this post was submitted on 22 May 2024
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Yes but also no, the whole appeal is tied to her brand (her public image x the character HER), unlike Woody who is an original creation.
It's like doing a commercial using a lookalike dressed like the original guy and pretending that's a completely different actor.
I agreed with op, then i read your astute response and now I don't know which position is correct.
Thinking it through as i type... If you photoshopped an image of Tom Hanks giving a thumbs up to your product, that would clearly be illegal, but if you hired an exact flawless lookalike impersonator of Tom Hanks and had him pose for a picture with a thumbs up to your product, would that be illegal? I think it might still be illegal, because you purposely hired a lookalike impersonator to gain the benefit of Tom Hanks' brand.
I think the law on AI should match what the law says about impersonators. If hiring an indistinguishable celebrity impersonator to use in media is legal, then ai soundalikes should be legal too, and vice versa.
when you get into these nitty gritty copyright/ip arguments you realize it's all just a house of cards to make capital king and the main ism
I think what it comes down to is intention. Are you intending to mimic someone else's likeness without that person's permission? That's wrong. But if you just like someone's voice and want to use them, and they happen to have a similar likeness, that's fine.
Where OpenAI gloriously fucked up is asking Johansson first. If they hadn't, they would have plausible deniability that they just liked the voice actor's voice. If it reminds them of Johansson, that's even fine. What's wrong is that they specifically wanted her likeness, even after she turned them down.
I get that she is grappling with identity and it's not a clear cut case, but if the precedent is set that similar voices (and I didn't even think it was that similar in this case) are infringement, that would be a pretty big blow to commercial creativity projects.
Maybe it's more a brand problem than an infringement problem.
That reminded me of Ice Ice Baby and the rip-off of Queen's Under Pressure bass riff. Queen won i think.
I don't think this is the same thing though. They asked her, she said so, they went for her cute cousin instead... typical.