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But it's clearly not her voice right? The version that's been on the app for a year just isn't. Like, it clearly intending to be slightly reminiscent of her, bu

But it's clearly not her voice right? The version that's been on the app for a year just isn't. Like, it clearly intending to be slightly reminiscent of her, but it's also very clearly not. Are we seriously saying we can't make voices that are similar to celebrities, when not using their actual voice?

gedy 2y ago
Normally I'd agree if this were some vague "artist style", but this was clearly an attempt to duplicate a living person, a media celebrity no less.
- __loam 2y ago
  Why do you have an issue with them taking someone's likeness to use in their product but not with them taking someone's work to use in their product?
  - gedy 2y ago
    Because this isn't training an audio model along with a million other voices to understand English, etc. It's clearly meant to sound exactly like that one celebrity. I suspect a video avatar service that looked exactly like her would fall afoul of fair use as well. Though an image gen that used some images of her (and many others) to train and spit out generic "attractive blonde woman" is fair use in my opinion.
    - numpad0 2y ago
      Chances are this is. Basically same as LoRA. One of go-to tools for these literally uses Diffusion model and work on spectrograms as images.
    - __loam 2y ago
      Okay so as long as we steal enough stuff then it's legal.
- threatofrain 2y ago
  Is this different from the various videos of the Harry Potter actors doing comedic high fashion ads? Because those were very well received. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipuqLy87-3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipuqLy87-3A
  - BadHumans 2y ago
    Is a billion dollar AI company utilizing someone's voice against their will in a flagship product after they said no twice different from a random Youtube channel making comedy videos? I think so but that could just be me.
  - nicklecompte 2y ago
    I think anti-deepfake legislation needs to consider fair use, especially when it comes to parody or other commentary on public figures. OpenAI's actions do not qualify as fair use.
    - throwway120385 2y ago
      The problem with that idea is that I can hide behind it while making videos of famous politicians doing really morally questionable things and distributing them on YouTube. The reason Fair Use works with regular parodies in my opinion is that everyone can tell that it is obviously fake. For example, Saturday Night Live routinely makes joking parody videos of elected officials doing things we think might be consistent with their character. And in those cases it's obvious that it's being portrayed by an actor and therefore a parody. If you use someone's likeness directly I think that it must never be fair use or we will quickly end up in a world where no video can be trusted.
      - cjbgkagh 2y ago
        I’m guessing you’re referring to people still thinking Sarah Palin said she could see Russia from her house, that was from a SNL skit and an amazing impression from Tina Fey. I agree, people have a hard time separating reality from obvious parody, how could we expect them to make a distinction with intentional imitation. Society must draw a clear line that it is not ok to do this.
- citizenpaul 2y ago
  An actress that specifically played the voice of AI in a movie about AI no less.
bigfishrunning 2y ago
It could be trained on Scarlett's voice though, there's plenty of recorded samples for OpenAI to use. It's pretty damning for them to take down the voice right away like that
- brandall10 2y ago
  Her statement claims the voice was taken down at her attorney's insistence.
bobthepanda 2y ago
this is correct. in fact the fcc has already clarified this for the case of robocalls. https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-makes-ai-generated-voices-robocalls-illegal https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-makes-ai-generated-voices-r...
emmp 2y ago
We can seriously say that, yes. The courts have been saying this in the US for over 30 years. See Midler v. Ford Motor Co.
- Avshalom 2y ago
  Tom Waits won a lawsuit against Doritos too.
dragonwriter 2y ago
If the purpose is to trade on the celebrity voice and perceived association, and its subject to California right of personality law, then, yes, we're saying that that has been established law for decades.
- Last5Digits 2y ago
  That's not the purpose though, clearly. If anything, you could make the argument that they're trading in on the association to the movie "Her", that's it. Neither Sky nor the new voice model sound particularly like ScarJo, unless you want to imply that her identity rights extend over 40% of all female voice types. People made the association because her voice was used in a movie that features a highly emotive voice assistant reminiscent of GPT-4o, which sama and others joked about. I mean, why not actually compare the voices before forming an opinion? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SamGnUqaOfU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SamGnUqaOfU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgYi3Wr7v_g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgYi3Wr7v_g ----- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iF9mrI9yoBU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iF9mrI9yoBU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV01B5kVsC0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV01B5kVsC0
  - cowsup 2y ago
    > People made the association because her voice was used in a movie that features a highly emotive voice assistant reminiscent of GPT-4o, which sama and others joked about. Whether you think it sounds like her or not is a matter of opinion, I guess. I can see the resemblance, and I can also see the resemblance to Jennifer Lawrence and others. What Johannson is alleging goes beyond this, though. She is alleging that Altman (or his team) reached out to her (or her team) to lend her voice, she was not interested, and then she was asked again just two days before GPT-4o's announcement, and she rejected again. Now there's a voice that, in her opinion, sounds a lot like her. Luckily, the legal system is far more nuanced than just listening to a few voices and comparing it mentally to other voices individuals have heard over the years. They'll be able to figure out, as part of discovery, what lead to the Sky voice sounding the way it does (intentionally using Johannson's likeness? coincidence? directly trained off her interviews/movies?), whether OpenAI were willing to slap Johannson's name onto the existing Sky during the presentation, whether the "her" tweet and the combination of the Sky voice was supposed to draw the subtle connection... This allegation is just the beginning.
ncallaway 2y ago
> Are we seriously saying we can't make voices that are similar to celebrities, when not using their actual voice? They clearly thought it was close enough that they asked for permission, twice. And got two no’s. Going forward with it at that point was super fucked up. It’s very bad to not ask permission when you should. It’s far worse to ask for permission and then ignore the response. Totally ethically bankrupt.
- nicce 2y ago
  And they could have totally get away with it by never mentioning the name of Scarlett. But of course, that is not what they wanted. Edit: to clarify, since it is not exactly identical voice, or even not that close, they can plausibly deny it, and we never new what their intention was. But in this case, they have clearly created the voice to represent Scarlett's voice to demonstrate the capabilities of their product in order to get marketing power.
  - visarga 2y ago
    > since it is not exactly identical voice, or even not that close, they can plausibly deny it When studios approach an actress A and she refuses, then another actress B takes the role, is that infringing on A's rights? Or should they just scrap the movie? Maybe if they replicated a scene from the A's movies or there was striking likeness between the voices... but not generally.
    - nicce 2y ago
      > When studios approach an actress A and she refuses, then another actress B takes the role, is that infringing on A's rights? Or should they just scrap the movie? The scenario would have been that they approach none.
      - r2_pilot 2y ago
        Your scenario leads to the disenfranchisement of lesser-known voice talent, since they cannot take on work that Top Talent has rejected if they happen to resemble(nobody here has seen their doppelganger before? How unique is a person? 1 in 5 million? Then there are 36 million of that type in just the United States alone). Perhaps it's time to re-evaluate some of the rules in society. It's a healthy thing to do periodically.
EasyMark 2y ago
Sure they could have taken her to court but right now they don't want the bad publicity, especially since it would put everything else in the shadow of such a scandalous "story". Better to just back off, let S.J. win and move on and start planning on they're gonna spend all that paper money they got with announcement of a new, more advanced model. It's a financial decision and a fairly predictable one. I'm glad she won this time.
- __loam 2y ago
  Paper money from the model they're giving away for free?
  - EasyMark 2y ago
    I mean if you don't think these kinds of positive announcements don't increase the value of the company or parent company then I don't really know how to convince you as it's a standard business principle.
    - ml-anon 2y ago
      There isn’t a positive announcement here, what is wrong with you? This reads like “we got caught red handed” and doing the bare minimum for it to not appear malicious and deliberate when the timeline is read out in court.
      - EasyMark 2y ago
        They announced a whole new model, that's a positive announcement.
    - __loam 2y ago
      I believe there's a difference between building a sustainable and profitable business and pumping the stock.
- smugma 2y ago
  She also won big against Disney. They backed down even though it appeared the contract was on their side. Iger apologized. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58757748.amp https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58757748.amp
callalex 2y ago
I think we should all be held to the standard of “Weird” Al Yankovic. In personal matters consent is important.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
visarga 2y ago
> Are we seriously saying we can't make voices that are similar to celebrities, when not using their actual voice? I think the copyright industry wants to grab new powers to counter the infinite capacity of AI to create variations. But that move would knee cap the creative industry first, newcomers have no place in a fully copyrighted space. It reminds me of how NIMBY blocks construction to keep up the prices. Will all copyright space become operated on NIMBY logic?

gedy 2y ago

Normally I'd agree if this were some vague "artist style", but this was clearly an attempt to duplicate a living person, a media celebrity no less.

__loam 2y ago
Why do you have an issue with them taking someone's likeness to use in their product but not with them taking someone's work to use in their product?
- gedy 2y ago
  Because this isn't training an audio model along with a million other voices to understand English, etc. It's clearly meant to sound exactly like that one celebrity. I suspect a video avatar service that looked exactly like her would fall afoul of fair use as well. Though an image gen that used some images of her (and many others) to train and spit out generic "attractive blonde woman" is fair use in my opinion.
  - numpad0 2y ago
    Chances are this is. Basically same as LoRA. One of go-to tools for these literally uses Diffusion model and work on spectrograms as images.
  - __loam 2y ago
    Okay so as long as we steal enough stuff then it's legal.
threatofrain 2y ago
Is this different from the various videos of the Harry Potter actors doing comedic high fashion ads? Because those were very well received. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipuqLy87-3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipuqLy87-3A
- BadHumans 2y ago
  Is a billion dollar AI company utilizing someone's voice against their will in a flagship product after they said no twice different from a random Youtube channel making comedy videos? I think so but that could just be me.
- nicklecompte 2y ago
  I think anti-deepfake legislation needs to consider fair use, especially when it comes to parody or other commentary on public figures. OpenAI's actions do not qualify as fair use.
  - throwway120385 2y ago
    The problem with that idea is that I can hide behind it while making videos of famous politicians doing really morally questionable things and distributing them on YouTube. The reason Fair Use works with regular parodies in my opinion is that everyone can tell that it is obviously fake. For example, Saturday Night Live routinely makes joking parody videos of elected officials doing things we think might be consistent with their character. And in those cases it's obvious that it's being portrayed by an actor and therefore a parody. If you use someone's likeness directly I think that it must never be fair use or we will quickly end up in a world where no video can be trusted.
    - cjbgkagh 2y ago
      I’m guessing you’re referring to people still thinking Sarah Palin said she could see Russia from her house, that was from a SNL skit and an amazing impression from Tina Fey. I agree, people have a hard time separating reality from obvious parody, how could we expect them to make a distinction with intentional imitation. Society must draw a clear line that it is not ok to do this.
citizenpaul 2y ago
An actress that specifically played the voice of AI in a movie about AI no less.

bigfishrunning 2y ago

It could be trained on Scarlett's voice though, there's plenty of recorded samples for OpenAI to use. It's pretty damning for them to take down the voice right away like that

brandall10 2y ago
Her statement claims the voice was taken down at her attorney's insistence.

bobthepanda 2y ago

this is correct. in fact the fcc has already clarified this for the case of robocalls. https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-makes-ai-generated-voices-robocalls-illegal https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-makes-ai-generated-voices-r...

emmp 2y ago

We can seriously say that, yes. The courts have been saying this in the US for over 30 years. See Midler v. Ford Motor Co.

Avshalom 2y ago
Tom Waits won a lawsuit against Doritos too.

dragonwriter 2y ago

If the purpose is to trade on the celebrity voice and perceived association, and its subject to California right of personality law, then, yes, we're saying that that has been established law for decades.

Last5Digits 2y ago
That's not the purpose though, clearly. If anything, you could make the argument that they're trading in on the association to the movie "Her", that's it. Neither Sky nor the new voice model sound particularly like ScarJo, unless you want to imply that her identity rights extend over 40% of all female voice types. People made the association because her voice was used in a movie that features a highly emotive voice assistant reminiscent of GPT-4o, which sama and others joked about. I mean, why not actually compare the voices before forming an opinion? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SamGnUqaOfU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SamGnUqaOfU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgYi3Wr7v_g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgYi3Wr7v_g ----- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iF9mrI9yoBU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iF9mrI9yoBU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV01B5kVsC0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV01B5kVsC0
- cowsup 2y ago
  > People made the association because her voice was used in a movie that features a highly emotive voice assistant reminiscent of GPT-4o, which sama and others joked about. Whether you think it sounds like her or not is a matter of opinion, I guess. I can see the resemblance, and I can also see the resemblance to Jennifer Lawrence and others. What Johannson is alleging goes beyond this, though. She is alleging that Altman (or his team) reached out to her (or her team) to lend her voice, she was not interested, and then she was asked again just two days before GPT-4o's announcement, and she rejected again. Now there's a voice that, in her opinion, sounds a lot like her. Luckily, the legal system is far more nuanced than just listening to a few voices and comparing it mentally to other voices individuals have heard over the years. They'll be able to figure out, as part of discovery, what lead to the Sky voice sounding the way it does (intentionally using Johannson's likeness? coincidence? directly trained off her interviews/movies?), whether OpenAI were willing to slap Johannson's name onto the existing Sky during the presentation, whether the "her" tweet and the combination of the Sky voice was supposed to draw the subtle connection... This allegation is just the beginning.

ncallaway 2y ago

> Are we seriously saying we can't make voices that are similar to celebrities, when not using their actual voice? They clearly thought it was close enough that they asked for permission, twice. And got two no’s. Going forward with it at that point was super fucked up. It’s very bad to not ask permission when you should. It’s far worse to ask for permission and then ignore the response. Totally ethically bankrupt.

nicce 2y ago
And they could have totally get away with it by never mentioning the name of Scarlett. But of course, that is not what they wanted. Edit: to clarify, since it is not exactly identical voice, or even not that close, they can plausibly deny it, and we never new what their intention was. But in this case, they have clearly created the voice to represent Scarlett's voice to demonstrate the capabilities of their product in order to get marketing power.
- visarga 2y ago
  > since it is not exactly identical voice, or even not that close, they can plausibly deny it When studios approach an actress A and she refuses, then another actress B takes the role, is that infringing on A's rights? Or should they just scrap the movie? Maybe if they replicated a scene from the A's movies or there was striking likeness between the voices... but not generally.
  - nicce 2y ago
    > When studios approach an actress A and she refuses, then another actress B takes the role, is that infringing on A's rights? Or should they just scrap the movie? The scenario would have been that they approach none.
    - r2_pilot 2y ago
      Your scenario leads to the disenfranchisement of lesser-known voice talent, since they cannot take on work that Top Talent has rejected if they happen to resemble(nobody here has seen their doppelganger before? How unique is a person? 1 in 5 million? Then there are 36 million of that type in just the United States alone). Perhaps it's time to re-evaluate some of the rules in society. It's a healthy thing to do periodically.

EasyMark 2y ago

Sure they could have taken her to court but right now they don't want the bad publicity, especially since it would put everything else in the shadow of such a scandalous "story". Better to just back off, let S.J. win and move on and start planning on they're gonna spend all that paper money they got with announcement of a new, more advanced model. It's a financial decision and a fairly predictable one. I'm glad she won this time.

__loam 2y ago
Paper money from the model they're giving away for free?
- EasyMark 2y ago
  I mean if you don't think these kinds of positive announcements don't increase the value of the company or parent company then I don't really know how to convince you as it's a standard business principle.
  - ml-anon 2y ago
    There isn’t a positive announcement here, what is wrong with you? This reads like “we got caught red handed” and doing the bare minimum for it to not appear malicious and deliberate when the timeline is read out in court.
    - EasyMark 2y ago
      They announced a whole new model, that's a positive announcement.
  - __loam 2y ago
    I believe there's a difference between building a sustainable and profitable business and pumping the stock.
smugma 2y ago
She also won big against Disney. They backed down even though it appeared the contract was on their side. Iger apologized. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58757748.amp https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58757748.amp

callalex 2y ago

I think we should all be held to the standard of “Weird” Al Yankovic. In personal matters consent is important.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

visarga 2y ago

> Are we seriously saying we can't make voices that are similar to celebrities, when not using their actual voice? I think the copyright industry wants to grab new powers to counter the infinite capacity of AI to create variations. But that move would knee cap the creative industry first, newcomers have no place in a fully copyrighted space. It reminds me of how NIMBY blocks construction to keep up the prices. Will all copyright space become operated on NIMBY logic?