that make it legally questionable, as it appears that they knowingly capitalized on the voice's similarity to Scarlett's without her permission.
It is about intent, and how the voice is marketed. Voice sounds like a famous person = fine, voice sounds like a famous person and the voice is marketed as being similar to the famous person's = not fine.
It is not a clear-cut 'this is definitely illegal' in this case, it is a grey area that a court would have to decide on.
> Who's to say it isnt the other way around, perhaps it is ScarJo that sounds like me and i'm owed money?
It seems like you don't get the fundamental principal underlying "right of publicity" laws if you are asking this question.
Seems she is prevented from doing work, if companies can get sued for hiring/using voice actors who sounds like ScarJo, then any voice actor who sounds like ScarJo has effectively been de-platformed. Similarly, imagine I look very much like George Clooney -- if George Clooney can sue magazines for featuring my handsome photos, then I lose all ability to model for pay. (Strictly hypothetical, I am a developer, not a fashion model.)
>> It seems like you don't get the fundamental principal underlying "right of publicity" laws if you are asking this question.
Totally, i have no idea of the laws here, but very curious to understand what OpenAI did wrong here.
>Totally, i have no idea of the laws here, but very curious to understand what OpenAI did wrong here.
It is illegal to profit off the likeness of others. If it wasn't, what's to stop any company from hiring any impersonator to promote that company as the person they are impersonating?
> Is it a crime for voice actors to sound similar to, say, James Earl Jones?
And the answer is, of course: It depends. For one thing, it depends on whether the company using the sound-alike's voice are in a business closely related to the theme of Star Wars, and whether they market whatever it is they're marketing by referring to Jones' iconic performance as Vader. ("<PANT> ... <PANT>") If they do that, then yes, it most likely is.
So you are trying to tell me there was zero chance that this film director was not aware of the movie "Her" and may have been influenced by it?
Why doesn't the voice sound like the Enterprise's computer from TNG? I don't mean sound, I mean cadence, more professional and not like a sexline operator.
The question is whether or not OAI traded on the similarity to Scarlet Js likeness. The “her” tweet raises suspicions.
Let’s say I want to shoot a movie. Id love to have Scarlett star in it. But I can’t afford her, so I hire some b actress that kind of looks like her. What’s wrong with that?
The only way I could see this being wrong is if they then processes the voice of this different person to make it sound more like Scarlett.
How the heck could that not matter?!?
Making the voice similar enough that the public will associate it with the recognition and popularity of the movie is obviously capitalizing on the movie, including Johansson's performance. If they did that intentionally, they owe Johansson (and the movie studio) recompense for that. And Altman's tweet rather obviously shows it can at the very least be argued that such intent was present.
> Let’s say I want to shoot a movie. Id love to have Scarlett star in it. But I can’t afford her, so I hire some b actress that kind of looks like her. What’s wrong with that?
Depends on intent. If that's all you do, then fine. But if you dress your movie up to heavily imply it's a sequel to a movie with Johansson in it, and put the actual name of your "B actress" down in the fine print(1), and then tweet the name of the Johansson movie when yours is released... Do you think movie makers get away with shit like that? Or that they should?
What is it about this that you don't understand? Do you genuinely not see that those are two different things, distinguished by intent? Or did you just not know that intent is often a rather vital part of whether something is legal or not?
___
(1): Or omit it altogether, like this allegedly-existing Sky voice actress is still (last I read, before the weekend) anonymous.
I remain with my point that if they did any processing that made the voice sound more like Scarlett they most definitely should compensate her.
1: https://github.com/RVC-Project/Retrieval-based-Voice-Convers...
2: https://github.com/w-okada/voice-changer
I am impressed
It's either our delusion (you and me) or they have someone in the marketing department who has a really good grasp of how to ride the news cycle wave.
As a result of the negative publicity, most people know OpenAI as the company that steals things from other people. Most of them will never hear that this one time, OpenAI didn't actually do the thing they were accused of doing.
That's the problem with having a repeat liar as a CEO: you lose any credibility for those rare instances when you're actually telling the truth.
That is already the perception of AI in general, especially evident if you reflect back on the Github Copilot launch.
People move on as the usefulness of the next shiny thing fills the void of time.
An ad-blocking generation of people who pirated music and movies with the zeal of a god-given right now complaining about AI taking peoples work. Ok.
If GPTxyz is convenient and makes their life easier, they will use it.
> whose voice do you use?
> It's based on Scarlett Johannson's performance in "Her."
> the actress confirmed that neither Johansson nor the movie “Her” were ever mentioned by OpenAI. The actress’s natural voice sounds identical to the AI-generated Sky voice, based on brief recordings
Given this I don't think anyone at OpenAI did anything wrong in this instance except Sam Altman. After getting explicitly rejected by Johansson he should not have asked again and definitely should not have referenced her character in that tweet. And this whole thing could have been avoided if they just used a different voice for the demo instead of their voice that happened to sound the most like her.
They should have learned from Weird Al. Famously, he technically doesn't need permission to do song parodies but he asks anyway and respects the artist's wishes if they say no.
>> the actress confirmed that neither Johansson nor the movie “Her” were ever mentioned by OpenAI. The actress’s natural voice sounds identical to the AI-generated Sky voice, based on brief recordings
> Given this I don't think anyone at OpenAI did anything wrong in this instance except Sam Altman.
Not necessarily. The OpenAI people could had the internally stated goal of making a soundalike of Johansson, sorted through the applicants to find actress who sounded closest to Johansson, then gave direction to steer the actress's performance to be similar to Johansson's in Her. All the while never mentioning Johansson or her movie to the actress directly.
Maybe they were trying to mimic the precedent of Compaq reverse engineering and cloning the PC BIOS using a "Clean Room."
Did he, though? The character's name was Samantha. The name of the _movie_ was Her.
He never mentioned her by name, he pointed out how the AI demo OpenAI created is similar to the _character_ from Her.
If you don't want to be linked to a character forever, maybe don't act? It's just such a ridiculous statement to make. Like making an argument that no one should talk about Obi Wan because Alec Guinness didn't like being recognized from Star Wars.
And yet Kaparthy (a co-founder of OpenAI) did mention her by name as "the killer app of LLMs", less than 24 hours from the announcement.
> The killer app of LLMs is Scarlett Johansson.
https://x.com/karpathy/status/1790373216537502106
And your example is absurd. A fictional character about fantasy vs a fictional product were on the cusp of creating. I’ve never watched her so can’t comment more.
Are you a mind-reader, or how do you know that that was all he intended?
They are very likely to settle out of court. Investors get a bit anxious with pending litigation.
But I honestly hope Johansson does not. She certainly has the runway to take it all the way. Make them look like fools in open court. Show the people their real colors.
I don't see how the implementation details matter at all.
Are they not allowed to hire a person that sounds like... any famous person?
Aren't others in this thread claiming how similar voices can be and theyre not unqiue?
Here's an alternative explanation that fits the same facts. Sam tweeted "her", not due to the voice, but due the existence of a conversational system that resembled the system in the movie. This primed people to hear Scarlett Johansson's voice in a generically cheerful female voice actor who was contracted over half a year ago. Scarlett's lawyers encourage her to write a public letter, helping Scarlett with the wording, in order to steer the public narrative, in order to place pressure on OpenAI to settle with her financially out of court.
If they had kept the voice then it might seem like they were reacting and possibly caught off-guard. Instead, it looks like they're stepping back, assessing the facts, and proceeding with due caution.
In general, I assume anything a CEO says after a scandal breaks is whatever the crisis management people told him to say.
New theory, HN is a honey pot for dumb people that Y Combinator studies how to make money from.
Previous theory it was a Alzheimer's style "Fake bus stop" used to round up imposter hackers and keep them contained while the real Hackers did stuff.
Not to mention, on the AI Paint thread, there was this heavily upvoted guy saying its servers are paid for by the stock market and tech bubble like some kind of conspiracy theorist, completely ignoring that it's run locally.
I don't know why I keep coming here. I guess it's because I'm addicted. At least on Reddit you could leave subreddits and block people when they get too incomprehensible from your own perspective.
But I have had to cut myself off from a given community because my relationship became unhealthy with it many times. I get that.
Personally I think it's dilluted the hackers from other sites (like me). But your theory sounds much stronger. A lot of new sites and ideas are not pay to win, they are buy to belong. Crypto, 3D printers, gaming forums, PC hardware forums, AI. These communities manifest free marketing and updates in products to convince you they're good for you to buy them.
I found HN great for some things but you did click this link too. This is a celebrity gossip thread and you joined. I found John walkers site from here didn't know about it. https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
'Real hackers' are live on git, maybe twitch. Chill out and listen to what your general peer has to say here and imagine non hackers discussing it. Nobody outside here cares about this drama except Twitter bots. Check out Google trends. https://trends.google.com/trends/trendingsearches/daily?geo=...
If it goes to court I’m sure discovery will unearth a bunch of emails and slack messages pertaining to this as well as documentation about the make up of their training sets and casting and performance notes for the voice talent. Hopefully they’re under legal hold now.
Several possible reasons.
1. They're not actively malicious and have the emotional capacity to feel embarrassed
2. They know they were talking about her voice and making comparisons and that this is A Bad Look and they've had a terrible week PR-wise already
3. Might be a trademark violation, I'm not sure how that law works (in general let alone voice) but there's a reason why Pear Computer had to change their logo
#3 famous people do seem to have some control over their likeness; I don't know how real that control is or anything about how it works, just that it looks like this from the outside. IANAL, so treat that as a claim of analogy not literal.
It's ok for people to just be people. Courts should be held to a higher standard, but that doesn't mean regular people should be expected to act like courts.