At first, they denied it—“OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati said the company did not pattern any ChatGPT voices on Johansson’s sultry computer voice in the movie,” but Altman and other OpenAI guys had let the cat out the bag on Twitter
They’re not just deliberately using her voice; they’re deliberately lying about it and bragging about what really happened in public. They’ll pay some nuisance settlement that’s a small fraction of their profit.
That’s how they treat an a list actress. Imagine how they treat everyone else. You don’t get a settlement. You just get fucked.
You see this in action anytime people go “no no you just don’t understand how this works” as a way of sidestepping the overall issue. They try to bury you in the minutiae of it, and what’s “technically” possible without acknowledging that A) what’s possible will increase over time and B) the issue is not technology, it’s the intention of it and the motivations of the people behind it.
It’s like trying to deconstruct the concept of a gun, talking about all its potential mechanical malfunctions, its capacity limits, the fact you have to aim it, and so on, all as a way of trying to downplay the danger of it being pointed directly at you.
They would not keep doing it if it did not keep working.
There are a great many similarities to this and all of Trump’s many & varied trials - when the rewards (of rape, bribery, extortion, blackmail, assassination, and so many other things) FAR outweigh the risks, it would be the height of stupidity to expect that nobody would ever even so much as dream of taking advantage.
And by stupidity, I suppose I mean Mitch McConnell, who more than any other singular individual that we can see decides e.g. which and whether judges can be appointed to their seats, and which and whether government programs may get funded - e.g. watchdog organizations that used to prosecute law-breaking behaviors, way back in ye olden times. (Mitch’s partner in this is not worth mentioning bc that role is played by a rotating cast of characters - now it’s Mike Johnson, before it was Kevin McCarthy, maybe next it will be Matt Gaetz, who da fuq knows.)
Every time we hear about another tech bro that gets a slap on the risk, while e.g. a black person gets shot just for walking/running/jogging/working/breathing/sleeping, we should remind ourselves: this is on purpose (or at least deemed “acceptable losses”, “collateral damage”). Those laws were supposed to be ours (Of/For/By The People) to make as we wished, and were, before this country was taken over from the inside by a silent coup, more than a decade prior to January 6. Now, an increasingly smaller minority runs the entire nation - e.g. less than a handful ousted McCarthy - and we seem to have collectively decided that we will do nothing about it.
Even conservatives should be against this, bc getting your way is not the same thing as doing things properly, and maintaining a stable democracy system of governance (who am I kidding, we’ve been a plutocracy since basically the beginning) is something that is required for us all to continue to exist. Example scenario: I am a father and two of my teenage children are having a birthday celebration, with both of their hearts desires set on sushi, and my wife wanted Chinese food but is okay with sushi. However, I don’t like sushi, hence we are all going for barbecue (despite one of the birthday teens being vegetarian except fish), and that’s final - sound familiar? Winning an argument is not the same as “winning” at life.
TLDR: expect more of this kind of “tech bro” nonsense over time rather than less, bc we have more foundational issues that are leaking out to cause / allow them.
Sorry this is a lot of words - I think sometimes we oversimplify so wanted to keep all these details, this time.
In a very realistic sense that has happened already.
First, the actual smart ones (or those who listen to smart advisors, same difference) - I’m talking about the likes of Zuckerberg and Bezos - have adapted to get ahead no matter who wins the election. These will utilize whatever advantage their robot/lizard brains can concoct. We hear about these, but they have successfully managed to train society to not think about them all that much, especially in conjunction to words like “politics” or “inflation”, despite being very much active in both. e.g., FaceBook facilitated genocide was bad - oh uh… well uh… haven’t you heard, FaceBook is dead now, while we are “Meta”, didn’t you know!?
But both the Musk and the Donald have their own proprietary social media platforms - Xhitter and [Alternative]Truth Social, respectively - and they have already eaten out the heart of most of the former conservative party. i.e. before the Tea Party (e.g. Ted Cruz) could eat out the GOP from the inside out, the Donald overtook that process and was so “successful” at it that a lot of people - us and them even! - call it the “GQP” now. The Kings of Old, aka Moscow Mitch, now have to kiss the ring of the twice-impeached former reality TV personality, while ignoring the sounds & smells of shatting (it pains me to think that the latter part of that sentence I mean literally! and then arguably even worse figuratively, e.g. how Trump makes fun of their wives in public but they have to swallow their pride and praise him or else their own supporters will boot them out as fast as McCarthy was).
Anyway, Trump is not a “tech bro”, but the likes of the Musk look up to him all the same, and also there’s a fantastic argument that FaceBook helped elect Trump to be President in the first place, much as Twitter is trying to get him back in for a second term, so the tech bro culture is very much ingrained in the heart of the conservative party even now.
According to her statement, they were still trying to strike a deal with her within days of the release.
I can’t imagine anything more shady than trying to strike a deal with someone for their likeness, all the while preparing to use it anyway and later denying it had anything to do with them
She is going to take them to the cleaners, and Altman and his circlejerk club will deserve every single cent of the damages they’re forced to pay. I genuinely hope she makes it an incredibly messy and eye wateringly expensive legal process for them. I’m not a ScarJo fanboy by any means, but fuck OpenAI for thinking they can get away with something so absurdly blatant and obviously unethical.
Gods, I hope you’re right. I hope it’s so bad that it scares every other AI company. Because they get away with this kind of crap all the time with no repercussions, since your average person doesn’t have the money to bring them to court over it.
Well, more importantly, a lot of people with a lot of assets invested a lot of money and thus expect to make a lot more money on OpenAI, so my bet’s on this getting sidetracked in some weird sketchy fashion because the US is a corporate feudal state these days (amongst other things).
They “let the cat out of the bag” by referencing the movie “Her” if I understand correctly. Not really an admition of guilt like the article makes it seem.
They also clearly state on their website that they used an other voice actor. If you actually compare both voices, they aren’t the same just similar. They probably went with someone that sounds like her on purpose specifically because of the movie but that’s fine really.
This article is emotional and manipulative. I don’t think scar jo deserves to own the whole spectrum her voice belongs to just because she voiced an AI in one movie. This is how you end up with corporations owning all voices like they tried with music.
In Scarlett Johansson‘s statement, she says that OpenAI approached her to voice the Sky voice.
Whether or not OpenAI hired another actress that sounded very similar to her (hah.) and they are weirdly cagey about naming or they just ripped off the audio from her movies and are lying about hiring a voice actress, is not the extent of the issue.
People sounding alike just happens. But that we know they asked to use Johansson’s voice for this. After being rebuffed, they created Sky, which sounds a lot like Sam, and made several references to the Her movie. Sky is even presented with the same ‘personality’ as Sam. They aren’t just ripping off Scarlett Johansson’s voice acting, they’re ripping off the character as a whole, and trying to associate themselves with the movie. That’s shameful and rips off Spike Jonze as well as all the other creatives who created that movie.
And for what? Because tech bros didn’t get what they wanted, so they decided to try to rip off the characters anyway? Because Her is sort of a cultural touchstone, and their product is merely well-positioned, but GPT-4o will be in a crowded market space within 6 months?
It’s sort of pathetic - pretending to lean on the relevance of a movie because your product is destined to become irrelevant.
Also - highly ironic to me that Her is (somewhat) about how you can’t own something that doesn’t consent to be owned. And those dumb bitches went and ripped it off when they didn’t get consent. Well, now Sky’s gone to join Sam in some non-corporeal reality.
Sorry for the novel. I didn’t sleep well and I get weird when I’m sleep deprived.
Just like scarlet doesn’t own all voices that sound mildly like her, Spike Jonze doesn’t own the concept of an AI companion.
I’m not really sure what your point is, there’s nothing to rip off. No matter what they make it sound like, there’s going to be similarities with the movie. There’s nothing wrong with leaning into these for advertising purposes.
No matter what they make it sound like, there’s going to be similarities with the movie.
I don’t follow.
They literally disabled the ‘Sky’ voice Sunday night and now users can’t pick a voice that sounds like the character from Her.
And, mind you, this is not a ‘huh, they sorta sound the same’ this is a ‘they sound very similar, and have the same personality’ situation, in addition to the fact that Sam Altman is on the record talking about being obsessed with the movie Her - which is circumstantial. What isn’t circumstantial is they literally referenced the movie’s name in their marketing materials. Sam tweeted a vague hint, and his colleagues confirmed it. It’s not speculative.
There’s nothing wrong with leaning into these for advertising purposes.
Actually, intellectual property theft is either wrong or merely only technically illegal, depending on where you stand on copyright, but it’s still wrong, either way. Then there’s trying to mislead the public into thinking that GPT-4o was endorsed in some way by those involved in the Her movie. A false endorsement is also illegal. So - wrong there, too.
I’m sure an actual lawyer could find more wrong with it, but just those two things are actual, literal crimes.
I’m saying practically any voice with the associated bubbly flirty personality is going to make you think of the movie Her in such a context.
Sure they leaned into it for advertising purposes but a tweet referencing it and showcasing the one voice that sounds like her out of the five isn’t crossing the line imo.
I think it’s a slippery slope to say any AI assistant that has a similar timbre and personality as an AI in a movie is off limits.
As long as they don’t infringe by calling it “Scarjo” or saying “From the movie Her” I don’t see a problem.
I’m saying practically any voice with the associated bubbly flirty personality is going to make you think of the movie Her in such a context.
I don’t know about you, but even a flirty Joaquin Phoenix voice would never make me think of Her.
But if they’d had a “voice actor” do a spot on impression of Paul Bettany, complete with the little pauses and other flourishes of his portrayals of Vision, I’d think they ripped off the character.
I think you and I differ there.
As best as I can figure, you’re stuck on the flimsy excuse from Altman that they hired a voice actor.
I see a line of events that points to OpenAI/Altman making a conscious effort to glom onto the Her movie, and specifically, the Samantha character to drum up interest, create viral buzz to enrich further themselves (without compensating anyone involved in the movie), and to try to add a veneer of credibility to a fading trend.
Slight turn.
In another life I was a photographer, and one of the things that they do not mess around with is model releases. Any person that appears in your photos that distributed must absolutely have a legal agreement in place. Using someone’s likeness for commercial purposes without consent and/or compensation will get you fucked in triplicate.
There’s also the moral part of it. Artists know that you don’t rip off artists. Inspired by, sure. But there’s a line, and you don’t cross it. It’s as simple as that.
Okay, and finally, this is based less on facts I know, and more feelings I have about the situation -
It’s fucking creepy, dude.
Okay, so the movie Her - an entire society becomes obsessed with their AI companions and falls in love with them, causing tremendous grief and trauma. And that’s like, what they’re going to lengths to brand but not brand this latest version with? What kind of fucked up things are going on in their heads over there?
It doesn’t make sense.
The rundown, again. (Sorry, I like to establish context. Yay neurodivergence.).
Altman is on record saying that Her is his favorite movie, and that it is a major inspiration to him. One of the reasons he got into this field. He spent 9 months trying to convince Johansson to work with him on this, and lend her name/voice to this latest iteration of ChatGPT. He’s been so focused on getting her to lend his name to this, that he continued asking her to join in on this even just a few days before the announcement, which was like, the 13th. And that’s after she’s already turned him down, so he was just ignoring her boundaries and trying to pressure her…
On the 11th - two days before this announcement, Altman does a Reddit AMA (which he was doing as part of the 4o press junket) and says that he’d like to open up ChatGPT for personal NSFW usage.
I mean, everyone is focusing on Her, but we probably should also to be thinking about the Lucy Liu Futurama episode, because… well, I’m just going to say it. I think he already fucked the robot. The line of events from A to B is transparent and fucking gross.
Not the whole fucking a robot thing - people got needs - but that the likeness is obviously stolen from a non-consenting actress that I’m beginning to believe he’s obsessed with.
So … yeah… I have all the problems with this. I view concerns over the usage of her voice as immaterial to the usage of the character, and I see an inherent difference between an LLM mimicking a random voice that happens to sound like someone, and this situation, where the voice was clearly created to represent the character, and by extension, the actor that played the character. I don’t think there’s a slippery slope here. Most judges are fairly smart, and will be able to articulate something I (a non legal) took as a given from the outset.
Ya I get your point, I just think the similarities are too vague and trying to put down boundaries is fool hardy.
Like what’s the spectrum of voice that isn’t allowed here, how much does it need to differ from scarjo. Is it just because the character was AI. How much does the personality have to differ if that part matters.
Here’s a comparison by the way, they are hardly the same imo.
I also don’t think liking the movie or asking scarjo really mean anything if you think about it.
People can get their inspiration from wherever they like and falling in love with an AI is nothing novel, the directors certainly don’t have claim to the concept.
In any case, I think mostly it’s just hard to draw the line and the line will most likely only benefit corporations and mega celebrities while directly inconveniencing the rest of us.
No matter how similar the voice is to Scarlett Johansson’s, it would still sound fundamentally different. But there are tricks that you can use to alter the pitch and range of a voice to make it sound more like a specific person and that’s probably what they did.
But Johansson’s public statement describes how they tried to shmooze her: they approached her last fall and were given the FO, contacted her agent two days before launch to ask for reconsideration, launched it before they got a response, then yanked it when her lawyers asked them how they made the voice.
Which is still not an admission of guilt, but seems very shady at the very least, if it’s actually what happened.
Not really an admition of guilt like the article makes it seem.
You don’t need an admission of guilt to lose in court. The fact that they pursued her permission up until 2 days before the release, even after being assured the client did not wish for them to utilize her voice, is pretty damning.
I don’t think scar jo deserves to own the whole spectrum her voice belongs to just because she voiced an AI in one movie.
What’s the difference between this and an AI releasing a Taylor Swift album? Does Taylor Swift deserve to own a whole spectrum of voice?
Voice acting is still an art, and artists deserve to be paid for their contributions. If she has performed an awfully in Her, would they still want to mimic her voice? If Her hadn’t been made, would they have come up with the voice and personality out of the blue?
No, because it’s art, and AI is just an advanced copying machine. Open AI is just the newest attempt to leverage artists and workers from their group bargaining power. It’s the scab of the future, but with more carbon emissions.
You don’t need an admission of guilt to lose in court.
Currently even if they used voice clips to train a model on her voice it wouldn’t be illegal. That isn’t currently the case, since they say they used an other actress that sounds like her anyways.
Does Taylor Swift deserve to own a whole spectrum of voice?
No, just like she doesn’t deserve to own the four chord progressions that make up her songs. If she did, she could literally sue half of all pop music.
This is why none of this is copyrightable. There are too many people that have similar voices and too many songs that use similar chord progressions.
Your fantasy where this empowers small time artists is just that, a fantasy. If we push and they come out with new laws that make these things copyrightable, you just end up with corporations owning all of it.
Currently even if they used voice clips to train a model on her voice it wouldn’t be illegal.
I think that’s currently the point of contention…
That isn’t currently the case, since they say they used an other actress that sounds like her anyways.
That’s what they’re claiming, but it’s not like open AI doesn’t have a pretty well documented history of lying.
No! Just like she doesn’t deserve to own the four chord progressions that make up her songs.
There’s a difference between common chord progressions and plagiarizing someone’s voice and performance. You are the only person conflating the two.
This is why none of this is copyrightable. There are two many people that have similar voices
I think their intent is pretty clear. They didn’t want a similar voice, they wanted her voice. After failing at getting her consent, they proceeded anyways.
and too many songs that use similar chord progressions.
There’s actual precedent on how similar songs can be to each other without giving credit. Simple chord progressions aren’t copyrightable, but how those chord progressions are performed are.
Your fantasy where this empowers small time artists is just that, a fantasy.
Lol, if they are able to plagiarize art from millionaires, what’s the chance there’s going to be any kind of protections for small artist?
If we push and they come out with new laws that make these things copyrightable, you just end up with corporations owning all of it.
We don’t have to come out with laws banning chord progressions, that’s just a strawman argument you erected yourself. We just need to apply the laws we currently have to AI companies. If Sony had tried to get her to dress like black widow and do a commercial and she refused. And if they then proceeded to hire an actress who looked like her, dressed the actress in a black skin tight suit, and gave her a red wig… We’d be dealing with a hefty lawsuit, even if they claimed it wasn’t supposed to be SJ.
If you read another article that has more information to it, instead of just this opinion piece, it looks like they hired and paid a voice actress and that it is her natural voice (supposedly).
Which begs the question: Can a voice actor be denied work or denied the ability to have their voice used, if they sound similar to someone else who is more famous?
This kind of reminds me of Crispin Glover, from Back to the Future. He tried to negotiate a higher pay for the second movie, so the producers hired a different actor to play the role, but deliberately made the actor up to look like Glover. In response, Glover sued the producers and won. It set a critical precedent for Hollywood, about using someone’s likeness without consent.
The article mentions they reached out to her two days before the launch - if she had said ‘OK,’ there’s no way they could have even recorded what they needed from her, let alone trained the model in time for the presentation. So they must have had a Scarlett Johansson voice ready to go. Other than training the model on movies (really not ideal for a high quality voice model), how would they have gotten the recordings they needed?
If they hired a “random” voice actress, they might not run into issues. But if at any point they had a job listing, a discussion with a talent manager, or anything else where they mentioned wanting a “Scarlett Johansson sound-alike,” they might have dug themselves a nice hole here.
Specifically regarding your question about hiring a voice actor that sounds like someone else - this is commonly done to replace people for cartoons. I don’t think it’s an issue if you are playing a character. But if you deliberately impersonate a person, there might be some trouble.
Honestly, with the tweets that reference the Her movie, they may already be in a hole, anyway. Plus, it’s not just the voice, it’s that the ‘character’ of the Sky voice is very similar to Sam in the Her movie.
If I were a jurist, I could easily be persuaded to believe they willingly committed IP theft and attempted to imply endorsement of the Her movie (the production studio?), Spike Jonze, and Scarlett Johansson.
(Of course, that statement would disqualify me as a jurist, so I’ll never know!)
Well one of the other articles I’ve read said they listened to and sampled 400 voice actors and selected 5 of them to have flown out to do all the voice work. The voice in the product also doesn’t sound that much like Scar Jo. Just similar. She never had a very unique voice.
I think it is less a question of whether the voice sounds like Scarlett Johansson, as that is subjective and arbitrary (e.g. assume you could objectively measure the similarity, what’s the acceptable cut off - 80%? 90%?). The same is true for the uniqueness of her voice.
I think the real question will come down to intention. They clearly wanted her voice. Did they intentionally attempt to replicate it when they couldn’t have the real thing? If so, there is precedent that would suggest they could be in a little trouble here, e.g.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-05-09-me-238-story.html
The voice they’re using isn’t a replicated one, though. It’s a paid voice actress and it is supposed to be her natural voice. It also does sound a bit different than scar jo.
That won’t be a copyright issue, but if you’re deliberately making it indistinguishable from somebody else it can be a publicity rights issue by (false) implicit support from the one impersonated.
Intent probably matters a lot here. The actor they hired did not coincidentally have a similar voice. They were hired because they had a similar voice, and the fact that Scarlett Johansson was approached to start with only underscores this.
They were specifically looking for her likeness, for commercial reasons. And when it was denied, they purposely imitated it. That doesn’t feel right to me. In the end, they’re still trying to use her likeness without permission.
That’s different than if they liked a VA’s voice and hired them. The voice could be similar, but there was no ill intent nor attempting to copy a likeness. I think they would’ve been fine if they were even shooting for something like her voice. Where OpenAI fucked up is approaching Johansson to start with, because it shows they didn’t want something like her voice or the VA coincidentally sounded similar – they purposely wanted her likeness, and went behind her back to do it once she denied them.
That‘s the type of cockiness you‘d expect from scoundrels who just committed the biggest heist in history and got away with it. I‘m not surprised in the slightest.
They’re not just deliberately using her voice; they’re deliberately lying about it and bragging about what really happened in public. They’ll pay some nuisance settlement that’s a small fraction of their profit.
That’s how they treat an a list actress. Imagine how they treat everyone else. You don’t get a settlement. You just get fucked.
No, you don’t understand, these guys are tech bros, they’re special, for reasons.
From the article:
And that sums up techbros in one sentence.
You see this in action anytime people go “no no you just don’t understand how this works” as a way of sidestepping the overall issue. They try to bury you in the minutiae of it, and what’s “technically” possible without acknowledging that A) what’s possible will increase over time and B) the issue is not technology, it’s the intention of it and the motivations of the people behind it.
It’s like trying to deconstruct the concept of a gun, talking about all its potential mechanical malfunctions, its capacity limits, the fact you have to aim it, and so on, all as a way of trying to downplay the danger of it being pointed directly at you.
Damn you really nailed it. This is something that has bothered me a lot but I’ve never found a good way to explain it. Your analogy is perfect.
They would not keep doing it if it did not keep working.
There are a great many similarities to this and all of Trump’s many & varied trials - when the rewards (of rape, bribery, extortion, blackmail, assassination, and so many other things) FAR outweigh the risks, it would be the height of stupidity to expect that nobody would ever even so much as dream of taking advantage.
And by stupidity, I suppose I mean Mitch McConnell, who more than any other singular individual that we can see decides e.g. which and whether judges can be appointed to their seats, and which and whether government programs may get funded - e.g. watchdog organizations that used to prosecute law-breaking behaviors, way back in ye olden times. (Mitch’s partner in this is not worth mentioning bc that role is played by a rotating cast of characters - now it’s Mike Johnson, before it was Kevin McCarthy, maybe next it will be Matt Gaetz, who da fuq knows.)
Every time we hear about another tech bro that gets a slap on the risk, while e.g. a black person gets shot just for walking/running/jogging/working/breathing/sleeping, we should remind ourselves: this is on purpose (or at least deemed “acceptable losses”, “collateral damage”). Those laws were supposed to be ours (Of/For/By The People) to make as we wished, and were, before this country was taken over from the inside by a silent coup, more than a decade prior to January 6. Now, an increasingly smaller minority runs the entire nation - e.g. less than a handful ousted McCarthy - and we seem to have collectively decided that we will do nothing about it.
Even conservatives should be against this, bc getting your way is not the same thing as doing things properly, and maintaining a stable
democracysystem of governance (who am I kidding, we’ve been a plutocracy since basically the beginning) is something that is required for us all to continue to exist. Example scenario: I am a father and two of my teenage children are having a birthday celebration, with both of their hearts desires set on sushi, and my wife wanted Chinese food but is okay with sushi. However, I don’t like sushi, hence we are all going for barbecue (despite one of the birthday teens being vegetarian except fish), and that’s final - sound familiar? Winning an argument is not the same as “winning” at life.TLDR: expect more of this kind of “tech bro” nonsense over time rather than less, bc we have more foundational issues that are leaking out to cause / allow them.
Sorry this is a lot of words - I think sometimes we oversimplify so wanted to keep all these details, this time.
They’ll probably end up becoming the next big conservative party if the social conservative fascists are beaten.
In a very realistic sense that has happened already.
First, the actual smart ones (or those who listen to smart advisors, same difference) - I’m talking about the likes of Zuckerberg and Bezos - have adapted to get ahead no matter who wins the election. These will utilize whatever advantage their robot/lizard brains can concoct. We hear about these, but they have successfully managed to train society to not think about them all that much, especially in conjunction to words like “politics” or “inflation”, despite being very much active in both. e.g., FaceBook
facilitated genocidewas bad - oh uh… well uh… haven’t you heard, FaceBook is dead now, while we are “Meta”, didn’t you know!?But both the Musk and the Donald have their own proprietary social media platforms - Xhitter and [Alternative]Truth Social, respectively - and they have already eaten out the heart of most of the former conservative party. i.e. before the Tea Party (e.g. Ted Cruz) could eat out the GOP from the inside out, the Donald overtook that process and was so “successful” at it that a lot of people - us and them even! - call it the “GQP” now. The Kings of Old, aka Moscow Mitch, now have to kiss the ring of the twice-impeached former reality TV personality, while ignoring the sounds & smells of shatting (it pains me to think that the latter part of that sentence I mean literally! and then arguably even worse figuratively, e.g. how Trump makes fun of their wives in public but they have to swallow their pride and praise him or else their own supporters will boot them out as fast as McCarthy was).
Anyway, Trump is not a “tech bro”, but the likes of the Musk look up to him all the same, and also there’s a fantastic argument that FaceBook helped elect Trump to be President in the first place, much as Twitter is trying to get him back in for a second term, so the tech bro culture is very much ingrained in the heart of the conservative party even now.
According to her statement, they were still trying to strike a deal with her within days of the release.
I can’t imagine anything more shady than trying to strike a deal with someone for their likeness, all the while preparing to use it anyway and later denying it had anything to do with them
She is going to take them to the cleaners, and Altman and his circlejerk club will deserve every single cent of the damages they’re forced to pay. I genuinely hope she makes it an incredibly messy and eye wateringly expensive legal process for them. I’m not a ScarJo fanboy by any means, but fuck OpenAI for thinking they can get away with something so absurdly blatant and obviously unethical.
Gods, I hope you’re right. I hope it’s so bad that it scares every other AI company. Because they get away with this kind of crap all the time with no repercussions, since your average person doesn’t have the money to bring them to court over it.
Well, more importantly, a lot of people with a lot of assets invested a lot of money and thus expect to make a lot more money on OpenAI, so my bet’s on this getting sidetracked in some weird sketchy fashion because the US is a corporate feudal state these days (amongst other things).
They “let the cat out of the bag” by referencing the movie “Her” if I understand correctly. Not really an admition of guilt like the article makes it seem.
They also clearly state on their website that they used an other voice actor. If you actually compare both voices, they aren’t the same just similar. They probably went with someone that sounds like her on purpose specifically because of the movie but that’s fine really.
This article is emotional and manipulative. I don’t think scar jo deserves to own the whole spectrum her voice belongs to just because she voiced an AI in one movie. This is how you end up with corporations owning all voices like they tried with music.
I wouldn’t ever want someone to be able to own a tone/sound of voice. I’m with you there.
But it kinda sounds like they’re trying to straight-up imitate her. Like they want people to hear this ai and think it’s voiced by johanssen herself.
I don’t know if that’s true, or if it even makes a difference legally, it’s just the impression I’m getting.
I’m not knowledgeable about any of this; any correction is welcome, lol.
In Scarlett Johansson‘s statement, she says that OpenAI approached her to voice the Sky voice.
Whether or not OpenAI hired another actress that sounded very similar to her (hah.) and they are weirdly cagey about naming or they just ripped off the audio from her movies and are lying about hiring a voice actress, is not the extent of the issue.
People sounding alike just happens. But that we know they asked to use Johansson’s voice for this. After being rebuffed, they created Sky, which sounds a lot like Sam, and made several references to the Her movie. Sky is even presented with the same ‘personality’ as Sam. They aren’t just ripping off Scarlett Johansson’s voice acting, they’re ripping off the character as a whole, and trying to associate themselves with the movie. That’s shameful and rips off Spike Jonze as well as all the other creatives who created that movie.
And for what? Because tech bros didn’t get what they wanted, so they decided to try to rip off the characters anyway? Because Her is sort of a cultural touchstone, and their product is merely well-positioned, but GPT-4o will be in a crowded market space within 6 months?
It’s sort of pathetic - pretending to lean on the relevance of a movie because your product is destined to become irrelevant.
Also - highly ironic to me that Her is (somewhat) about how you can’t own something that doesn’t consent to be owned. And those dumb bitches went and ripped it off when they didn’t get consent. Well, now Sky’s gone to join Sam in some non-corporeal reality.
Sorry for the novel. I didn’t sleep well and I get weird when I’m sleep deprived.
Just like scarlet doesn’t own all voices that sound mildly like her, Spike Jonze doesn’t own the concept of an AI companion.
I’m not really sure what your point is, there’s nothing to rip off. No matter what they make it sound like, there’s going to be similarities with the movie. There’s nothing wrong with leaning into these for advertising purposes.
I don’t follow.
They literally disabled the ‘Sky’ voice Sunday night and now users can’t pick a voice that sounds like the character from Her.
And, mind you, this is not a ‘huh, they sorta sound the same’ this is a ‘they sound very similar, and have the same personality’ situation, in addition to the fact that Sam Altman is on the record talking about being obsessed with the movie Her - which is circumstantial. What isn’t circumstantial is they literally referenced the movie’s name in their marketing materials. Sam tweeted a vague hint, and his colleagues confirmed it. It’s not speculative.
Actually, intellectual property theft is either wrong or merely only technically illegal, depending on where you stand on copyright, but it’s still wrong, either way. Then there’s trying to mislead the public into thinking that GPT-4o was endorsed in some way by those involved in the Her movie. A false endorsement is also illegal. So - wrong there, too.
I’m sure an actual lawyer could find more wrong with it, but just those two things are actual, literal crimes.
I’m saying practically any voice with the associated bubbly flirty personality is going to make you think of the movie Her in such a context.
Sure they leaned into it for advertising purposes but a tweet referencing it and showcasing the one voice that sounds like her out of the five isn’t crossing the line imo.
I think it’s a slippery slope to say any AI assistant that has a similar timbre and personality as an AI in a movie is off limits.
As long as they don’t infringe by calling it “Scarjo” or saying “From the movie Her” I don’t see a problem.
I don’t know about you, but even a flirty Joaquin Phoenix voice would never make me think of Her.
But if they’d had a “voice actor” do a spot on impression of Paul Bettany, complete with the little pauses and other flourishes of his portrayals of Vision, I’d think they ripped off the character.
I think you and I differ there.
As best as I can figure, you’re stuck on the flimsy excuse from Altman that they hired a voice actor. I see a line of events that points to OpenAI/Altman making a conscious effort to glom onto the Her movie, and specifically, the Samantha character to drum up interest, create viral buzz to enrich further themselves (without compensating anyone involved in the movie), and to try to add a veneer of credibility to a fading trend.
Slight turn.
In another life I was a photographer, and one of the things that they do not mess around with is model releases. Any person that appears in your photos that distributed must absolutely have a legal agreement in place. Using someone’s likeness for commercial purposes without consent and/or compensation will get you fucked in triplicate.
There’s also the moral part of it. Artists know that you don’t rip off artists. Inspired by, sure. But there’s a line, and you don’t cross it. It’s as simple as that.
Okay, and finally, this is based less on facts I know, and more feelings I have about the situation -
It’s fucking creepy, dude.
Okay, so the movie Her - an entire society becomes obsessed with their AI companions and falls in love with them, causing tremendous grief and trauma. And that’s like, what they’re going to lengths to brand but not brand this latest version with? What kind of fucked up things are going on in their heads over there?
It doesn’t make sense.
The rundown, again. (Sorry, I like to establish context. Yay neurodivergence.).
Altman is on record saying that Her is his favorite movie, and that it is a major inspiration to him. One of the reasons he got into this field. He spent 9 months trying to convince Johansson to work with him on this, and lend her name/voice to this latest iteration of ChatGPT. He’s been so focused on getting her to lend his name to this, that he continued asking her to join in on this even just a few days before the announcement, which was like, the 13th. And that’s after she’s already turned him down, so he was just ignoring her boundaries and trying to pressure her…
On the 11th - two days before this announcement, Altman does a Reddit AMA (which he was doing as part of the 4o press junket) and says that he’d like to open up ChatGPT for personal NSFW usage.
I mean, everyone is focusing on Her, but we probably should also to be thinking about the Lucy Liu Futurama episode, because… well, I’m just going to say it. I think he already fucked the robot. The line of events from A to B is transparent and fucking gross.
Not the whole fucking a robot thing - people got needs - but that the likeness is obviously stolen from a non-consenting actress that I’m beginning to believe he’s obsessed with.
So … yeah… I have all the problems with this. I view concerns over the usage of her voice as immaterial to the usage of the character, and I see an inherent difference between an LLM mimicking a random voice that happens to sound like someone, and this situation, where the voice was clearly created to represent the character, and by extension, the actor that played the character. I don’t think there’s a slippery slope here. Most judges are fairly smart, and will be able to articulate something I (a non legal) took as a given from the outset.
Ya I get your point, I just think the similarities are too vague and trying to put down boundaries is fool hardy.
Like what’s the spectrum of voice that isn’t allowed here, how much does it need to differ from scarjo. Is it just because the character was AI. How much does the personality have to differ if that part matters.
Here’s a comparison by the way, they are hardly the same imo.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ8UVSXnefk
I also don’t think liking the movie or asking scarjo really mean anything if you think about it.
People can get their inspiration from wherever they like and falling in love with an AI is nothing novel, the directors certainly don’t have claim to the concept.
In any case, I think mostly it’s just hard to draw the line and the line will most likely only benefit corporations and mega celebrities while directly inconveniencing the rest of us.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://m.piped.video/watch?v=aQ8UVSXnefk
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
No matter how similar the voice is to Scarlett Johansson’s, it would still sound fundamentally different. But there are tricks that you can use to alter the pitch and range of a voice to make it sound more like a specific person and that’s probably what they did.
There’s also this part:
Which is still not an admission of guilt, but seems very shady at the very least, if it’s actually what happened.
You don’t need an admission of guilt to lose in court. The fact that they pursued her permission up until 2 days before the release, even after being assured the client did not wish for them to utilize her voice, is pretty damning.
What’s the difference between this and an AI releasing a Taylor Swift album? Does Taylor Swift deserve to own a whole spectrum of voice?
Voice acting is still an art, and artists deserve to be paid for their contributions. If she has performed an awfully in Her, would they still want to mimic her voice? If Her hadn’t been made, would they have come up with the voice and personality out of the blue?
No, because it’s art, and AI is just an advanced copying machine. Open AI is just the newest attempt to leverage artists and workers from their group bargaining power. It’s the scab of the future, but with more carbon emissions.
Currently even if they used voice clips to train a model on her voice it wouldn’t be illegal. That isn’t currently the case, since they say they used an other actress that sounds like her anyways.
No, just like she doesn’t deserve to own the four chord progressions that make up her songs. If she did, she could literally sue half of all pop music.
This is why none of this is copyrightable. There are too many people that have similar voices and too many songs that use similar chord progressions.
Your fantasy where this empowers small time artists is just that, a fantasy. If we push and they come out with new laws that make these things copyrightable, you just end up with corporations owning all of it.
I think that’s currently the point of contention…
That’s what they’re claiming, but it’s not like open AI doesn’t have a pretty well documented history of lying.
There’s a difference between common chord progressions and plagiarizing someone’s voice and performance. You are the only person conflating the two.
I think their intent is pretty clear. They didn’t want a similar voice, they wanted her voice. After failing at getting her consent, they proceeded anyways.
There’s actual precedent on how similar songs can be to each other without giving credit. Simple chord progressions aren’t copyrightable, but how those chord progressions are performed are.
Lol, if they are able to plagiarize art from millionaires, what’s the chance there’s going to be any kind of protections for small artist?
We don’t have to come out with laws banning chord progressions, that’s just a strawman argument you erected yourself. We just need to apply the laws we currently have to AI companies. If Sony had tried to get her to dress like black widow and do a commercial and she refused. And if they then proceeded to hire an actress who looked like her, dressed the actress in a black skin tight suit, and gave her a red wig… We’d be dealing with a hefty lawsuit, even if they claimed it wasn’t supposed to be SJ.
If you read another article that has more information to it, instead of just this opinion piece, it looks like they hired and paid a voice actress and that it is her natural voice (supposedly).
Which begs the question: Can a voice actor be denied work or denied the ability to have their voice used, if they sound similar to someone else who is more famous?
This kind of reminds me of Crispin Glover, from Back to the Future. He tried to negotiate a higher pay for the second movie, so the producers hired a different actor to play the role, but deliberately made the actor up to look like Glover. In response, Glover sued the producers and won. It set a critical precedent for Hollywood, about using someone’s likeness without consent.
The article mentions they reached out to her two days before the launch - if she had said ‘OK,’ there’s no way they could have even recorded what they needed from her, let alone trained the model in time for the presentation. So they must have had a Scarlett Johansson voice ready to go. Other than training the model on movies (really not ideal for a high quality voice model), how would they have gotten the recordings they needed?
If they hired a “random” voice actress, they might not run into issues. But if at any point they had a job listing, a discussion with a talent manager, or anything else where they mentioned wanting a “Scarlett Johansson sound-alike,” they might have dug themselves a nice hole here.
Specifically regarding your question about hiring a voice actor that sounds like someone else - this is commonly done to replace people for cartoons. I don’t think it’s an issue if you are playing a character. But if you deliberately impersonate a person, there might be some trouble.
Honestly, with the tweets that reference the Her movie, they may already be in a hole, anyway. Plus, it’s not just the voice, it’s that the ‘character’ of the Sky voice is very similar to Sam in the Her movie.
If I were a jurist, I could easily be persuaded to believe they willingly committed IP theft and attempted to imply endorsement of the Her movie (the production studio?), Spike Jonze, and Scarlett Johansson.
(Of course, that statement would disqualify me as a jurist, so I’ll never know!)
Well one of the other articles I’ve read said they listened to and sampled 400 voice actors and selected 5 of them to have flown out to do all the voice work. The voice in the product also doesn’t sound that much like Scar Jo. Just similar. She never had a very unique voice.
I think it is less a question of whether the voice sounds like Scarlett Johansson, as that is subjective and arbitrary (e.g. assume you could objectively measure the similarity, what’s the acceptable cut off - 80%? 90%?). The same is true for the uniqueness of her voice.
I think the real question will come down to intention. They clearly wanted her voice. Did they intentionally attempt to replicate it when they couldn’t have the real thing? If so, there is precedent that would suggest they could be in a little trouble here, e.g. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-05-09-me-238-story.html
The voice they’re using isn’t a replicated one, though. It’s a paid voice actress and it is supposed to be her natural voice. It also does sound a bit different than scar jo.
That won’t be a copyright issue, but if you’re deliberately making it indistinguishable from somebody else it can be a publicity rights issue by (false) implicit support from the one impersonated.
Intent probably matters a lot here. The actor they hired did not coincidentally have a similar voice. They were hired because they had a similar voice, and the fact that Scarlett Johansson was approached to start with only underscores this.
They were specifically looking for her likeness, for commercial reasons. And when it was denied, they purposely imitated it. That doesn’t feel right to me. In the end, they’re still trying to use her likeness without permission.
That’s different than if they liked a VA’s voice and hired them. The voice could be similar, but there was no ill intent nor attempting to copy a likeness. I think they would’ve been fine if they were even shooting for something like her voice. Where OpenAI fucked up is approaching Johansson to start with, because it shows they didn’t want something like her voice or the VA coincidentally sounded similar – they purposely wanted her likeness, and went behind her back to do it once she denied them.
Then what about impersonators for hire? Or like a Motley Cru cover band?
Nice try chatgpt but we know it’s tou.
That‘s the type of cockiness you‘d expect from scoundrels who just committed the biggest heist in history and got away with it. I‘m not surprised in the slightest.
These are the same dudes who have LSD and mushroom parties with their female coworkers and then pressure them into sex.
Source? Sounds about right for techbro AI douches, curious though
Orgies and psychedelics use is super common in their own rite, but it’s even more common in high tech silicone valley circles:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40401043
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/machine-learning-researcher-links-openai-185652824.html
I don’t think actresses are worth more than ordinary people but sure, I get what you are saying.
Big tech fucks everyone over, as usual.