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this post was submitted on 24 May 2024
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The issue is Altman made it murky. If my name is Joe McDonald, I'm allowed to open a hamburger shop. What I can't do is purposefully confuse customers for my personal gain.
This isn't parody, it's image and likeness. It is much less murky when they are promoting it as "Her" as in the movie starring Johansson as the voice of a sentient AI assistant.
What doing satire has to do with the matter?
How do you think it would go if OpenAI had used actors with the voices of Biden or Trump and Altman had tweeted “POTUS” just before the event?
Altman knew exactly what he was doing.
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Parody is legal. This is not parody.
To be fair, I have not looked into this case enough to have an opinion. Just wanted to point out the logic error.
So like, can you a record label sue another band for 'sounding like' the band that they are promoting?
It was more of a thing in the 90s, but there were always competing follow up bands (Sublime being followed by 311) that chased the sound of another artist.
Like should NSync be sued for being a boy band following in Backstreet Boys wake?
Not parody, but mimicry is fundamental to art.
I suppose my rather extreme views on copyright and up leaves me the outlier here, but I think the whole thing is rather absurdist.
Chat GPT is not art, it is an LLM sold by a business that courted Scarlett Johansson to endorse and/or voice their LLM.
She refused and they released an LLM named Sky with a similar voice and personality to the Sam (Samantha) character she played, while also openly referencing the Her movie with their social media.
If I created an “AI” ska band that sounded like Sublime and trained it on Bradley Nowell’s singing voice, with a similar-sounding vocalist to fill in the gaps, I’m pretty sure Sub Lime featuring Badly Novell would get fucked so hard by copyright attorneys that all I would have left is my dog and some weed.
It is not allowed. See Tom Waits vs. Frito Lay. Vocal timbre is considered to part of a celebrities' "likeness" and reproducing it to imply endorsement will get you landed in court. ScarJo is a huge Tom Waits fan so she knows the story.
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It was murky from the getgo. Open AI immediately came out and stated it was the voice of a hired voice actor and that all four or five voice options were, and that it was the voice actor using her own natural voice. The media has just chose to mostly completely ignore that and instead wanted to run with rumors that they stole ScarJos voice from the movie or by sampling a bunch of her work, because that sounds way more gossipy.
To your 2nd point though. The trump voicing stuff is a clear and apparent "parody" which is protected to be legally used. Even when Weird AL does his music, he doesn't actually have to get the artists permission. He just always has because he's a world treasure.
Yes well Sam (I'm a total dipshit, but it's ok cause I'm rich now) Altman tweeting out "Her" on launch day did not help matters.
Very true right there. It could just as easily be described as him flaunting technology like what was in the movie, though. I posted a side by side a bit ago and the voices are pretty different.
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Yeah this was the case right from the start. I'm not sure why people are just coming around now, I guess it helps that the actual voice actor has spoken out so it's concrete proof that she at least exists.
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Setting aside whether soundalikes-hyped-as-the-real-deal is a violation of personal likeness rights…
How do we know what voice(s) they actually used? To my understanding, the process atomizes the input such that you can never actually prove what went into it.
Their whole business seems to be one of selling plausible-deniability engines.
I think a huge issue currently is the widespread "AI" hysteria. People kinda want to believe that they did this violation because they already have this negative image of LLMs in their mind from all the overblown headlines & scenarios that they've read.
I think it's fair to err on the side of shadiness with OpenAI considering their training data controversies with gtp and Sora.
I don't mean this argumentatively but would you be surprised if it came out that they did use Johansson's voice to train it?
It would seem weird to have them go through the trouble of hiring this woman only to then not use her recordings in favor of Scarlet Johansson's voice only to then not claim it is Scarlet Johansson. I'm not a fan of a lot of what is being done with AI but that logic just doesn't make sense to me.
I don't think anyone is claiming that they scrapped the hired actor's voice completely. I'm inclined to think they supplemented the training data with Johansson's long career.
OpenAI has not been very open about where they source anything and there's more evidence than not that they've used copyrighted material in the past.
I’m inclined to think they supplemented the training data with Johansson’s long career.
But why do that? They're already paying someone they can have her say everything they need.
They’re paying her for plausible deniability. They tried multiple times to get Johansson to agree to allow her voice to be used, including two days before they released it. They’re covering their ass.
Surprised? No. But I think we should stick with the facts we actually know instead of starting witch hunts just because we don't like the company.
I don't think it's a witch hunt to call it into question, though. I feel bad for the voice actor they hired but what they showed of it is remarkably similar to Johansson's iconic voice from Her.
It's akin to (though not nearly on the same level) as having a voice that says "it's-a-me, Vincenzo! Wahoo!" and saying it's just a coincidence that it sounds like Mario
Maybe they hired her because of her voice's the likeness to Johansson. It's getting 90% of what they wanted but still being legal I'd think.
Maybe. I don't claim to know the truth, just saying that thinking they're being shady is an not unfounded thought
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And most of those headlines are spread by the tech companies... So we don't have much reason to trust them
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I'm guessing probably because she was never cast as the friendly-sounding voice of an AI, what with that being something people associated Scarlett Johansson's voice with?
I'm guessing that the multiple people who took over for Bug Bunny's voice after Mel Blanc died were not compared to Mel Blanc before they took on the role.
I’m guessing she won’t say otherwise because if her voice is canceled she probably won’t get paid as much.
Maybe, but she also may not have even known that she had that quality when she was hired. Casting directors don't necessarily tell you why you got a role. I did VO for quite some time. Sometimes I knew I was being hired to sound like someone else- generally a fictional character, but occasionally to dub in some dialogue when an actor was unavailable if I could do a good enough impression- but who knows about any of the other times? I've never been compared to Dan Aykroyd, but maybe someone thought I sounded enough like him that I got hired for a role which they wanted a voice like his for. They wouldn't have told me and I wouldn't have asked.
Voice actors are usually paid for the work they do, not the performance of the final product.
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For anyone interested, here's a comparison. They really don't sound the same at all.
Here's a longer video I came across. Sky sounds pretty different to me, but we'll see what the courts think. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdrgFCldvrA
The AI voice sounds like Siri but only slightly less robotic and very clearly nothing like Scarlet Johansson's except for being female.
Must be nice to operate a business on the bleeding edge where there are no effective requirements or regulations... My, albeit limited, understanding of how these things work is that sometimes no rules are made unless legal challenges like this lawsuit are made. In that way, win or lose, I think it is important to proceed in order to provide definition to a new industry (assuming a lot about functioning legal and legislative systems, lack of corruption, blah blah.. bunch of stuff that doesn't actually exist, etc.).
There's already voice and likeness protections on the books. They got a similar sounding voice actress, but the voices are definitely distinguishable. ScarJo shouldn't get to own any semi robotic voice that sounds fairly close to her own from a 10 year old movie. If every actor and actress gets to start making these claims against every voice actor or actress, that's going to just screw over opportunities for the voice actors. Everybody sounds somewhat like one famous person or another.
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Tbh, I didn't hear the similarity in the GPT4o demos. Not saying OpenAI did right or wrong, just that I wouldn't have guessed that the Sky voice was meant to be ScarJo.
I don't disagree - I think this lawsuit is likely going to focus more on the fact that OpenAI tried to contract with ScarJo and then specifically got budget ScarJo and that Sam Altman is a dummy hype boi who tweeted a dumb thing right before the presentation. He basically pulled an Elon.
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