OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/05/22/openai-scarlett-johansson-chatgpt-ai-voice/

574 1201 2 years ago

Quote from the Post article:

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.

bawolff• 2 years ago

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?

flutas3• 2 years ago

I heard it when they were showing the demo without any prompting "to listen for it", as did many others.

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...

wokwokwok• 2 years ago

He said, she said.

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. (:

gnabgib• 2 years ago

Huge discussion 2 days ago [0](1497 points, 1001 comments), related [1](141 points, 191 comments)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40421225

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40414249

scoofy• 2 years ago

Actual Washington Post title:

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.

dang• 2 years ago

Ok, we've reverted the title. Submitted title was "OpenAI and Scarlett Johansson's Voice". Thanks!

Ariel_Asura• 2 years ago

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?

echelon• 2 years ago

I think we'll find voices not that unique.

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?

guitarlimeo4• 2 years ago

I agree on the technical aspect.

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.

trevyn• 2 years ago

How can I protect myself in such a situation?

Choose a different career, like maybe public-opinion influencer.

MattGaiser2• 2 years ago

with a unique voice

Is your voice truly unique out of the 8 billion out there in the world? Nobody could plausibly pass as you?

numpad016• 2 years ago

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.

solidasparagus• 2 years ago

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.

The genie's not going back in the bottle.

grugagag3• 2 years ago

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.

fsloth• 2 years ago

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.

gamblor9563• 2 years ago

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.

nottorp• 2 years ago

Who's Charles Dance? :)

As for Scarlett Johansson, I remember her from the Ghost in the Shell the live action movie controversy. Not fondly.

numpad016• 2 years ago

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.

numpad016• 2 years ago

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.

huygens6363• 2 years ago

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?"

pfannkuchen• 2 years ago

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.

hotdogscout2• 2 years ago

A sensational lie spread much quicker than the truth even on HN, with no sign of course correction.

I hope Sam feels fine after so much baseless harassment.

onion2k• 2 years ago

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.

CaptainFever5• 2 years ago

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

boxed5• 2 years ago

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.

The voice actor involved is irrelevant.

gambiting8• 2 years ago

> 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?

kunley• 2 years ago

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

hotdogscout2• 2 years ago

For me it is the blatant disregard for truth people on the internet usually have when dealing with public personalities.

I have the same instinct to criticize hate mobs against him as I have when they're against Anita Sarkeesian or Brianna Wu.

skilled4• 2 years ago

https://archive.is/BNFvh

jrockway• 2 years ago

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...)

pavlov2• 2 years ago

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.

squigz2• 2 years ago

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?

maxglute2• 2 years ago

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.

yorwba• 2 years ago

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.

tibbydudeza• 2 years ago

I know there is some exceptions in US law for use of parody ???.

visarga3• 2 years ago

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.

robertlagrant4• 2 years ago

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.

johnbellone8• 2 years ago

Fair use[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

0110101001• 2 years ago

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.

portaouflop2• 2 years ago

Who cares about this nothingburger

lchengify• 2 years ago

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

contrarian123412• 2 years ago

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"..

derbOac• 2 years ago

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.

somenameforme• 2 years ago

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

throwaway17_17• 2 years ago

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.

tptacek16• 2 years ago

"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."

CRConrad37• 2 years ago

But will either be mentioned by ChatGPT?

bloppe• 2 years ago

Parody is protected in the US. The Simpsons can get away with a lot of stuff because of it

jhbadger• 2 years ago

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.

skilled4• 2 years ago

The thing that worried me initially was that:

- 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.

palad1n• 2 years ago

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.

stingraycharles• 2 years ago

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.

tivert6• 2 years ago

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."

aprilthird2021• 2 years ago

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

serial_dev• 2 years ago

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.

gnicholas11• 2 years ago

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).

dingclancy2• 2 years ago

Sure but Skye is still not SJ.

jorvi• 2 years ago

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.

lupusreal3• 2 years ago

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?

Terretta2• 2 years ago

Sky doesn't sound like the movie, much less "uncanny".

bengale2• 2 years ago

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.

ActionHank• 2 years ago

This will be used as a template by the entertainment industry to screw over so many people.

freejazz13• 2 years ago

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.

eps• 2 years ago

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.

jonathankoren2• 2 years ago

Doesn't matter. Waits v Frito Lay

johnbellone8• 2 years ago

Intent matters.

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.

user_7832• 2 years ago

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.

ZooCow• 2 years ago

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.

pavon• 2 years ago

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.

JCM92• 2 years ago

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.

m3kw92• 2 years ago

We are just nit picking now because we are bored?

tmaly• 2 years ago

Why would they have taken down the voice if they were operating on a level of truth in their favor?

KHRZ2• 2 years ago

"out of respect" for the angry woman rather than argue with her, you never had this problem with a wife/girlfriend?

beeboobaa310• 2 years ago

Is it a crime for voice actors to sound similar to, say, Darth Vader?

CRConrad37• 2 years ago

ITYM

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.

sschueller• 2 years ago

"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.

Sakos• 2 years ago

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.

moi23883• 2 years ago

Yes, how dare another woman have a voice that might somewhat sound like Scarlett?

comfysocks• 2 years ago

Can’t really fault the voice actor for having a specific voice.

The question is whether or not OAI traded on the similarity to Scarlet Js likeness. The “her” tweet raises suspicions.

boxed5• 2 years ago

They asked her. She said no.

moi23883• 2 years ago

Even if they did. How does that matter?

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.

slim2• 2 years ago

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 ?

slim2• 2 years ago

what test data would they use ?

numpad016• 2 years ago

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.

1: https://github.com/RVC-Project/Retrieval-based-Voice-Convers...

2: https://github.com/w-okada/voice-changer

joekinley• 2 years ago

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.

I am impressed

skilled4• 2 years ago

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.

gamblor9563• 2 years ago

It's not very impressive.

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.

frankacter2• 2 years ago

most people know OpenAI as the company that steals things from other people.

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.

Workaccount2• 2 years ago

People literally do not care about theft.

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.

walterbell• 2 years ago

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.

grugagag3• 2 years ago

And what does this imply?

squigz2• 2 years ago

I think you're giving far too much credit to those involved. Not everything is a plot.

huppeldepup• 2 years ago

It _does_ make me wonder whether spin doctoring and plotting will be available as a model in the near future.

ktchg• 2 years ago

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.

FrustratedMonky2• 2 years ago

The New-Coke strategy ?

crimsoneer• 2 years ago

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.

modeless• 2 years ago

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.

tivert6• 2 years ago

> 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."

mwigdahl7• 2 years ago

definitely should not have referenced her character in that tweet.

Did he, though? The character's name was Samantha. The name of the _movie_ was Her.

CRConrad37• 2 years ago

And who was the "her" the title referred to?

seydor2• 2 years ago

The whole thing was absurd. The voice doesnt even sound like her

123yawaworht456• 2 years ago

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.

shalmanese• 2 years ago

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.

seydor2• 2 years ago

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

bluSCALE42• 2 years ago

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.

ApolloFortyNine3• 2 years ago

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.

flutas3• 2 years ago

He never mentioned her by name, he pointed out how the AI demo OpenAI created is similar to the _character_ from Her.

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

bluSCALE42• 2 years ago

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.

CRConrad37• 2 years ago

he pointed out how the AI demo OpenAI created is similar to the _character_ from Her.

Are you a mind-reader, or how do you know that that was all he intended?

xbmcuser• 2 years ago

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

xyst• 2 years ago

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.

SeanAnderson• 2 years ago

Why do you feel OpenAI doesn't have a chance to win in court given the information presented in this WaPo article? It seems fairly conclusive to me.

boxed5• 2 years ago

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.

omnicognate3• 2 years ago

Read up about "Right to publicity" laws or just read the article itself, which explains she may have a strong case against OpenAI here.

moogly• 2 years ago

Technically? Maybe not. In spirit? Sure as heck.

hackerlight• 2 years ago

This could be confirmation bias.

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.

jamespo• 2 years ago

It's an alternative explanation all right

abrookewood• 2 years ago

If they are so confident that they didn't copy her voice, then why did they pull that character/version?

gnicholas11• 2 years ago

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.

dingclancy2• 2 years ago

Sam Altman statement said they pulled the voice out of respect to Scarlett Johansson.

aaron695• 2 years ago

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.

maxbond2• 2 years ago

I'm curious why, if that's what you think about this place, you not coming here?

numpad016• 2 years ago

Frankly speaking, both sounds plausible!

CaptainFever5• 2 years ago

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.

maxbond2• 2 years ago

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.

graphe• 2 years ago

This comment and the replies are extremely insightful. Humans are flawed, just because high IQ Newton invented physics doesn't mean he was good at the fomo of the south sea stock. https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/73/7/30/800801/Isa...

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=...

esjeon• 2 years ago

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?

ml-anon• 2 years ago

Then why pull the voice in the first place?

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.

nusl• 2 years ago

Pulling things at first signs of an outcry seems to be the thing to do. It's hard to know how folks would have reacted had they not pulled it.

ben_w3• 2 years ago

Then why pull the voice in the first place?

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

gnicholas11• 2 years ago

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.'

skepticATX• 2 years ago

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?

DeathArrow3• 2 years ago

In today's climate you are considered guilty until you prove you are innocent. People who accused you don't have to show any proof.

tmalsburg2• 2 years ago

Today's climate, where Silicon Valley billionaires occasionally have to endure some mild pushback.

nhinck34• 2 years ago

In today's climate I can I can infer through OpenAI's past and present actions what their intent was.

sanderjd35• 2 years ago

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.

dharma12• 2 years ago

Props for Scarlett for turning down what was likely a big chunk of change. I can see how being the official voice of AI could turn out to be counter productive for her in the longer run

exo762• 2 years ago

What long run? She is 39 in Hollywood.

dharma12• 2 years ago

I guess the $150m+ nw acts as a bit of a cushion/retirement nest egg. I mean longer run in terms of AI development - if it gets very polarised I’m not sure you want to be the poster girl

kamaal3• 2 years ago

This is bigger than Will Smith turning the role of Neo for the Matrix movie.

Strawberry76• 2 years ago

I think it's pretty obvious that OpenAI had decided at an early stage that the new voice should resemble the voice of SJ in "Her", regardless of which voice actresses they then contacted and in which sequence.

junon2• 2 years ago

Yeah this seems pretty clear to me too. The voice was also overtly horny, way more so than the others are. I say this as a gay man - I was uncomfortable listening to her talk about ISA specifications like she had a fetish for them.

Seemed like an easy "pop culture" win akin to Cortana / Halo and Pacific Rim / GladOS.

danielbln• 2 years ago

As a hetero man, I didn't get the overtly homeyness out of that voice, maybe somewhat flirtatious at most. Are you maybe projecting?

contrarian123412• 2 years ago

I think it's really problematic that the government is protecting voice actor's careers. It's like if they disallowed cars on the roads to protect horse carriages. Clearly with the new technology a whole economic sector is gone and irrelevant over night. Now amateurs and small projects can afford to add good sounding voices to their creations. This is good news in the end

The same goes for actors and their likenesses ... just stop protecting ultra wealthy celebrities. They'll be a bit poorer, but they're going to be okay. You're just holding back progress

I can imagine in a decade some place like China which doesn't care about protecting celebrities will have movies with dozens of Tom Cruises Arnolds and Johansson's and will just be pumping out better quality content at affordable budgets. Young talented directors won't be hamstrung by these legal roadblocks

JumpCrisscross16• 2 years ago

like if they disallowed cars on the roads to protect horse carriages

What? Nobody is banning OpenAI from licensing voices. The censure is on, at the very least, using an unlicensed likeness to promote their new products without compensation. (Assuming Sky truly is a clean-room product.)

Likeness just became a tradeable product. That wasn't true before. The better analogy is in recognising mineral rights, including crude oil, after the utility of it was recognised and traded on [1].

ultra wealthy celebrities

We have a hundred millionaire atop a multi-billion dollar industry fighting a billionaire atop a multi-billion dollar company. Nobody gets to cry poverty.

can imagine in a decade some place like China which doesn't care about protecting celebrities

Would positively love to see Altman try to pull this stunt with Xi Jinping's voice.

[1] https://info.courthousedirect.com/blog/history-of-mineral-ri...

defrost• 2 years ago

I'd like to see him go further again,

deliver all discussions on Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era via an animated Pooh Bear with the voice from the movie.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/23/china_xi_jinping_chat...

contrarian123412• 2 years ago

"Likeness just became a tradeable product. That wasn't true before."

Only because the government is making it that way. It's not an inevitability. It's a shortsighted move that doesn't add any value to society. It only serves to make celebrities even more wealthy

persnickety2• 2 years ago

What makes a likeness a likeness?

A measure of similarity? Then I demand all people sounding like me to license their voice from me.

A claim that the voice originates from a certain person? Then you don't need any licensing in this case.

zirgs• 2 years ago

Imagine if switchboard operator careers were protected. We still would not have the Internet today.

cruise9• 2 years ago

That's a pretty generous take on the situation. Sam Altman isn't some robin hood character taking from the rich to give to the poor. If AI companies can keep operating with impunity, taking as much data as they want with no compensation for the creators, or consequence for infringement, that's not good.

I agree that the technology is great, and it will empower small creators, but I'm also worried about the cowboy behaviour of all these tech billionaires.

contrarian123412• 2 years ago

In this context they aren't "creators" because they don't create anything. These actors are not being compensated, b/c they're not actually performed any additional work or doing any acting

If you record my voice at a conference and then create a synthetic replica.. why would I care? You didn't make me do any additional work or anything

CRConrad37• 2 years ago

Said #9 of those Chinese Tom Cruise clones... ;-)

(No no, you're perfectly right [except perhaps about "the technology is great, and it will empower small creators"], but yagotta admit, your example in justaposition with your user id is funny.)

TrackerFF4• 2 years ago

It boils down to dollars and cents.

Why should the creative sources (artists, actors, writers, etc.) be left out of the cut, while the tech companies are reaping the rewards?

"But those stars are rich, they'll survive."

Yeah, maybe - but the creative world is 0.001% wealthy people, and the rest being people that barely get by - and could earn more money by doing pretty much anything else.

I get the argument about copyright protections stifling progress, but it bugs me something fierce that people here are essentially saying it's OK for the AI/ML creators to become filthy rich, while the people they are ripping off should just do something else.

contrarian123412• 2 years ago

They won't become filthy rich based of any one person's voice b/c anyone else can create a synthetic replica as well (unless they have some secret training data or something). It becomes commodity and as free as the air. Voice acting ceases to be a real career but in exchange it becomes accessible to everyone for pennies

jonathanstrange4• 2 years ago

The vast majority of all voice actors are piss poor, not ultra wealthy celebrities. The ultra wealthy celebrities just happen to be the only ones who could legally defend themselves and can create a media fuzz.

You're basically suggesting that it's okay to copy anyone's voice and appearance without ever giving them compensation and without regard to personality rights. That's insane. Even for someone who thinks this should be allowed in principle (I certainly don't think so), there would need to be strict safeguards. Or, do you want your person and voice to appear in a commercial for <insert organization, product, or cause you don't support at all and despise>?

contrarian123412• 2 years ago

As long as it's clear it's not actually me and I'm not personally endorsing the product then what is the problem? Here you are talking to OpenAI's system and it's clear Scarlett isn't personally answer you and the answers don't represent her or her views

chipweinberger• 2 years ago

People see what they want to see.

If it wasn't for us being biased by the surrounding circumstances I don't think people would have confused their voices. Their voices are not that similar. I probably personally know people with a voice as similar to SJ as Sky's. You probably do too.

The voice actress says the same: "I’ve never been compared to her by the people who do know me closely."

But then suddenly a story emerges and their voices are indistinguishable. All of these extra details shouldn't have even mattered.

DeathArrow3• 2 years ago

People see what they want to see.

Sounds like a female. Sounds like a white person. Sounds like between 30 and 40. It must be SJ.

sanderjd35• 2 years ago

If she were not the voice actress in the smash hit movie that their product is directly inspired by, then this would be a great point!

Recursing• 2 years ago

Everyone mentions the "her" tweet, but I'm surprised to see nobody mention this tweet from ex-OpenAI employee Karpathy: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1790373216537502106

If it sounds nothing like her, and there was no intent to make it sound like her, why would he tweet "The killer app of LLMs is Scarlett Johansson"?

Many people made the comparison right after it was released https://x.com/search?q=scarjo%20until%3A2024-05-14&src=typed... and https://x.com/search?q=johansson%20until%3A2024-05-14&src=ty...

sebzim45003• 2 years ago

Because the functionality is extremely similar to the AI depicted in Her?

GaggiX7• 2 years ago

Because of "Her" I imagine and all the memes about GPT-4o. The "Her" and GPT-4o memes I always thought of them as "they both have a real-time charming female AI assistant" and not like they have the same voice.

ratg13• 2 years ago

the tweet, plus all of the last minute trying to get scarlett to sign off on it signals an intent to try and make it sound like "her"

why be an apologist?

OpenAI was given an opportunity by Scarlett to prove that they did not intend to make it sound like her, and instead of responding their choice was to take down the voice. (yet another signal)

I think you'd have to be willfully ignorant to believe there wasn't some intent here.

Whether or not it's legal to copy someone's likeness in this fashion is another story.

sanderjd35• 2 years ago

"the surrounding circumstances" are relevant to the question.

volleygman180• 2 years ago

I thought it sounded like SJ when I watched the demo live https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40345775&p=6#40346221

mwigdahl7• 2 years ago

Another data point: I didn't.

CRConrad37• 2 years ago

Or, as the case may be, hear what they want to Her-- eh, hear.

throwaway1153• 2 years ago

This whole thing is starting to feel like another Sam Altman spotlight production. There's enough evidence to show no wrongdoing, but it was handled in a way to make people think there was a scandal. Maximum spotlight for relatively low risk. I wonder if people will get tired of being jerked around like this.

LewisVerstappen2• 2 years ago

I honestly don't understand how delusional you have to be to think OpenAI wanted this to happen.

portaouflop2• 2 years ago

I honestly don’t understand why people care about this story at all.

zecg• 2 years ago

It's a very cheap way to get people to realize gpt4-o is something new.

shiandow• 2 years ago

I mean clearly having Scarlett Johansson on board was plan A.

Bringing the voice offline and then revealing it was a recording of someone else who coincidentally sounded exactly the same is definitely plan B or C though.

I don't understand how you can trust OpenAI so much to think it was all an accident.

XorNot4• 2 years ago

If I didn't much care for my critics, then letting them invent a lot out of story I can rebut easily is worth waiting a few days, knowing full well I can publish it widely whenever I want.

An ordinary person worries all the time about dealing with the legal system. A big company does it all the time.

pietmichal• 2 years ago

I honestly don't understand how delusional you have to be to not think OpenAI wanted this to happen.

xpe2• 2 years ago

I honestly don't understand how delusional you have to be to think OpenAI wanted this to happen.

(1) I've become tired of the "I honestly don't understand" prefix. Is the person saying it genuinely hoping to be shown better ways of understanding? Maybe, maybe not, but I'll err on the side of charitability.

(2) So, if the commenter above is reading this: please try to take all of this constructively. There are often opportunities to recalibrate one's thinking and/or write more precisely. This is not a veiled insult; I'm quite sincere. I'm also hoping the human ego won't be in the way, which is a risky gamble.

(3) Why is the commenter so sure the other person is delusional? Whatever one thinks about the underlying claim, one would be wise to admit one's own fallibility and thus uncertainty.

(4) If the commenter was genuinely curious why someone else thought something, it would be better to not presuppose they are "delusional". Doing that makes it very hard to curious and impairs a sincere effort to understand (rather than dismiss).

(5) It is muddled thinking to lump the intentions of all of "OpenAI" into one claimed agent with clear intentions. This just isn't how organizations work.

(6) (continuing from (5)...) this isn't even how individuals work. Virtually all people harbor an inconsistent mess of intentions that vary over time. You might think this is hair-splitting, but if you want to _predict_ why people do specific irrational things, you'll find this level of detail is required. Assuming a perfect utility function run by a perfect optimizer is wishful thinking and doesn't match the experimental evidence.

unraveller• 2 years ago

Grab 'em by the nothing burger.

resolutebat• 2 years ago

I'm genuinely not sure what you're trying to say here. Are you claiming that this was somehow engineered by Altman on purpose to draw attention, because all publicity is good publicity? Or engineered by his enemies to throw mud at Altman, because if you throw enough some of it will stick?

Occam's Razor argues that Sam simply wanted ScarJo's voice, but couldn't get it, so they came up with a legally probably technically OK but ethically murky clone.

bayindirh2• 2 years ago

they came up with a legally probably technically OK but ethically murky clone.

Isn't what OpenAI does all the time? Do ethically murky things, and when people react, move the goal posts by saying "Well, it's not illegal now, is it?".

flexie• 2 years ago

It's not a clone. What is ethically murky about it?

You want Brad Pitt for your movie. He says no. You hire Benicio Del Toro because of the physical resemblence. Big deal.

Having seen "Her" and many other Scarlet Johansson movies, I didn't think for a second that GPT-4o sounded like her. On the contrary, I wondered why they had chosen the voice of a middle aged woman, and whether that was about being woke. It wasn't until social media went hysterical, I realized that the voices were sort of similar.

throwaway1153• 2 years ago

I would like to think that a normal person, having not been able to hire voice work from a specific well-known actor, and wanting to avoid any image of impropriety, would use a completely different voice instead. Sam isn't dumb, he knew the optics of this choice, but he chose it anyways, and here we all are, talking about OpenAI again.

ImHereToVote2• 2 years ago

I think people will get really sick of all the drama once the paperclips start chiming.

throwaway2112• 2 years ago

Clippy was ahead of his/her/its time.

JumpCrisscross16• 2 years ago

for relatively low risk

This was rocket fuel for activists trying to get a nationwide personality rights law on the books. That would almost certainly increase costs for OpenAI.

preommr• 2 years ago

That would almost certainly increase costs for OpenAI.

And every one of it's competitors. I think regulatory capture would be just as much, if not more, of a victory for OpenAI.

SilverBirch2• 2 years ago

I don't think you understand. It's extremely well established in law, you can't approach someone to voice an advert for you, get told no, and then hire an impersonator to do it. Take all the AI hype bullshit and the cult of personality bullshit out of it. What Altman did is very standard and very clearly not allowed. He will end up paying for this in monetary terms, and paying further for it in the reputation damage - in that no one can trust OpenAI to conduct business in good faith.

xpe2• 2 years ago

It's extremely well established in law, you can't approach someone to voice an advert for you, get told no, and then hire an impersonator to do it.

Can you explain and/or cite the legal basis here? What cases? What law?

mwigdahl7• 2 years ago

This assumes that the voice actress was an impersonator. By her own statements, no one who knows her has said that her voice sounds like Scarlett Johansson (personally, I agree). And she was auditioned and hired before SJ was even approached. I don't think that this falls under the "very standard" scenario you reference.

sanderjd35• 2 years ago

The evidence shows wrongdoing with ass-covering.

jojobas• 2 years ago

You don't get the fame of being the psychopath among the Silicon Valley CEOs for nothing.

khazhoux2• 2 years ago

The press says Sky voice is indistinguishable from Scarlett Johansson, but I hear zero similarities to her voice in any of her films. Besides, of course, that it is a standard-issue unaccented white anglo female.

flumpcakes3• 2 years ago

Sounds only like Scarlett Johansson to me. I watch a lot of TV and film and can't think of a single person it sounds like other than Scarlett Johansson. I think the same would be true for most people not in the US. The tweets (one referencing Scarlett Johansson by name, and one from Sam just saying "her" are also confirming my bias here.)

In all honesty, I thought this was just another thing AI vacuumed up without thought. Weird how when it's a "real" celebrity's work that gets put through the AI sausage machine people get skittish.

khazhoux2• 2 years ago

Can you post a link to the audio you think sounds like her? I’m very curious

croes• 2 years ago

Maybe we should wait.

Everything OpenAI and Altman related seems to have multiple layers like an onion.

If we wait long enough we might get documents which show they uses Scarlett Johansson's voice but hired an actress to claim it's hers.

One month later it might be the opposite again.

In times of AI fakes real evidence is hard to find.

justeoghan• 2 years ago

I never comment on HN I’ve just always been a long time lurker but I feel like I’m going crazy here reading comments.

SJ is not the “AI” portrayed in the movie her. And AFAIK she does not in fact have all the same idiosyncrasies and tones in real life as the voice does in the movie because she was in fact directed to act like that.

Not only that but the voices are not the same because there was another actress for sky as we have seen.

To me It seems as if the case for SJ is DOA unless it comes out somehow that they in fact trained on her voice specifically. But since that doesn’t seem like the case I have no idea how SJ can legally own all voices that sound like hers.

It would obviously be a different story if OpenAI were saying that sky was SJ but that’s not the case. To me the question should be is “can the studio own the character in her that openAI was copying and any similar things”. Which given that systems like SIRI were already out there in the world when the movie came out and we knew this tech was on the way. The answer should be no but IANAL.

I’m not a huge fan of OpenAI anymore and I think they deserve criticism for many things. But this situation isn’t one of them.

Clarification: Of course if it turns out that they in fact trained on SJ or altered the voice to be more like hers then I’d think differently. I still think the studio has more of a claim though look from the outside and not being a lawyer.

Edit: clarification

pseudosavant4• 2 years ago

Exactly. Lots of voices sound like other peoples’ voices. We aren’t that unique.

SJ doesn’t get to own the voice rights to everyone that sounds at all like her just because she is famous.

taytus2• 2 years ago

What about the back and forth trying to hire her, and she refusing?

Sounds like: "Eh nevermind, we are going to use it anyway and BTW, I'm going to tweet 'HER' "

You don't think that will have no weight whatsoever in a lawsuit?

nicce4• 2 years ago

It is not about the voice. Rather using the fame of known actress to boost the product. If your inner motive is to sound like her because she is well-known, differences in voice does not matter much.

apetrovic• 2 years ago

So if I have a company that sells, say, manure, I can search and hire a voice actress that sounds exactly like Scarlett to promote me in radio ads? And write a tweet that vaguely implies that it's really her?

foobar_______• 2 years ago

Exactly. I barely know who this actress is. To me, it sounds like the tens of thousands of other white american voices. How is the remotely too similar?

mondrian2• 2 years ago

Well as the article states, there’s legal precedent protecting actors from having their voices “impersonated” by other actors. The fact that Altman tweeted “her” and contacted Johansson can make the case for the intent to impersonate.

Pedro_Ribeiro2• 2 years ago

What if that's just the VA's natural voice? Must she stop doing VA?

chrisjj3• 2 years ago

Well as the article states, there’s legal precedent protecting actors from having their voices “impersonated” by other actors.

The article doesn't state that. It says that about singers. Very different.

column2• 2 years ago

It's not a question of owning all voices that sound like her, it's a question of "are customers deceived into thinking it is her" and "does it affect SJ negatively to be associated with this sound alike" when her income comes partly from her distinctive voice (much like Morgan Freeman). Sam Altman tweeting "Her" right before the announcements is what builds the case for SJ.

Imagine we hired a Leo Messi look alike and made him play football badly or something worse, if viewers can clearly tell it's not him it falls under parody but if we use camera trickery to keep a fooling doubt, we could be in legal trouble.

johtso• 2 years ago

I think Morgan Freeman is a useful comparison to make. Imitations of his voice have been used in a lot of political campaign videos (not sure how many of them got permission). An imitation of his voice was also used in a UK "morethan" advert where they did seek permission and pay him. Another highly popular AI voice would be David Attenborough, used in any number of videos.

kleiba2• 2 years ago

But is that the point? Here is a relevant precedence, for instance, that may or may not change your mind:

Tom Waits is a singer known for his raspy singing voice. Back in the late 1980s, Frito-Lay, Inc., the makes of Doritos, thought it was a great idea to run an ad in which the music had the atmosphere and feel of a Tom Waits song. Except the professional singer they hired for that got the job done a bit too well: the sounds of his voice in the commercial was so close to Tom Waits' work (he had for ten years sang in a band covering Tom Waits songs) that in November 1988, Waits successfully sued Frito-Lay and the advertising company Tracy-Locke Inc., for voice misappropriation under California law and false endorsement under the Lanham Act [1].

Now, when you hear Tom Waits speak in interviews, I find that his voice does not sound nearly as raspy as in his performances. But the point is that it does not matter so much whether OpenAI used the actual voice of Johansson or hired someone to imitate her performance.

Given the fact that Johansson was initially contacted by OpenAI to provide her voice and declined, we can surely assume that the selection of the particular voice actress they ended up using was no coincidence.

[1] http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/communications...

ApolloFortyNine3• 2 years ago

Given the fact that Johansson was initially contacted by OpenAI to provide her voice and declined

This order is wrong according to the article, the VA was contracted before ever reaching out to SJ.g

Additionally here is a relevant anecdote, for instance, that may or may not change your mind?

In a statement from the Sky actress provided by her agent, she wrote that at times the backlash “feels personal being that it’s just my natural voice and I’ve never been compared to her by the people who do know me closely.”

It would suck to be blacklisted from your career because your voice may sound too similar to another famous person, if viewed from a certain light.

newaccount742• 2 years ago

because she was in fact directed to act like that

It's still Scarlet Johansons voice and acting. The same role with the same lines read by different actors would be very different. Imagine for example that they would have cast Tilda Swinton for Samantha. Even with the same script it would probably end up a very different character. Actors aren't interchangeable.

It's very clear that OpenAI was trying to make ChatGPT sound like Samantha from Her. Whether they used Scarlet Johansons voice to train, or excerpts from the movie, or had writers come up with typical responses that sound similar to Samantha are details, and it's up to the lawyers to figure out whether this is legal or not.

But the undisputable fact is that OpenAI took heavy inspiration from a movie, and did so without permission. You could argue that taking inspiration from a popular movie is fair game, but I'm not sure where the line is between "inspiration" and a blatant rip-off.

jes51992• 2 years ago

in fact, the movie was originally recorded with Samantha Morton doing the voice of the AI, but she was replaced with Johansson last minute!

beefnugs• 2 years ago

The point is : for a little podcast to use some AI to make a couple of ephemeral jokes about real people should absolutely be allowed and might be one of the few moral use cases of AI. (see dudesy podcast humor like george carlin standup and tom brady standup)

But for a massive tech company, to fuck over an individual artist in such a blatantly disrespectful way is hugely different.

omayomay• 2 years ago

yeah but, "kind of" copied, and samalt reinforced that with refering to "her" in this tweet.

samalt is walking in the shadows of ethical/non-ethical line and he seems obviously is proficient in that.

however, even in such cases he does not hesitate to walk in the border of non-ethical is worrisome for the future of the ethics in ai.

DeathArrow3• 2 years ago

Some people die due to hunger, some people die due to wars, some people die due to curable diseases, but somehow, what matters most for some folks is whether OpenAI copied the voice of Scarlett Johansson.

Human mind is a curious place.

danparsonson• 2 years ago

Some of us can hold more than one thought in our head at once.

sanderjd35• 2 years ago

There is no implication anywhere that this is "what matters most" to anyone.

omnicognate3• 2 years ago

Comments full of people reading the headline and assuming that what OpenAI did here is fine because it's a different actress, but that's not how "Right of publicity" (*) laws work. The article itself explains that there is significant legal risk here:

Mitch Glazier, the chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, said that Johansson may have a strong case against OpenAI if she brings forth a lawsuit.
He compared Johansson’s case to one brought by the singer Bette Midler against the Ford Motor Co. in the 1980s. Ford asked Midler to use her voice in ads. After she declined, Ford hired an impersonator. A U.S. appellate court ruled in Midler’s favor, indicating her voice was protected against unauthorized use.
But Mark Humphrey, a partner and intellectual property lawyer at Mitchell, Silberberg and Knupp, said any potential jury probably would have to assess whether Sky’s voice is identifiable as Johansson.
Several factors go against OpenAI, he said, namely Altman’s tweet and his outreach to Johansson in September and May. “It just begs the question: It’s like, if you use a different person, there was no intent for it to sound like Scarlett Johansson. Why are you reaching out to her two days before?” he said. “That would have to be explained.”

* A.K.A. "Personality rights": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights

scoot2• 2 years ago

They contacted Johansson after the Sky voice was created, they didn’t create it because she declined.

The voice actor isn’t a Johansson imitator, and the voice isn’t an imitation.

The only similarity between the Sky voice and Johansson’s is that it’s a white American female, so by your logic a significant percentage of the US population has a case.

dragonelite• 2 years ago

Imaging this to be such a legal minefield, can't sell my own voice because a celeb sounds a bit alike as my own voice.

greg_V• 2 years ago

The jury will decide on the latter.

At any rate, Altman made clear allusions to hint that they are capable of synthesizing ScarJo's voice as a product feature. The actress retaliated saying she verbally did not consent, and now OpenAI's defense is that they hired a different actress anyway.

...which means they lied to everyone else on the capabilities of the tech, which is y'know, even worse

gnicholas11• 2 years ago

The only similarity between the voice and Johansson’s is that it’s female, so by your logic half of California has a case.

My understanding was that the voices sound quite similar. I haven't heard the original Sky voice so don't know. Are there any samples online?

hyfgfh• 2 years ago

her

helsinkiandrew2• 2 years ago

They contacted Johansson after the Sky voice was created, they didn’t create it because she declined.

Her statement says otherwise:

"Last September, I received an offer from Sam Altman, who wanted to hire me to voice the current ChatGPT 4.0 system. He told me that he felt that by my voicing the system, I could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and Al. He said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people.

https://twitter.com/BobbyAllyn/status/1792679435701014908

huxley2• 2 years ago

Hmmm. This isn’t voice acting though. I suspect that we’ll find that OpenAI used thousands of Johansson’s voice samples for general training to give the voice a “Her” feel and then found someone with a similar voice for fine tuning but had Johansson said yes, they could then have had her do it instead.

If the records show that they did train Sky with Johansson’s voice samples it will be an interesting case.

gnicholas11• 2 years ago

The Midler case is readily distinguishable. From Wikipedia:

Ford Motor created an ad campaign for the Mercury Sable that specifically was meant to inspire nostalgic sentiments through the use of famous songs from the 1970s sung by their original artists. When the original artists refused to accept, impersonators were used to sing the original songs for the commercials. Midler was asked to sing a famous song of hers for the commercial and refused. Subsequently, the company hired a voice-impersonator of Midler and carried on with using the song for the commercial, since it had been approved by the copyright-holder. [1]

If you ask an artist to sing a famous song of hers, she says no, and you get someone else to impersonate her, that gets you in hot water.

If you (perhaps because you are savvy) go to some unknown voice actress, have her record a voice for your chatbot, later go to a famous actress known for one time playing a chatbot in a movie, and are declined, you are in a much better position. The tweet is still a thorn in OA's side, of course, but that's not likely to be determinative IMO (IAAL).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

marcus_holmes9• 2 years ago

The actress did impersonate Her though.

It's not just a random "voice for your chatbot", it's that particularly breathy, chatty, voice that she performed for the movie.

I would agree with you completely if they'd created a completely different voice. Even if they'd impersonated a different famous actress. But it's the fact that Her was about an AI, and this is an AI, and the voices are identical. It's clearly an impersonation of her work.

moralestapia8• 2 years ago

The tweet is still a thorn in OA's side, of course, but that's not likely to be determinative IMO (IAAL).

It amounts to nothing as it was a single word and they could spin that any way they want, it's even a generic word, lol. The "worst" interpretation on that tweet could be "we were inspired by said movie to create a relatable product" which is not an unlawful thing to do.

makeitdouble• 2 years ago

The order of the events is different, but it still comes down to whether OA had a specific voice in mind when building the chatbot.

By your logic, I could go find a Tim Cook looking and sounding guy, make a promotion video with him praising my new startup, ping Tim Cook to check if by any chance he wouldn't miraculously be willing to do me a favor to avoid me all the trouble in the first place, but still go on and release my video ads without any permission.

"I did all the preparation way before asking the celebrity" wouldn't be a valid defense.

helsinkiandrew2• 2 years ago

later go to a famous actress known for one time playing a chatbot in a movie, and are declined, you are in a much better position

But they asked her first!:

https://twitter.com/BobbyAllyn/status/1792679435701014908

So its: ask Johansson, get declined, ask casting directors for the type of voice actors they are interested in, listened to 400 voices, choose one that sounds like the actor, ask Johansson again, get declined again, publish with a reference to Johansson film, claim the voice has nothing todo with Johansson.

[EDIT] Actually it looks like they selected the Sky actor before they asked Johansson and claim that she would have been the 6th voice, its still hard to believe they didn't intend it to sound like the voice in her though:

https://openai.com/index/how-the-voices-for-chatgpt-were-cho...

ig1• 2 years ago

The tweet + approach is probably sufficient to bring a lawsuit and get into discovery and then it'll come down to if there's a smoking gun documents (e.g. internal emails comparing the voice to Her, etc.)

It's likely that someone internally must have noticed the similarity so there's like some kind of comms around it so it very much will depend on what was written in those conversations.

weinzierl2• 2 years ago

There are probably a number of other cases. The one I remember is when Sega asked Lady Miss Kier of Deee-Lite fame to use her public image for a game. Nothing come out of it but Sega made the character Ulala[1] anyway. If you grew up in the 90s the characters name was strongly connected to Lady Miss Kier's catch phrase, but unfortunately she lost the suit and had to pay more than half a million.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulala_(Space_Channel_5)

dghughes• 2 years ago

Wouldn't that apply to entertainers like Rich Little whose entire career was him doing his best to exactly impersonate famous peoples' voices and mannerisms?

snowwrestler• 2 years ago

Pulling the voice when ScarJo complained is not a good look. I’m sure her attorneys would be very excited to do discovery around that decision should it come to trial.

It won’t though, this is primarily a PR problem for OpenAI. Which is still a real problem when their future product development depends entirely on everyone giving them tons of data.

joshspankit• 2 years ago

Counter-intuitively, I think this puts Johansson in a stronger position.

OpenAI did not want to copy her the actress, they wanted to copy HER the performance from the movie.

staticautomatic2• 2 years ago

Also a lawyer, and the Middler case is apparently not understood so narrowly. The possible chilling effect on employability of actors who happen to look or sound just like already famous actors rankled me, too, and I really got into it with my entertainment law professor (who has had some quite high profile clients). His advice in no uncertain terms was basically “Sorry to those actors, but if you try to get away with hiring one of them knowing they’re likely to be confused with someone more famous, you’re stupid.”

moralestapia8• 2 years ago

You misunderstand how personality rights work.

Called it in the other thread and calling it in this one, there is no wrongdoing on OpenAI's side.

Looking/sounding like somebody else (even if its famous) is not prosecutable. Scarlet Johansson has nothing in this case, whether people like it or not. That's the reality.

eynsham• 2 years ago

Who said it was ‘prosecutable’?

codingdave• 2 years ago

whether people like it or not. That's the reality.

That is exactly it - people do not like how OpenAI is acting. Whether or not there is legal action to be had is an interesting tangent, but not the actual point - OpenAI's actions are ticking people off. Just because something is legal does not mean it is the right thing to do.

omnicognate3• 2 years ago

Nobody said looking/sounding like someone else is "prosecutable", and this willfully obtuse reading is getting annoying.

Many people here, including you, seem to be under the impression that a person who sounds like a celebrity can, because they are not that celebrity, do whatever they want with their voice regardless of whether or not they seem to be passing off as or profiting from the persona of that celebrity. This is not the case.

When others point this out many people, again including you, then go "so you're saying the fact that someone sounds like a celebrity means they can't do anything with their voice - how absurd!", and that isn't the case either, and nobody is saying it.

This binary view is what I'm calling obtuse. The intent matters, and that is not clear-cut. There are some things here that seem to point to intent on OpenAI's part to replicate Her. There are other things that seem to point away from this. If this comes to a court case, a judge or jury will have to weigh these things up. It's not straightforward, and there are people far more knowledeable in these matters than me saying that she could have a strong case here.

People have now said this an absurd number of times and yet you seem to be insisting on this binary view that completely ignores intent. This is why I am calling it willfully obtuse.

If the above are misrepresentations of your argument then please clarify, but both seemed pretty clear from your posts. If instead you take the view that what matters here is whether there was intent to profit from Scarlett Johannson's public persona then we don't disagree. I have no opinions on whether they had intent or not, but I think it very much looks like they did, and whether they did would be a question for a court (alongside many others, such as whether it really does sound like her) if she were to sue, not that there is any indication she will.

Edit: And I should say IANAL of course, and these legal questions are complex and dependent on jurisdiction. California has both a statutory right and a common law one. Both, I think, require intent, but only the common law one would apply in this case as the statutory one explicity only applies to use of the person's actual voice. (That seems a bit outdated in today's deepfake ridden world, but given the common law right protected Midler from the use of an impersonator perhaps that is considered sufficient.)

https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/california-right-publicity-...

Steko• 2 years ago

You misunderstand how personality rights work .. Called it in the other thread

One of the great things about HN is you get all kinds of experts from every field imaginable.

is not prosecutable

Yikes.

hatenberg• 2 years ago

All we need is discovery. They’ll settle before that because we all know they are swimming in dirt.

sheepscreek• 2 years ago

Here’s the thing though - if I was OpenAI, I’d be more interested in the actor sounding like the voice agent in Her, than Scarlett Johansen.

After all, Scarlett was playing a role in the movie (lending her voice to it), and they wanted to replicate this acted out role.

If the intent alone mattered, OpenAI should be in the clear. More so if they never specially instructed this voice actor to “sound like Scarlett”.

On the other hand, Sama reaching out to Scarlett directly over a number of times doesn’t lend a good look. Perhaps they felt that Scarlett has already done it (acted out as a voice agent they were trying to bring to life) and she would truly understand what they were going for.

Maybe, it was also a bit for marketing and the buzz-worthy story it might generate (“OpenAI worked with ScarJo to create their life-like AI voice. Scarlett was also the voice behind the AI in “Her”).

However, I’m not a lawyer and the the law could very well view this more favourably towards Scarlett.

IanCal2• 2 years ago

> Several factors go against OpenAI, he said, namely Altman’s tweet and his outreach to Johansson in September and May. “It just begs the question: It’s like, if you use a different person, there was no intent for it to sound like Scarlett Johansson. Why are you reaching out to her two days before?” he said. “That would have to be explained.”

I think there's a pretty reasonable answer here in that the similarities to Her are quite obvious, and would be regardless of whose voice it was. If you wanted it to be SJ, reaching out right at the last minute seems rather odd, surely you'd reach out at the start?

There are three timelines that seem to be suggested here

* OAI want the voice to sound like SJ

* They don't ask her, they go and hire someone else specifically to sound like her

* They work on, train and release the voice

* OAI, too late to release a new voice as part of the demo, ask SJ if they can use her voice

This requires multiple people interviewed to be lying

* OAI hire someone for a voice

* They train and release the voice

* People talking to a computer that reacts in this way is reminiscent of Her

* "We should get SJ as an actual voice, that would be huge" * Asks SJ

One third one, probably more middle of the road?

* OAI hire someone for a voice

* They train and release the voice

* People talking to a computer that reacts in this way is reminiscent of Her

* "Is this too similar to SJ? Should we ask them?"

* Asks SJ

He compared Johansson’s case to one brought by the singer Bette Midler against the Ford Motor Co. in the 1980s. Ford asked Midler to use her voice in ads. After she declined, Ford hired an impersonator. A U.S. appellate court ruled in Midler’s favor, indicating her voice was protected against unauthorized use.

Sure, though worth noting that they hired a Bette Midler impersonator to sing a cover of a Better Midler song (edit - after asking and getting a "no")

To be honest, I'm not really that convinced it sounds like her

https://youtu.be/GV01B5kVsC0?t=165

https://youtu.be/D9byh4MAsUQ?t=33

Andrew_nenakhov2• 2 years ago

Maybe they didn't need SJ to do anything to train the voicebot as it was already trained with the material from the movie.

(I'm in a camp that Sky voice doesn't really like Johansson's)

baxtr• 2 years ago

The sad thing is: most probably absolutely nothing will happen.

These startups break laws, pay the fines and end up just fine.

Remember that it was Sam Altman who proposed to change the YC questionnaire to screen applicants by incidents where they have successfully broken rules. YC even boasts about that.

varispeed• 2 years ago

Or to rephrase it, the laws don't apply to the rich. They just have to pay a little bit more "tax" (which probably still works out to be less than typical small business has to pay % wise anyway) to be allowed to break them.

AvAn12• 2 years ago

These startups break laws, pay the fines and end up just fine.

That thought process puts them in the same boat as: Theranos, FTX, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Countrywide Financial, Enron, Washington Mutual, Kidder Peabody, and many other companies which no longer exist.

So if (since?) they lack the ethical compass to not break the rules, perhaps a simple history of what happens to companies that do break the rules might be useful guidance...

bko• 2 years ago

Do we really want someone's voice to be copyrightable, to a point where similar sounding people can't be used?

This is such a weird issue for HN to be upset about when other IP related issues (e.g. companies suing for recreating generic code, patent trolls, trademark colors, disregard of paywall, reverse engineering, etc), people here overwhelmingly fall on the side of weaker IP protections.

I guess the diff is some people just pick the side of "the little guy" and the example of centi millionaire beautiful actress vs billion dollar founder, the scales tip to the actress

onlyrealcuzzo• 2 years ago

They're likely going to write Scarlett Johansson a large check and get a new voice.

What else do you think is going to happen?

The entire company gets shut down?

staticautomatic2• 2 years ago

Then you don’t know ScarJo. She doesn’t fuck around and she has enough money to put legal fees where her mouth is. She was the vanguard of actors suing for streaming royalties, for example.

pyeri• 2 years ago

However strong her case may be but in lawsuits like these, the prosecution usually needs to prove *beyond reasonable doubt* that OpenAI copied her voice and that too intentionally. This, in all likelihood, seems very tough to come given the evidence so far. Yes, she might drag on the case for a long time but doubt that will cause the slightest dent in OpenAI's business.

V__• 2 years ago

Crimes must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, whereas civil claims are proven by lower standards of proof, such as the preponderance of the evidence.

[1] https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-law-basics/the-dif...

huxley2• 2 years ago

This would be a civil not criminal case, there is no prosecution as well “beyond a reasonable doubt” is not the standard, rather Johansson’s lawyers only need to show that the balance of probabilities lies in her favour.

loongloong• 2 years ago

What sort of damages can Scarlett Johansson expect to get if OpenAI launches with the Sky voice for a short while, then pulls it quickly after the backlash (like they did)?

Are punitive damages commonplace for such scenarios?

amelius• 2 years ago

Any damages are probably going to be way cheaper than the cost of an equivalent publicity campaign.

Bad PR is also PR.

conductr• 2 years ago

I’m sure someone can do some type of math about her general pay rate per performance minute then multiply it by the millions of hours Sky has been heard using her voice. I think that number would likely be quite high.

dangoodmanUT• 2 years ago

After she declined, Ford hired an impersonator. A U.S. appellate court ruled in Midler’s favor, indicating her voice was protected against unauthorized use.

That's because it was impersonating them, not sounding like them. If they didn't try to sell it as them they would have been fine

boesboes• 2 years ago

That's the problem here too right? Sam implies the voice is scarlet with his references to Her.

To me it all just shows these tech-bro's are just spoiled little brads with strong incel energy. I 100% expect a scandal in a few months where it turns out Sam has a bunch of VR porn bots generated by AI that just 'happen' to look and sound EXACTLY like some celebs...

1vuio0pswjnm7• 2 years ago

OpenAI hires voice actress. Then it contacts famous actress for a license. Why. The implication is that OpenAI knows there is a potential legal issue.

Then later, when OpenAI promotes voice actress with an apparent reference to famous actress' work, and famous actress complains, OpenAI "pauses" the project. If OpenAI believes there is no issue, then why pause the project.

This behaviour certainly looks like OpenAI thought it needed a license from famous actress. If there is another explanation, OpenAI has not provided it.

afavour• 2 years ago

I’ll admit that my cynicism is in overdrive but I wonder if OpenAI deliberately provoked this. Or at least didn’t mind it as an outcome.

More and more you see legal action as a form of publicity (people filing frivolous lawsuits etc), a lawsuit like this would help keep OpenAI looking like an underdog startup being crushed by the rich and powerful rather than the billion dollar entity it actually is.

rootlocus• 2 years ago

indicating her voice was protected against unauthorized use

But it wasn't her voice, it was the voice of the impersonator. By that logic, the impersonator can never speak without authorization because the impersonator would use Bette Midler's voice.

ljf• 2 years ago

They wanted people to either think that is was Bette Midler, or someone that sounded very like her to gain the benefit of association with her. They wanted to use some of Bette's cultural cachet, without her permission.

scotty792• 2 years ago

I don't get it. He was looking for specific voice. Scarlett Johansson is one of the people who has the voice of this kind. She wasn't interested. It's only logical to approach a different person with the same kind of voice.

It's kinda nasty for one person to monopolize work for all actors that have similar voice to them just because she's most famous of all of them.

can16358p3• 2 years ago

100% this.

I'm in the exact same camp, bur for some reason HN crowd thinks that Scarlet has a right here as the other voice actor has a similar voice. Apparently there's an [archaic] law called right to publicity (or something like that) that makes even working with someone with a similar voice illegal. According to that restrictive logic no one can do anything on Earth as they might be doing/looking/sounding similar to someone else who might get offended, as everyone's offended by literally anything nowadays.

I frankly want to see a lawsuit of OpenAI vs Scarlet on this one, where OpenAI wins.

ThinkBeat• 2 years ago

"Mitch Glazier, the chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, said that Johansson may have a strong case against OpenAI"

Of course he does. RIAA thinks nearly everything is illegal, and in general mocked or critiqued on the site when they go after some shared mp3s or whatever.

His opinion is neither authoritative or informative.

CRConrad37• 2 years ago

Oh lovely, RIAA mingling in among the good guys...

This may well be the only taint on Johansson's case.

ilaksh2• 2 years ago

It's always the least significant thing that everyone cares the most about. Because people are stupid.

This one case is a pretty grey area. But what is not is the voice cloning tools like Eleven Labs which can and do clone voices very well.

Forget about stealing one person's voice. Or a lot of people's voices. This technology will soon be able to replace everyone's skillset. Give it 2-5 years.

This type of reaction is how we know that humans will not maintain control of the planet for much longer.

grugagag3• 2 years ago

This type of reaction is how we know that humans will not maintain control of the planet for much longer.

But who will? There will always be some people who own the technology, they will hold control over people with the help of technology but not the technology itself which has no intent whatsoever. But I agree that people will be rendered powerless or even redundant which calls their existence into question.

ilaksh2• 2 years ago

Eventually things will be run by new types of AI lifeforms.

wruza• 2 years ago

Is there even a general consensus on likeness protection? I’m not gonna defend OAI ever now, but tbh the concept of likeness feels too stretched to me. If one naturally looks, sounds or behaves like the other, do they violate their rights? How can likeness be illegal if it’s not a direct theft of their work? Are photos of movie stars illegal to print? Where does likeness end? Is likeness yours even or does it live in people’s minds?

I can make enough arguments and counterarguments, but this whole thing doesn’t sound convincing. If I want to change my voice to sound like Michael Jackson and walk like him, no one’s business if I do that and publicly.

I understand the concerns of “looks and sound” models here, but the reality changes with time and thick ice becomes thin, you have to adapt too. Progress isn’t responsible for everyone’s job, especially if it’s built on such an ephemeral concept. That only worked for a while.

facialwipe• 2 years ago

@sama has done a good job at portraying himself as an elon/zuck hybrid visionary. he's either going to deliver on the agi promise or be the next @sbf_ftx. there's no in between.

CRConrad37• 2 years ago

@sama has done a good job at portraying himself as an elon/zuck hybrid visionary.

Yeah, because those are such universally-beloved role models that modelling oneself on them is a genius move.

FrustratedMonky2• 2 years ago

If using a different voice actor to imitate someone is ok, then why did the George Carlin videos get in so much trouble and have to be taken down?

This would be a loop hole to imitate anybody. Including in music right? Like using imitations of Tupac.

mleroy• 2 years ago

What do you think? Is it possible to give a polite, slightly anxious translator bot a metallic-sounding British accent without having to pay C-3PO's voice actor?

chrisjj3• 2 years ago

On Monday, Johansson cast a pall over the release of improved AI voices for ChatGPT, alleging that OpenAI had copied her voice

False reporting. The SJ statement contains no such allegation.

psychoslave• 2 years ago

Nice way to hijack some public attention on both party. I have no doubt they will both financially benefit from this in a way or in an other.

ac50hz• 2 years ago

Of course, it’s possible that the intent or otherwise wasn’t the objective. They’ve succeeded in bringing together several associations which allude to a sophisticated and peaceful future for all of us, in spite of the possibility of any minor legal hiccups. Whether the man with something of the dark about him was responsible, involved or unaware, the company continues to lay out its strategy, concerns and targets in plain sight. I’ll try to remain outside of this chaotic arena.

sva_• 2 years ago

OpenAI already won anyways. Either they'll pay a fine to Johansson or settle out of court.

But the media hype effect the demo was supposed to bring has already happened, so they don't really need the voice anymore.

The fine will be the cost of doing advertising/marketing, they absolutely knew what they were doing.

gverrilla• 2 years ago

Not only that. They established the comparison between their product and Her. This will last for a long time.

wavefunction• 2 years ago

Why don't I get to choose the voice I interact with. More and more it feels like "AI" is gonna be a 1%er gate-kept corporate curated "experience" with significant guard-rails and fences and walls and moats and signs telling me to keep off the grass.

The wealthy and powerful will again monopolize this power for their own benefit despite AI being the product of the sum of human technological civilization.

arresin• 2 years ago

Every week they get free publicity. Sam Altman is a PR genius. Just look at how much discussion he generates.

FergusArgyll2• 2 years ago

As an aside, I find it bewildering the hate for success that I see on this site. Ostensibly, the readers are either Startup founder adjacent who are dying for OpenAI's success, or Techie/intellectual types, which I assume aren't looking for monetary success and I would have thought would not be bothered by someone else going on a completely different path.

johnbellone8• 2 years ago

Listen, with any new technology, someone is going to bring a court case to challenge it. This is one example of a case that OpenAI will need to contend with in the future.

It’s not about hate for success. Well, maybe some of it is, but most is discourse about how several shady or questionable practices seem to be coming out of one company (OpenAI) or one person (Altman).

itsoktocry2• 2 years ago

As an aside, I find it bewildering the hate for success that I see on this site.

Some of us find the "great man" worship bewildering. You know, how we think the leaders of these companies are geniuses and have insightful things to say about everything.

FergusArgyll2• 2 years ago

I don't mean OpenAI only, I include Google, (which doesn't have any leader, basically) MSFT, TSLA (which does, I know...) etc etc

I know that there are problems with each of those companies, but to hate all of them seems like a pattern to me

tejohnso• 2 years ago

So if you just so happen to hire someone that coincidentally sounds like "her", and you haven't even seen the movie, no harm no foul, right? Afterall, the alternate voice actress has a right to use their voice as well.

But if you deliberately seek out the actress who voiced "her" and then happen to get a similar sounding alternate after the "her" actress refuses, you're in legal violation. Is that right?

I'd like to have seen this go to court.

onethought3• 2 years ago

Protected voice? Pianos all sound the same, how come they aren’t protected?

Voice is just an instrument. I love finding reasons to hate on big tech, but “it sounds like Me” (intentional or not) is bullshit. If I build a piano that sounds just like your piano… tough luck there are two pianos now.

onethought3• 2 years ago

They should rename the voice:

Sosumi

Come on OpenAI - do it!

CRConrad37• 2 years ago

Yeah, that would be stupid AF.

Hope you have a better one sometime soon.

onethought3• 2 years ago

Thanks for the contribution. I think challenging the screen actors guild and calling bullshit on “I own the sound of my voice” would be a good thing.

Open AI already took a stance like this challenging copyright threats against llms.

But maybe you haven’t considered it that way. Or you think unions (representing the 1%) are cool! I think they are stupid AF

throwaway112996• 2 years ago

Everyone eagerly citing the article, google: “who owns Washington Post”

cal85• 2 years ago

So the hard claim in the headline is based on this thought process: If they didn’t specifically mention Scarlett Johansson or Her to the voice actress, this proves they weren’t trying to copy it. Seriously? Awful journalism, sorry.

Timber-6539• 2 years ago

It doesn't really matter now, the thought has already crept inside most people's minds, whether they copied her voice or didn't.

Sam probably should have changed the voice as soon as Scarlett noped out from the deal. All this furore could have been avoided.

CRConrad37• 2 years ago

That's assuming he wanted to avoid the furore. The opposite seems at least as plausible.

gravescale• 2 years ago

If AI isn't going to be voiced like Majel Barrett, this isn't a future I'm especially interested in.

Computer, end program.

JCM92• 2 years ago

Headline presents a premise that represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the law. You don’t have to actually use the person in question to be found liable for what OpenAI is accused of doing.

Famous case here is Back to the Furure Part II where the producers hired another actor and used prosthetics to look like Crispin Glover. Crispin isn’t actually in the move but people thought he was because they used tech to make it look like it was him.

Sam tweeting “Her” is sort of the smoking gun here in showing it was their intention to make people think it was the same voice. Whether or not it actually was doesn’t matter per precedent in the law. What matters is that they tried to make people think it was Johansson. Sam’s tweet handed OpenAI’s lawyers a dumpster fire.

drcode• 2 years ago

the best they could do, with the full resources of OpenAI, is get some second hand quotes from a supposed agent to the supposed actress

strange, no?

andrewstuart• 2 years ago

Does Altman really think that was the goal, to “win”?

To defeat Scarlett Johanssen?

The point is it’s the wrong thing to do, regardless of whether or not he can legally get away with it.

No wonder Silicon Valley’s reputation for ethical behavior is in the toilet.

eagerpace• 2 years ago

When I first used ChatGPT the voice was similar enough that I thought to myself “oh that’s cool they got Johansson to do the voice.”

Angostura• 2 years ago

Get tapes from 100 actors. Select the one who sounds closest to Scarlett

CRConrad37• 2 years ago

Hey, the tape from Johansson herself will probably be in the top ten most popular choices! Maybe not top five, but at least top twenty, for sure! ;-)

slibhb• 2 years ago

I never made the connection between the Sky voice and Scarlett Johansson's. I've seen many of her movies. She has an extremely distinctive voice that has a certain huskiness to it and the Sky voice totally lacks that.

Some voices are sexy and both of them fall into that category -- but that's beside the point.

That aside, it is genuinely pleasant to have a conversation with chatGPTo and some of that has to do with the voices. There's a kind of irony here because people generally imagined that AI would be cold, logical, unempathetic, etc. But LLMs are the opposite; they're extremely polite and deferential. Meanwhile they aren't that good at logic!

gandalfgreybeer• 2 years ago

I made that connection but never really thought it was the same. I just thought it was very close

Meanwhile they aren't that good at logic This statement is contentious; depends on what level of abstraction you're looking at.
Extremely polite and deferential This is a setting that can be turned off btw.

queuebert• 2 years ago

I don't find any of the OpenAI voices sexy or deferential. They sound fake happy to me, like a customer service phone menu or an elementary school teacher, and reek of Bay area vocal fry [1] and lilt. I wish there was a greater diversity of accents and speaking patterns available, such as can be seen on the Speech Accent Archive [2].

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0yL2GezneU

2. https://accent.gmu.edu/browse_language.php?function=find&lan...

TecoAndJix• 2 years ago

counterpoint - it is the first connection made when I heard the voice. I also really enjoyed the movie Her.

iamleppert• 2 years ago

Hollywood elites know they are cooked. It’s only a matter of time before corporations like OpenAI and Microsoft make celebrities and actors as valuable and useful as the next rank and file employee.

I personally want an AI Taylor Swift that can sing to me whatever song I want, and I would like it to be cheap and owned by a corporation.

ecjhdnc2025• 2 years ago

"The actors should be nonunion."

Five small, unremarked-upon words that illustrate OpenAI's positioning perfectly.

misiek08• 2 years ago

I hope they produce all proofs of their innocence with AI. Maybe some people will open theirs eyes in 20-30 years after finding such records :D

nfriedly• 2 years ago

I listened to a few clips of each and was expecting them to sound more similar than they do.

Sure they're both female voices with some similarities, but they sound like distinctly different people if you listen to the two back to back.

leecarraher• 2 years ago

but how could you falsify all those records so quickly and convincingly, oh nm

lenerdenator• 2 years ago

I always get suspicious when it's a company providing records saying they didn't do something, especially when they have access to technology that can be used to produce documentation that appears to be legitimate but was completely computer-generated.

can16358p3• 2 years ago

If Right to Publicity laws indeed favor Scarlet here, then the law is really outdated and needs to catch up with the current paradigm.

A company wanted a voice, had something in their minds, approached a voice actor who has a similar voice to what they have in mind, got rejected, then approached next candidate and worked with her. Simple as that. If this is illegal, I don't know what is legal.

GaggiX7• 2 years ago

OpenAi had been working with the "Sky" voice actress for months before first contacting Scarlett Johansson.

flutas3• 2 years ago

And one of the co-founders of OpenAI (Karpathy) also quite literally said "The killer app of LLMs is Scarlett Johansson." the day after the announcement.

https://x.com/karpathy/status/1790373216537502106

CRConrad37• 2 years ago

According to this cherry-picked article.

boringg• 2 years ago

Ethics aside - if anyone thinks chatGPT didn’t walk through the legality of there moves beforehand and their procedures they followed (which I'm sure are documented) I would be shocked. They are moving fast but id be certain that they knew they had relatively good legal footing. Johansson is rightfully taking them to court - likely this is all maneuvering for a settlement.

Either way this brings up artists rights in an AI world which is a good thing.

menacingly2• 2 years ago

I don't really care either way, but one thing that seems odd to me is how unlikable people seem to find the other voices (myself included)

If this were the massive creative effort they make it out to be, it seems like they'd have netted another solid result or two

bradley13• 2 years ago

I also dislike the voices. They sound great, but the are very overenthusiastic. "Awesome!" "Thar's great!" I don't want my computer to talk like a California valley girl.

How about concise and factual? It shouldn't be wooden and emotionless, of course, but it shouldn't sound like a floofy-brain.

menacingly2• 2 years ago

Yeah, I just think it should make use of the nonverbal channel we use to communicate, otherwise we get frustrated at the inefficiency

m3kw92• 2 years ago

Is funny seeing some peoples head get yanked back and forth because they have a predetermined bias against Sam and OpenAI. Critical thinking would have saved you the trouble.

CRConrad37• 2 years ago

It's funny seeing some people immediately being convinced by this weak-sauce defense. Critical thinking might have saved you the embarrassment.

trimethylpurine• 2 years ago

Whether they intended to sound like her or not, it doesn't sound like her.

wumbo• 2 years ago

Maybe she’s attractive because she meets a very median set of attractiveness characteristics.

I.e. maybe being hot is actually less about being unique and more anout being consistent.

Maybe sultry female voices only have so much variety.

I didn’t think of Scarjo during the demo. That said, I don’t need robots to be sexy, so it doesn’t matter.

I feel the real goal is to slow OpenAI down with distractions.

eggy2• 2 years ago

Scarlett Johansson will forever be associated with this voice named, "Sky", the official voice of "Skynet" that will wipe us all off the face of the earth! In comparison, the unfolding of "her" the movie would be like a walk in the park compared to armies of Terminators.

It sounds too close to Scarlett for me to believe this was not the goal whether they hired somebody else or not, and if they try and prove beyond a doubt no audio post processing was done. Just listen to famous musicians doing acoustic or no processing versions of their songs to see how much you can craft a voice or sound.

[Edit]

  1. A movie that features an AI voice of a female voiced by Scarlett Johansson.

  2. A real-life AI company, OpenAI, is trying to put a distinct voice to their AI product vs. a canned voice.

  3. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, contacting SJ to ask her to be the AI voice.

  4. SJ refuses.

  5. CEO of OpenAI tweets "her" the title of the movie in #1 above.

Audio processing with DSP methods and current audio engineering craft or training AI to make it sound like SJ would be the thing to prove. Get raw audio of actress and finished sound and compare how they steered it to the final product and compare a spectrograph of SJ if you can get the same words.

My common sense and the above facts says OpenAI did whatever they did to get close enough to SJ's voice. SA pursued it a few times, no? It definitely sounds like her enough to me.

tempeler• 2 years ago

end of IP era. Content produced by ai is expressed as generated. which means most of that products are generated not copied.

zug_zug3• 2 years ago

When I first used ChatGPT's voice assistant's I was like "Wow, this one is clearly Scarlett Johansson from Her, they even copy her mannerisms."

No amount of unverifiable "records" (just pieces of paper provided by somebody who has a multimillion dollar incentive to show one outcome) will change my mind.

But if they can produce the actual voice artist I'd be more open-minded.

flumpcakes3• 2 years ago

As a non-American I only hear Scarlett Johansson's voice in the examples I've heard, to me it clearly is an impersonation. Maybe state-side that specific voice sound is more common and thus less recognisable as Scarlett Johansson's.

dbreunig• 2 years ago

This shows how bad it is. If you're proactively sharing a package of docs with the Washingington Post, you're toast.

Altman's outreach, his tweet, and the thousands of tweets and comments talking about how similar Sky is to ScarJo is enough to win the case in California.

pc86• 2 years ago

Then we can add this to the long list of insane lawsuits going the wrong way in California.

They asked SJ, she said no. So they went to a voice actor and used her. Case closed, they didn't use SJ's voice without her permission. That doesn't violate any law to any reasonable person.

tptacek16• 2 years ago

The Washington Post comprehensively refuted the story. This is like the "this is good for Bitcoin because ____" meme, but in reverse.

Aunche• 2 years ago

I don't think the mannerisms of a performance something that's copyrightable though. It sounded like they used a voice actor who was instructed to speak with a similar intonation as Her, but Scarlet Johansson's voice is more raspy, whereas Sky just sounds like a generic valley girl.

monocasa8• 2 years ago

rst• 2 years ago

For a case to the contrary: Midler v. Ford -- a case in which Ford hired one of Bette Midler's ex-backup singers to duplicate one of her performances for an ad (after trying and failing to get Midler herself). Ford never said this was actually Midler -- and it wasn't -- but Midler still sued and won. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/849...

dragonwriter10• 2 years ago

I don’t think the mannerisms of a performance something that’s copyrightable though.

Yes, this discussion is about right of publicity, not copyright.

stavros2• 2 years ago

Funny, I'm the opposite. I saw clips from the film after the controversy (it's been ten years since I saw the film itself) and Sky sounds nothing like Johansson to me. No amount of unverifiable "records".

glenstein3• 2 years ago

And then there's me, and I'm somewhere in the middle. When I first heard that voice, I didn't really think anything of it. But retrospectively given the media reporting from Sam Altman tweeting about the movie and the reports of approaching Scarlet Johansson, I can make that connection. But I would not have without the context. And without real reporting I would have dismissed it all as speculation.

m_ke3• 2 years ago

1. The sky voice currently available in the app is a different model from the one they presented (one is pure TTS, the new one in GPT-4o is a proper multi modal model that can do speech in and out end to end)

2. Look at these images and tell me they didn't intend to replicate "Her": https://x.com/michalwols/status/1792709377528647995

burntalmonds• 2 years ago

Same here. In the demo it never sounded like SJ to me. After the story broke I listened to clips from Her and the 4o demo. It doesn't sound like SJ.

Phrodo_00• 2 years ago

Yeah, I can hear the resemblance, but it's not the same. I actually said they should copy SJ's voice for a bigger "her" effect when I saw the demo.

IncreasePosts• 2 years ago

They voice artist put out a statement through her lawyer. She also stated her voice has never been compared to Scarlett in real life by anyone who knows her.

eggy2• 2 years ago

I'd like to hear her raw voice compared to the polished product. Listen to famous singers' acoustic vs. heavily audio-engineered final cuts. Big difference. I think if you played this OpenAI "Sky" voice to a sample population and said it was a famous person's voice, SA would come up frequently.

beeboobaa310• 2 years ago

This is just Scarlett Johansson trying to destroy some small voice actor. I greatly dislike what OpenAI is doing, but this is just ridiculous.

throwawaymaths4• 2 years ago

that's because scarlett's voice is pretty generic white upper middle class woman with a hint of vocal fry, and a slight hint of california (pretty typical given pervasiveness of media from california).

She's not exactly gilbert gottfried or morgan freeman.

tptacek16• 2 years ago

They did produce the actual voice artist!

mzs• 2 years ago

I don't see that here: https://openai.com/index/how-the-voices-for-chatgpt-were-cho...

Is my my google-fu failing me and I'm not looking in the right place?

FireBeyond6• 2 years ago

Where? Right now you have "An anonymous person says that an anonymous person said this to him in an email".

That's a pretty low bar for "produced the actual voice artist".

jackothy4• 2 years ago

"Her" is one of my favorite movies of all time, and not once while watching the demo did I think that it sounded specifically like ScarJo. The whole concept, of course, made me think of "Her", but not the voice itself.

bamboozled2• 2 years ago

It's just annoying enough that they launched a product using a voice that sounded similar enough to generate such a controversy, why, if you had the all great "generative AI" systems at your finger tips you couldn't just generate some other completely random voice is beyond me.

akaru2• 2 years ago

Ask it for an image or for some text. Then cross-check. Many times you can see: it doesn’t make stuff up, it steals and remixes. Same thing here.

CodeWriter23• 2 years ago

Why did OpenAI comply with Johansson’s Cease and Desist letter and take the voice down? If they legit hired a different actress their response should have been “Go ahead and sue us”.

tombert• 2 years ago

IANAL, but I suspect it was just to show that they complied with the request, so that if the law rules against them, they can minimize the damages. The less time that voice is available, the less of a case Johansson's have to try and extract money out of them.

Also, lawsuits are expensive and go on forever. I think sometimes is cheaper and easier to just roll your eyes and take the L, even if you're in the right (at least in the short term).

karaterobot• 2 years ago

They may have taken it down while they did an internal investigation to make sure. Or, regardless of their prospects of winning it, they may have not wanted to endure the cost or bad publicity a lawsuit would bring them. Neither option seems crazy to me.

browningstreet• 2 years ago

Sama has gone silent. It’s plausible they’re in negotiations or settlement talks with SJ. But he doesn’t often go silent. Even when he’s losing his job.

gklitz• 2 years ago

If we remove the “well technically” bs, they did copy her voice and they did so deliberately, the only detail they hide behind is that they did so in a less direct way than they could have done it.

abhinavk2• 2 years ago

Does anyone not find any proof of intent between Sam's tweet ("Her"), Karpathy's tweet ("The killer app of LLMs is Scarlett Johansson.") and the name Sky "SCarlett AI" itself?

humansareok1• 2 years ago

Imo it doesn't sound like SJ and if they can produce the actual recorded voice lines from the actress they used and whatever model they used to clone her voice it will be trivial to prove that if need be.

tibbon• 2 years ago

Is someone's voice their IP? Is it more-valuable property because they are famous? What type of IP? Trademark? Without their name and image in combination, is a voice/likeness actually defensible?

Training a computer to have any actual-human sounding voice is likely to almost match someone's voice.

I haven't taken an IP class since 2004, but I'm not sure if there's a real case here is there?

TheJoeMan• 2 years ago

Totally anecdotal, but I have no idea who is the voice of Siri. And if I met them, I as a layperson would think “you sound like Siri” not vice-versa like this case.

nekoashide• 2 years ago

I think it's key here that if someone else trained the voice and sounded like Scarlett Johansson, and there a payment to that person, and that person exist, it feels like to me they won't have a strong case.

Now if it was trained on the voices from various IP? Or "Computer generated", I think we have an argument that it was trained on her voice.

skilled4• 2 years ago

Nah, that’s too broad of an angle. I mean, you wouldn’t take Barack Obama’s voice and start making video tutorials with it.

“My fellow gamers…”

But what if it’s worse than just video tutorials, something vile? You simply wouldn’t want to have your voice associated with that.

lumost2• 2 years ago

Unless they can point to a voice actor that they did copy. It will be very difficult for them to prove that it wasn't trained to replicate Scarlett Johansen. Was the model trained on movies? were annotators instructed to compare to the movie "Her" - lots of ways to see this become problematic.

The fact that Sam Altman was requesting a licensing deal days before launch would suggest that they had a known problem that the model was too close to Scarlett Johansen's voice. In the generous case, this could come down to a few documents from product conception indicating that they wanted the model to replicate the movie "Her."

bongodongobob• 2 years ago

That's not really how proof works. SJ needs to prove it was modeled after her. Seeing as it doesn't sound like her, this whole thing is DOA.

lumost2• 2 years ago

In Civil court, all that is needed is a preponderonce of evidence as I recall. There would certainly be enough evidence to get discovery kicked off and have lawyers reviewing internal OpenAI docs.

kylebenzle• 2 years ago

Yeh, we can tell.

sobellian• 2 years ago

It's a sign of the times when OpenAI tacitly encourages forming a relationship with a computer system, and controversy erupts over IP rights for voice actors.

Higher-minded discussions certainly take place on a range of issues in AI. Can I rely on my AI to tell the truth? Is it ethical to use an AI for military applications? How do I make sure my AI doesn't turn into Archie Bunker? Even (IMO) fringe issues like whether it will exterminate humanity.

It would seem that those are rather abstract concerns. It would seem that your average person mostly cares about who's getting paid.

CRConrad37• 2 years ago

So in that sense it's a good thing that "Open" AI are just as venal and stupid on small shit like this as on those bigger and more serious issues. So the great unwashed, with their limited attention spans (and, TBF, realistically much less insight on the big underlying issues), can see for themselves, in terms they can grasp, what a-holes they are.

ETA: Seems to work on non-IT mundanes, at least. Not on tech-bro fanbois, of course, which seem to be the only kind of people defending "O"AI / Altman here.

throw48472852• 2 years ago

It's actually a Japanese actress doing an impression of Scarlett Johansson.

monocasa8• 2 years ago

Which would be a pretty cute and dry violation of likeness rights.

throw48472852• 2 years ago

This was a Ghost in the Shell joke.

shombaboor• 2 years ago

OpenAI and sama should get no benefit of doubt given his conduct the past year or so, starting with their refusal to say whether or not they trained on youtube data.

thepasswordis2• 2 years ago

In the movie “Her”, there is a smart AI assistant that you can talk to and is friendly and has good natural language.

How is it not obvious to everybody that this is what Sam and the OpenAI people are referencing with their tweets?

Scarlett Johanssons voice is certainly pleasing, but it feels misplaced to assume that the voice is the important thing here and not everything else.

talldayo3• 2 years ago

How is it not obvious to everybody that this is what Sam and the OpenAI people are referencing with their tweets?

Because according to Johansson, Sam also approached her twice in an attempt to license her voice legitimately. That's not the sort of thing that happens when you make an incidental reference to a film; he wanted that voice, so badly that he tried making a second offer (and got refused).

but it feels misplaced to assume that the voice is the important thing here

We're just as surprised as you are; honestly, Sam should have known better than to drill down and insist on something as stupid as copying a misanthropic psychological horror film.

Conasg2• 2 years ago

I know it's kind of nitpicking, but it was never intended to be misanthropic or a psychological horror. It's a sci-fi romantic drama; I don't really see where the misanthropy or psychological horror aspects are?

Conasg2• 2 years ago

I find the whole thing just bizzare. I agree, the only thing I'm confused about is why OpenAI ever contacted Scarlett to begin with. Did they want her to represent the product? The voice is really just a generic flirtacious woman; this wouldn't have been a problem if they'd never contacted her. We need a proper explanation as to why they contacted her in the first place.

uberdru• 2 years ago

Tom Waits provides the template here. He successfully sued Cheetos for impersonation. The major similarity: Waits, like Johansson, declined an offer to use his voice in advertising.

mwigdahl7• 2 years ago

And so OpenAI can't legally... use any adult white female's voice in their product?

I'm not a lawyer, but doesn't there have to actually be a reasonable voice resemblance to conclude that there's impersonation? In a side-by-side "taste test" I don't think these two voices are very similar.

CRConrad37• 2 years ago

And so OpenAI can't legally... use any adult white female's voice in their product?

No, they can't legally use an adult white female's voice that might be mistaken for Johansson's in their product and imply it has anything to do with Johansson's performance in the movie _Her_.

So... Smart tweet there, Sam. Really smart.

(I don't quite get why the Techbro - venture capitalist sphere is so enamored with this guy. From all I've seen reported about him, he seems not only a grade-A arsehole, but dumb as a fucking brick. But maybe they identify with that.)

sircastor• 2 years ago

I can’t help but think this is a matter of bias. I think the voice sounds a bit like Scarlett Johansson. But I’ve been told by two different people that I sound like Charlie Sheen… when I’m on the phone.

This feels a bit to me like confirmation bias: “OpenAI is selling an AI voice tool just like in that movie! Surely that’s what they’re going for!”

That said, the fact that they contacted her twice about it does feel awfully suspicious

spaceribs• 2 years ago

If you're interested in the background of voice trademark lawsuits, Tom Waits is a great deep dive:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6y1kc8Equk

gmd63• 2 years ago

What also concerns me is the piggybacking on the entire likeness crafted by the artist responsible for the actual movie Her.

Did OpenAI pay any amount of credit to the artist responsible for the free creative direction they copied for their AI's voice? I would imagine more than the voice actor, the person responsible for casting Scarlett and writing the movie would deserve something.

bamboozled2• 2 years ago

Has Open AI paid for anything they've taken without asking? Maybe, but we wouldn't know because nothing they do has any transparency. They absolutely suck as a company.

DustinBrett• 2 years ago

We are getting into the details of what is copying. If you can find someone with the identical voice who is a different person, is that all it takes? It seems to me the intention was to hire someone who sounded like the character from Her.

GaggiX7• 2 years ago

The voices are not identical tho.

dragonwriter10• 2 years ago

Hiring a different voice artist might show that they didn't use deepfake technology to imitate Johansson’s voice, but it absolutely doesn't prove that the voice isn't an imitation and one for which they would have been liable under existing law.

apwell23• 2 years ago

voice imitation is illegal?

monocasa8• 2 years ago

Copying likeness can be.

dragonwriter10• 2 years ago

Discussed a lot in the last thread on the issue, but, yes, imitation of celebrity voices voices for commercial purposes can violate the right of publicity (also known as the right of personality) in many US jurisdictions, including California (this is a matter of state statute and/or common law, not federal law.)

manishsharan• 2 years ago

exactly . when you cover an artist on your show, you have to take permission first.

I am not a copyright expert, but I do own a few of Weird Al albums and he is very diligent about obtaining permissions from artists he is covering.

dllthomas• 2 years ago

Weird Al albums and he is very diligent about obtaining permissions from artists he is covering.

IIUC, Weird Al probably doesn't need permission for his parodies, legally speaking. He does get it anyway.

dragonwriter10• 2 years ago

I am not a copyright expert

It’s not a copyright issue, it’s a right of publicity issue, a completely separate legal issue (conceptually, more trademark-like than copyright-like, but distinct from either.)

chrisbrandow• 2 years ago

Welcome to our incredible future where massive AI models will require us to choose between our lying eyes/ears and indecipherable collection of tensors. Nothing will be provable or protectable.

OrangeFlush• 2 years ago

People are completely missing the point in this thread. This is a civil action where the plaintiff need only prove their case based on the preponderance of the evidence.

The case law is clear and it is linked all up and down these threads so I won't reproduce here. It does not matter if it was a voice actor who sounded just like her, or if it was a trained AI voice that never used a single recording from ScarJo, what matters is if OpenAI intended to gain from reproducing the likeness of Scarjo. Intent is the key, not even how similar the voices are or the source.

Given that the Jury of average joes will be given this instruction directly by the judge, you can almost hear the plaintiff's lawyers case. "OpenAI contacted Scarlett 9 months before release asking to use her voice. She refused. OpenAI contacted her two days before release again asking to use her voice and she refused. Then, just prior to launch the CEO of the company tweets "Her" despite the fact that they could not secure an agreement with my client. The CEO of OpenAI, when engaged in a massive launch and PR campaign, referenced the likeness of my client in a clear attempt to produce economic benefit."

The two contacts before made the case 50/50 from the plaintiff's perspective. sama tweeting "Her" right before the launch is him spiking the football in his own endzone. The defense only has technicalities. At the civil level of burden of proof this is an absolute slam dunk case for the plaintiff. OpenAI will settle for a very large undisclosed amount of money. No way they let this go in front of a civil jury.

AndrewKemendo• 2 years ago

OpenAI is running laps around the media and everyone is eating it up

Notice that every month or so they have a few new “scandals” with high intrigue but noticeably iron clad legal and political “cover your ass” investments/ politicking

Meanwhile they are getting deep into bed with Apple, making an admarket (worst possible case scenario for users IMO) and generally cementing all of these commercial inroads for revenue

I’d be impressed if it weren’t so destructive and psychotic

No press is bad press

sanderjd35• 2 years ago

This isn't true at all. It can seem true for a surprisingly long time, but sometimes bad press is bad press.

Tesla's no press is bad press "strategy" recently came home to roost. No matter how you slice it, alienating your core constituency of customers is bad business.

This "bad" press certainly might not actually be bad. But it just isn't true that all press is good.

It's a nice quip, but in practice, the actual details matter.

hehdhdjehehegwv4• 2 years ago

Nice of Jeff to do give Sam some free PR crisis management. Class solidarity brings a tear to my eye.

TechRemarker• 2 years ago

When the original news broke, I don’t think the assumption was ever they actually used her voice as of course they would be sued instantly. But rather they wanted her especially after her Her movie, but of course to be safe first got another woman to record one that would sound very similar and then later ask Johansson to hopefully get her instead. She said no so they tried one more time before releasing and she still said so no so went with the very much like her but not her version and made reference to the Her movie to leave little doubt who you should think of when listening to that voice. So doesn’t seem like the above news changes any of that other than at least confirming they didn’t completely go off the rails and actually clone her voice from her actual content without permission which would have been insane.

GaggiX7• 2 years ago

"Sky" voice has been available for 8 months now, they didn't ask for Scarlett Johansson voice several times before releasing it.

akaru2• 2 years ago

This article is a paid hit-piece. Trumpian language and all: “people are saying—very good people, the best people—that the voice wasn’t copied. It was a perfect call.” It is so obvious that her voice was stolen, and they are paying to try to cover it up.

CRConrad37• 2 years ago

Funny how this post was up on the front page after twelve hours.

CosmicShadow• 2 years ago

Kind of concerning to see so much sketchbag behaviour from possibly the top AI company so consistently. Sure brings a lot of confidence in the future and sad that they can get away with it and still succeed because of the tech and their big names.

It feels like it took years before people started hating Google and Tesla, but these guys wasted very little time pretending to be good.

Do I still pay for and use them? Unfortunately yes, but I won't spend a second defending them or thinking they are trying to do anything remotely good, safe or ethical. Once things settle and hopefully someone else takes over, I can move my money elsewhere.

coffeebeqn• 2 years ago

Kind of makes the sama ouster seem more reasonable if this is the quality of his calls

sanderjd35• 2 years ago

I was so confused how so many people at the time didn't think it was clearly reasonable. The man has already taken over an "open" AI company and subverted its non-profit mission and governing structure. I was sympathetic to the employees who didn't want to see their giant equity compensation evaporate, but how anyone else looked at that power struggle and thought he was on the right side of it remains beyond me.

veidr• 2 years ago

I feel like this is the most important comment I read before giving up — Altman seems to have tried to move fast and break things (a dubious strategy at best) but now he's going full Musk/Shkreli.

jmull• 2 years ago

Well, here are some things that aren't really being disputed:

* OpenAI wanted an AI voice that sounds like SJ

* SJ declined

* OpenAI got an AI voice that sounds like SJ anyway

I guess they want us to believe this happened without shenanigans, but it's bit hard to.

The headline of the article is a little funny, because records can't really show they weren't looking for an SJ sound-alike. They can just show that those records didn't mention it. The key decision-makers could simply have agreed to keep that fact close-to-the-vest -- they may have well understood that knocking off a high-profile actress was legally perilous.

Also, I think we can readily assume OpenAI understood that one of their potential voices sounded a lot like SJ. Since they were pursuing her they must have had a pretty good idea of what they were going after, especially considering the likely price tag. So even if an SJ voice wasn't the original goal, it clearly became an important goal to them. They surely listened to demos for many voice actors, auditioned a number of them, and may even have recorded many of them, but somehow they selected one for release who seemed to sound a lot like SJ.

93po3• 2 years ago

The article clearly disputes this. They hired and worked with the voice actor for Sky months before the first time SJ was contacted, and the voice actor used for Sky never had the movie Her or SJ's name mentioned to her a single time

qarl21• 2 years ago

Right. And that's extremely hard to believe. A discovery search of the internal emails should give us a definitive answer.

bmitc3• 2 years ago

That doesn't mean anything. They could have been and were likely developing the process and technology while having Johansson in mind the whole time.

never had the movie Her or SJ's name mentioned to her a single time

How do you know that?

giobox3• 2 years ago

The Movie Her predates all of this by years, and Sam Altman even tweeted "her"! The OpenAI team are clearly well aware of Scarlett's voice (its inconceivable the majority of the team at OpenAI haven't at least seen part of the film that almost defined their industry). The movie predates all of this by years - of course they knew.

When auditioning actors "months before" they can still look for an actor who guess what? Sounds like SJ, even "before the first time SJ was contacted".

As the actor - I'd likely also be looking to emulate SJ in Her - its clearly what the client was looking for.

HarHarVeryFunny10• 2 years ago

Clearly an SJ voice was the goal, given that Altman asked her to do it, asked her a second time just two days before the ChatGPT-4o release, and then tweeted "her" on the release day. The next day Karpathy, recently ex-OpenAI, then tweets "The killer app of LLMs is Scarlett Johansson".

Altman appears to be an habitual liar. Note his recent claim not to be aware of the non-disparagement and claw-back terms he had departing employees agree to. Are we supposed to believe that the company lawyer or head of HR did this without consulting (or more likely being instructed by) the co-founder and CEO?!

tptacek16• 2 years ago

They hired the actor that did the voice months before they contacted SJ. The reaction on this site to the news that this story was false is kind of mindbending.

s0lar• 2 years ago

It could have simply been the other way around: they auditioned some unknown voice actors, then someone noted that one of them sounded like Scarlett Johansson. They optimistically contacted SJ, assuming she would agree, but then had to back off.

blackeyeblitzar• 2 years ago

Are we supposed to believe that the company lawyer or head of HR did this without consulting (or more likely being instructed by) the co-founder and CEO?!

Yes this is pretty typical. The CEO doesn’t make all decisions. They hire people to make decisions. A company’s head of legal could definitely make decisions about what standard language to use in documents on their own.

spiralk2• 2 years ago

Sky does not really sound like SJ though if you listen side by side. According to OAI's timeline, they intended to have Sky in addition to SJ. OAIs voice models including Sky predate the GPT4o voice assistant. Also:

"In a statement from the Sky actress provided by her agent, she wrote that at times the backlash “feels personal being that it’s just my natural voice and I’ve never been compared to her by the people who do know me closely.”"

It did not seem like an issue before and the Sky voice was public many months before GPT4o. I don't believe SJ can claim to own all young, attractive woman voices whether they are used as a voice assistant or not. It seems like the issue is being blown out of proportion. It does make a good story. The public perception of AI right now is generally negative and people are looking for reasons to disparage AI companies. Maybe there are good reasons sometimes, but this one is not it.

throwup238• 2 years ago

It seems like the issue is being blown out of proportion.

It kinda feels like its on purpose. Someone in a previous thread mentioned that this might have been a cynical marketing ploy and I'm warming up to the theory. After they recorded the Sky VA, they figured out a whole marketing campaign with SJ to promote the voice feature. After she turned them down (twice), they released with just enough crumbs referencing the movie to goad SJ into committing a first degree Streisand.

With the slow roll out, everyone would have forgotten about the feature the day after the announcement but now it's been in the news for a week, constantly reminding everyone of what's coming up.

buu7002• 2 years ago

I'm also curious, legally speaking, is it an issue even if Sky's actress does sound like Scarlett? What if OpenAI admits they intentionally chose someone who sounded like Scarlett? Does it matter whether she was using her natural speaking voice or intentionally mimicking Scarlett's voice and mannerisms?

This seems similar to the latest season of Rick and Morty. Whether justified or not in that particular case, it rubs me the wrong way a bit in principle to think that a production can fire someone only to hire someone else to do a near-perfect copy of their likeness. If (as in the OpenAI case) they'd gone further and trained an AI on the impressions of Justin's voice, would that have been considered an AI impersonation of Justin with extra steps?

All of which is to say, this seems like a pretty interesting legal question to me, and potentially broader than just AI.

evrydayhustling2• 2 years ago

"SJ can't own all female AI voices" is attacking a straw man version of the complaint, which is much narrower. The question is whether OpenAI deliberately fostered the impression of an association between their product and her performance, which she had so far refused.

To your point, there have many female assistant voices on the market, including Sky -- but what might have tripped the line of impersonation was the context this particular one was presented and marketed. I don't know where exactly that line should be, but you can certainly reject this kind of marketing without stifling anybody's legitimate career.

chung81232• 2 years ago

I would say that OpenAI wanted something that sounded like her which in turn sounded like Scarlett Johannson.

I also think the "sounded like" is less clear than you think. Is it similar, yes. But how similar I am not sure what the line is but for sure I didn't think it was Scarlett Johannson. By saying it is Scarlett Johannson and relating it to her our brains will make the association though. That is marketing.

soerxpso• 2 years ago

It doesn't seem like you'd need "shenanigans" for this. Lots of voice actors are capable of doing voices that sound like other people, and some even have a natural voice that happens to sound very similar to a particular more noteworthy celebrity. AFAIU, the rights to your likeness only apply to your likeness, not to the likeness of someone else who happens to look or sound a lot like you.

For a case that doesn't involve AI at all, consider situations where a voice actor in a cartoon is replaced (sometimes while still alive) by someone who can perform a voice that sounds the same. Decisively not illegal. Most people don't even find it immoral, as long as the reason for getting rid of the original voice actor wasn't wrong on its own (e.g. Roiland).

WalterBright4• 2 years ago

The attempts to sound like Mel Blanc after his death just don't sound right to me. Or maybe it's just the bad scripts.

gwern5• 2 years ago

For a case that doesn't involve AI at all, consider situations where a voice actor in a cartoon is replaced (sometimes while still alive) by someone who can perform a voice that sounds the same. Decisively not illegal.

Because there are contractual clauses. Do you think Hank Azaria owns the voice of 'Homer Simpson'? Or does Fox own that? It would be crazy to develop a show and then be held hostage to your voice actors for all future shows - what if they get hit by a car?

gunapologist99• 2 years ago

Regardless of the moral implications, "sounds almost exactly the same" is not copyright infringement. Perhaps it could be trademark infringement if she had trademarked her voice like Harley-Davidson attempted (and failed) to trademark the sound of their motorcycles, but "sounds alike" is a pretty hard case to prove, and it's completely blown away if they can demonstrate that another human sounds indisputably similar.

People do celebrity impressions all the time, and that's not infringement either, because it's not actually copying that person's voice.

I'm sympathetic to SJ in this matter, especially after the Disney Black Widow debacle, but it sounds like she had the opportunity to write herself a nice check, and she turned it down.

On the basis of this article, it sounds like she doesn't have the cause of action that she had believed she had; I imagine that her legal team are now advising a fast settlement, but OpenAI's legal team might prefer to milk the free publicity for as long as they can, especially if they are fairly certain they would prevail at trial.

Athari2• 2 years ago

it sounds like she had the opportunity to write herself a nice check, and she turned it down.

If I were SJ, I'd turn it down too. Shes in no need of money, and selling her voice to OpenAI would make most of creators and every single voice actor hate her (not to mention the Twitter mob).

In majority of creative circles, the current social norm is to hate AI, so touching AI in any way is too risky for reputation.

l33tman• 2 years ago

It isn't about copyright, it's about passing-off, it's described elsewhere in detail in these threads what it means. It's about intention and what the customer believes. If customers might believe its SJ, due to samas tweets, general likeness in voice, and the context (voice assistant), the public info about them trying to get SJ to do this - that's passing-off, even if it wasn't training on her voice per se. There are numerous law cases about this.

rmbyrro2• 2 years ago

I think a better characterization would be:

* OpenAI wanted an AI voice that is SJ's voice

* SJ declined

* OpenAI got an AI voice from another person that sounds like SJ

gs175• 2 years ago

That would require a step 3 where they get in a time machine:

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.

plorg• 2 years ago

It probably is worth paying attention to the water WaPo is carrying for OpenAI here next to their publisher's announcement about prioritizing the use of AI in their newsrooms.

outworlder• 2 years ago

I guess they want us to believe this happened without shenanigans, but it's bit hard to.

Right. And the question is, did they actually used SJ's voice as part of their training data? Because there's a lot of that available given all her works.

There's a reason why they wanted 'her', specifically. What reason is that? If they could just work with a noname voice actress (likely, for far cheaper), why not just do that from the get go? It could be a marketing gimmick and maybe they wanted her name more than just the voice to add to the buzz. If it is not that, then the sequence of events doesn't make sense.

WalterBright4• 2 years ago

This controversy is great marketing for SJ, too.

paulddraper3• 2 years ago

I don't understand.

If you literally use SJ's image or voice, then you're in trouble.

If it's an SJ lookalike or soundalike (and you don't claim otherwise), there's no problem.

Right? What's the "shenanigans?"

sanderjd35• 2 years ago

Your second statement may not be true, legally, and at the very least many (including the actress in question) believe it is not true, ethically.

kopecs• 2 years ago

If it's an SJ lookalike or soundalike (and you don't claim otherwise), there's no problem.

This isn't true. At least with respect to "soundalike" see, e.g., Waits v. Frito-Lay 978 F.2d 1093 and Midler v. Ford Motor Co. 849 F.2d 460.

spullara• 2 years ago

Since they asked two days before it was launched back in September my guess is that the voice was already created by then.

eagleinparadise• 2 years ago

So what? They’re free to hire whoever they want to be a voice actor. It’s not illegal for them to hire someone that sounds like Barack Obama.

pclmulqdq3• 2 years ago

If you say "yes we can" as your corporate announcement of that person who sounds like Obama, and one of your employees (or rather ex-executives) says "the secret ingredient in AGI is Obama", it actually can be illegal. The main issue in NIL rights (as with trademarks) isn't similarity - it's brand confusion.

Wowfunhappy• 2 years ago

But there's nothing wrong with this!

Let's say I'm making a movie. I have an old wizard character similar to Gandolf in Lord of the Rings, so I contact the guy who played Gandolf in Lord of the Rings. He says no, so I hire a different actor who also fits the "old wise wizard" archetype.

Is any of that illegal?

j0hnyl• 2 years ago

Except the voice does NOT sound like SJ.

kangaroozach• 2 years ago

Well said.

throwthrowuknow9• 2 years ago

In a statement from the Sky actress provided by her agent, she wrote that at times the backlash “feels personal being that it’s just my natural voice and I’ve never been compared to her by the people who do know me closely.”

piloto_ciego• 2 years ago

This isn’t the timeline though? The actor for Sky was hired and cast before they even reached out to SkarJo. The idea that they wanted to literally reproduce “Her” feels like motivated reasoning to me.

wnevets• 2 years ago

Oh cool we're currently in the gaslighting phase after someone gets caught doing something they shouldn't.

cdme• 2 years ago

Convenient story for a company that's proven difficult to trust at every possible turn.

j452• 2 years ago

An interesting thing about this vocal similarity is using udio.com

If you pick a particular genre, sometimes the output can feel like many similar singers voices merged together... and not.

I remember noticing the Sky voice going away, and mannerisms aside it felt a little more expressive and upbeat than I expected.

j452• 2 years ago

OpenAI could also introduce the actor they hired more prominently. But that doesn't seem to come forward as of yet.

nojvek• 2 years ago

The issue is Sam even asking SJ. And then sending her another ask before the release.

If they just released, people would be like hey it’s like “Her”.

Sky doesn’t sound like SJ. It’s a different voice.

Sam didn’t have to tweet “her”.

The problem with CEOs is they can’t keep their mouths shut. Same with Elon. They have God complex and need to be center of attention.

If Elon just kept it to science memes, Tesla would be a much larger company.

But they can’t keep their heads down and execute. They gotta be out there with their megaphones alienating the very crowd that got them there.

At this point, I feel OpenAI would be a more successful company without Sam.

dehrmann• 2 years ago

As soon as Scarlett Johansson said "no" (which I assume is true), OpenAI needed to go in very different directions to avoid anything that might look bad. It doesn't matter if they used a sound-alike or built a model from actual source material; anything would look bad. It looks especially bad when the company insists chatbot outputs are synthesized and not copyright infringement.

hifromwork• 2 years ago

"Looking bad" is not illegal. If OpenAI didn't do anything illegal, saying it shouldn't do something because it might "look bad" is unfounded. In general, listening to what people say and avoiding things that might "look bad" to someone is a bad life strategy.

sanderjd35• 2 years ago

They may or may not have done anything illegal. I think the facts in this article help their legal case significantly!

It is a bad life strategy as an individual to worry too much about the judgement of others.

But marketing and PR are important parts of running a business. It may be annoying that your customers care about things that you see as silly PR stuff, but it still matters to the business.

runjake• 2 years ago

Sky sounds more like Rashida Jones than SJ, to me.

d--b• 2 years ago

Says the paper that just entered into an agreement with OpenAi

luxuryballs• 2 years ago

“Can you generate me some records that indicate we didn’t copy…” /s

leovander2• 2 years ago

A lot of comments seem to forget that she was reached out to two years before, ignoring that and going straight to the line about working with a voice actor for months then them asking SJ one more time.

Additionally, glad no one here is a lawyer and should stick in their lane.

leovander2• 2 years ago

Sorry, 7 months* before.

vagab0nd• 2 years ago

I'm pretty confused throughout the whole thing, because I never got to hear the damn voice that sounded so similar to SJ! The demo voice was overly dramatic, and sounded nothing like her IMO. I've searched everywhere and couldn't find the "Sky" voice (I guess because they took it down?).

redleggedfrog• 2 years ago

Oh goodness, this is just the kind of behavior that shows how incapable OpenAI and Altman himself are of conducting their business in a responsible manner. Just the thing you don't want to see in the field of AI. Up next, SJ AI generated revenge porn in retaliation for her causing the ruckus. Of course, completely disassociated from anything at OpenAI (wink, wink).

mucle6• 2 years ago

These white swans prove there are no black swans! \s

slantedview2• 2 years ago

This headline should be _some_ records show.

Joel_Mckay• 2 years ago

While legally there is probably no recourse, the business goodwill with consumers is gone.

Scarlett Johansson has a lot of fans, and they will now see your company as a problem.

Legally you might get a pass... but business wise it is a big Nope... nerd hubris strikes again. =)

thelittleone• 2 years ago

Has the default voice on the mobile app changed in the last few weeks. I don't recall what voice name I had selected before, but it was amazing quality. I thought the voice was Rashida Jones [1] whose voice is in some ways similar to SJ.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0429069/?ref_=tt_cl_t_3

theturtle32• 2 years ago

Honestly, I didn't think it sounded remotely like her. Even after the allegation surfaced and I went back and listened, I still don't think it sounds anything like Scarlett Johansson.

nuancebydefault• 2 years ago

an actress was hired in June to create the Sky voice, months before Altman contacted Johansson, according to documents, recordings,...

documents, recordings,... these days can be artificially created if I'm not mistaken?

z79• 2 years ago

A voice isn't owned. It exists as a transient event of sound waves moving through space, shaped and modulated by the atmosphere, surfaces, and distances. Without a medium and the presence of listeners, these vibrations are meaningless. Thus, a voice exists only as a form of interaction with its physical environment. It's a communal event that doesn't belong to anyone.

infoseek12• 2 years ago

That’s a rather idiosyncratic interpretation that doesn’t align with current views or legal structures in the Western world (look up ‘publicity rights’)

‘Ownership’ isn’t a property of the universe. It’s a value imposed by human society and philosophy. The physical reality you describe is true but irrelevant

egberts1• 2 years ago

OepnAI may have not copied but they sefinitely "sampled" the voice.

htrp• 2 years ago

One thing the artificial intelligence company didn’t request, according to interviews with multiple people involved in the process and documents shared by OpenAI in response to questions from The Washington Post: a clone of actress Scarlett Johansson.

Open AI found records to show they did nothing wrong in response to questions from WaPo

Paddywack• 2 years ago

Could he not just have bought the rights from the studio that owns “Her”, and have been in the clear?

ByAzuraFan• 2 years ago

Why would they want a seductive sexy voice like SJ anyway. That’s just distracting and not conducive to the AI product being helpful or increasing productivity.

skeledrew• 2 years ago

As someone who watched the 4o demo, enjoys MCU works, and saw Her, but wasn't even aware of the connection between Black Widow and Samantha (no idea who SJ was until this whole thing), a lot of the comments on this post are absolutely ridiculous.

classified• 2 years ago

You know they're lying because their mouth is moving.

GuB-42• 2 years ago

Can it be argued that they copied "Her" voice, not Scarlett Johansson’s voice?

I mean, yes, Scarlett Johansson is the actress, but she is not playing herself in the movie. I didn't watch the movie, but I guess she matched her voice to the character, an AI called Samantha, who is not Scarlett Johansson.

It is not like the "Midler vs Ford" case that is often referred to. Where Ford hired a singer to sound like Midler, but that's Midler singing as Midler, not acting a fictional character.

Maybe Warner Bros could complain, they are the owners of the character OpenAI imitates. In the same way that Disney (rather than Scarlett Johansson) would complain if someone used the Black Widow character without permission.

urbandw311er• 2 years ago

To all those going around in circles debating the legality of hiring similar-sounding voice actors (spoiler: it’s still illegal) there’s a great round up post by Zvi M on this — you want to be looking here if you’re interested:

https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2024/05/22/do-not-mess-with-sca...

seec• 2 years ago

The whole outrage is so stupid. It is a very stupid fact of our modern capitalist system that some people can get a ton of money just for who they are, after becoming famous for various reasons (a lot of luck for many). It is just not fair that some people can get so much money without doing any real work while most of the regular people have to work their ass off just to survive. It is worse than unfair; it is terribly inefficient.

In this case they even tried to do the right thing and offered her compensation. She declined, probably because she thought it wasn't enough money (never underestimate the vanity/cupidity of women).

In the end they showed that they were just being "nice": they don't even need her work output of voice acting, they can just create a similar enough version just fine.

And the fact is that it isn't her voice. She didn't do the work, she refused. It also should be clear that there is bound to be another woman in the world with similar physical characteristics that has a voice close enough to her. She just cannot own a particular voice characteristic, she could have owned the work associated with her voice acting, but she refused.

The whole outrage is just dumb, I really hope she loses in court because otherwise it is going to set a very problematic precedent.

They are enough people in the world profiteering from various position without actually doing the equivalent work value that we don't need to get them even more money.

the_af2• 2 years ago

Completely sidestepping whether OpenAI did a scummy or underhanded thing here: I don't find Sky's voice to be all that close to Scarlett Johansson's. Scarlet has a "hoarseness" to her voice that is completely missing from Sky. It's difficult to describe, but you can see hear it in any clip from the movie Her, but that's what she actually sounds like in most movies.

I can completely buy that they were looking for a voice actress that sounded kind of like Scarlett, but this mimic isn't perfect because it misses this "raspiness".

OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show

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