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He kind of ruined that argument when he tweeted “Her” alongside the video. Pretty clearly drawing a line between the voice and Johansson’s portrayal in the movi

He kind of ruined that argument when he tweeted “Her” alongside the video. Pretty clearly drawing a line between the voice and Johansson’s portrayal in the movie. Incredible, really. It would have been so easy to just… not do that.

andrewflnr 2y ago
That makes it weird, but it doesn't (itself) mean they literally used her voice. It just means they were inspired by the movie. It's not illegal to be weird.
- lwansbrough 2y ago
  The founding principle of Silicon Valley.
- throwaway42668 2y ago
  Perpetual benefit of the doubt given for every implication as though it’s happening in a vacuum is how humanity keeps putting megalomaniacs and sociopaths into positions of power and influence. It’s really a shame.
  - andrewflnr 2y ago
    If we're going to pillory Sam Altman, it's important to do it for the right reasons. That was not a good reason. I really should not need to defend this principle.
    - jrflowers 2y ago
      What reason do you suggest is more appropriate to “pillory Sam Altman”
      - andrewflnr 2y ago
        Most of the other ones in this thread?
- hluska 2y ago
  I think it’s less the voice and more about how they went about it. They were apparently in negotiations with her and they fell apart. Then they tried to resume negotiations with her two days before the new model launched. If it was just an actor, it might be a case of inspiration gone awry. But this particular actor sued Disney in 2021 after making a lot of movies and a lot of money making movies for them. Deliberately poking a fight with a litigation happy actor is weird. Most weird is really benign. But this is the kind of weird that forces out of court settlements. It’s reckless. Edit - mistyped the date as 2001. Changed to 2021.
  - andrewflnr 2y ago
    Oh, sure. There's plenty of other ways OpenAI have been boneheaded. I'm just saying the mere fact of referencing "Her" implies very little.
    - jprd 2y ago
      That's a fair statement if you take the "Her" post out-of-context and without the corroborating retort from ScarJo and his history. Which, of course, is not possible and also pretty boneheaded itself. This isn't some college kid with an idea and too much passion.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  Legally they don’t need to have literally used her voice to have broken the law, never mind violating many people’s basic sense of what’s right and wrong.
  - andrewflnr 2y ago
    They don't? Because if it's true that they used a sound-alike voice actress for the actual model, I don't see how any reasonable complaint about that could stand. You can't ban people from voice-acting who have similar voices to other celebrities. There needs to be something more to it.
    - pseudalopex 2y ago
      The something more is intent.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
    - CaptainZapp 2y ago
      > You can't ban people from voice-acting who have similar voices to other celebrities Actually, you probably can.[0] [0] https://casetext.com/case/waits-v-frito-lay-inc https://casetext.com/case/waits-v-frito-lay-inc Edit: Added the context for the reply
      - andrewflnr 2y ago
        Well that's... concerning? I'm not sure I disagree with the decision there but to apply it any more widely would be a problem.
        llamaimperative 2y ago
        It's such a huge problem that it's only brought up in the context of someone (probably) doing exactly what it's designed to prevent... By some miracle, this actually isn't used to outlaw satire or put Elvis impersonators out of work. It's used to prevent people from implying endorsement where none exists.
meimo 2y ago
More likely he was drawing a line between the fictional AI assistant, and their real, actualised assistant.
HenryBemis 2y ago
He said/X-ed the quiet part loud.
yreg 2y ago
> He kind of ruined that argument when he tweeted "Her" Why? The grandparent is not saying it's coincidence. Why is it not okay to hire someone who has a voice similar to celebrity X who you intentionally want to immitate? I mean if you don't actually mislead people to believe that your immitation is actually X - which would be obviously problematic?
- TylerE 2y ago
  He strongly implied that it wasn’t an imitation.
  - yreg 2y ago
    We are talking about miohtama's argument, not Sam Altman. I don't believe Sam Altman, but I am interested in the general “is it legal/ethical to immitate something uncopyrightable” argument.
    - TylerE 2y ago
      Altman tweeted the name of a film Johansson stared in in association with this launch.
- FireBeyond 2y ago
  Alright then, the solution is simple. All he has to do is name the actress that OpenAI -did- hire for the voice work, right? That would put any doubt to rest.
  - CRConrad 2y ago
    Jennifer Tilly? ;-) (Can't for the life of me recall if she sounds anything like Johansson; just putting her forward to tease her relative here. (Who is in the wrong in his arguments above.))
btilly 2y ago
Let's take a parallel situation from around 20 years ago, and see how you feel about it. I'm going back that far as a reminder of what was long considered OK, before AI. In the movie The Seed of Chucky, Britney Spears gets killed. You can watch the clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3kCg5o0cHA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3kCg5o0cHA. It is very clearly Britney Spears. Except Britney Spears was not hired for the role. They hired a Britney Spears impersonator for the scene. They did everything that they could to make it look like Britney, and think it was Britney. But it really wasn't. Do you think that Britney should have sued the Chucky franchise for that? If so, should Elvis Presly's estate also sue all of the Elvis Presly impersonators out there? Where do you draw the line? And if not, where do you draw the line between what happened in Chucky, and what happened here? I really don't see a line between now having someone who sounded like the actress, and then tweeting the name of one of her movies, and what happened 20 years ago with Chucky killing someone who looked like Britney, then showing a license plate saying "BRITNEY1", and THEN saying, "Whoops I did it again." (The title of her most famous song at the time.) If anything, the movie was more egregious.
- kcplate 2y ago
  There is a distinction between the image of a celebrity and their voice. The image of a celebrity is usually pretty cut and dried, it’s them, or obviously intended to be them. If the use of their image isn’t meant to be satirical, it’s problematic. The Crispin Glover/Back to the Future 2 case is a good example of non-satirical use that was problematic. Zemeckis used previous footage of Glover, plus used facial molds of Glover to craft prosthetics for another actor. Voices…are usually not so distinctive. However, certain voices are very distinct—Tom Waits, Miley Cyrus, James Earl Jones, Matt Berry. Those voices are pretty distinctively those people and simulating their voices it would be obvious who you are simulating. Other celebrity voices are much more generic. Scarlett fits into this with a pretty generic female voice with a faint NY/NJ accent. Open AI screwed up by taking a generic voice and making it specific to the celebrity by reference and by actually pursuing the actor for the use of their voice.
- SrslyJosh 2y ago
  I don't think this is an apples-to-apples comparison. The movie producers didn't produce a simulation of Britney's voice and attempt to sell access to it. However you feel about an probably-unapproved celebrity cameo in a movie, it's not the same thing as selling the ability to impersonate that celebrity's voice to anyone willing to pay, in perpetuity.
dclowd9901 2y ago
I imagine he feels invincible at this point and gets off on displaying power.
px43 2y ago
Her was a movie with an AI assistant who talked like a normal human rather than an intentionally clunky "bleep blorp" dialect that lots of other movies go with. They even make fun of this in the movie when he asks her to read an email using a classic voice prompt, and she responds pretending to be a classic AI assistant. The new voice2voice from OpenAI allows for a conversational dialect, most prominently demonstrated in pop culture by the movie Her. Sam's tweet makes perfect sense in that context. Sky's voice has been the default voice in voice2voice for almost a year now, and no one has made a connection to the Her voice until it started acting more conversational. It seems pretty obvious that OpenAI was looking for a more conversational assistant, likely inspired by the movie Her, and it would have been cool if the actress had helped make that happen, but she didn't, and here we are. Also Juniper has always been the superior voice model. I just now realized that one of my custom GPTs kept having this annoying bug where the voice kept switching from Juniper to Sky, and that seems to be resolved now that Sky got removed.
- pseudalopex 2y ago
  > Sky's voice has been the default voice in voice2voice for almost a year now, and no one has made a connection to the Her voice until it started acting more conversational. No.[1] [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/177v8wz/i_have_a_really_hard_time_believing_the_sky_voice/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/177v8wz/i_have_a_r...
throwaway5959 2y ago
He knew there would be blowback, he just didn’t care. Look at how many people are talking about it.
SrslyJosh 2y ago
Given: 1. The plot of "Her" (guy falls in love with synthesized voice, played by Johansson) 2. Altman's affinity for the film (the article says he's called it his "favorite movie") Reaching out to Johansson about cloning her voice, then doing so without permission feels like Altman is creeping on her. The sooner this bubble pops, the better.
- eastbound 2y ago
  Oh, the irony. Actors are afraid of being digitalized and used without their content, and the first B2C AI company digitalizes a soundalike of the voice of one of the first 3 AI movies, without her consent…
- couchdb_ouchdb 2y ago
  What bubble? This isn't crypto. Have you used these tools? They aren't going anywhere.
  - CRConrad 2y ago
    Maybe they aren't going anywhere, but they sure af ought to.
  - hnfong 2y ago
    There could be a bubble in terms of stock valuation, but the tools are definitely going to stay. This could be kinda like the dot com bubble -- the Internet went on to become BIG, but the companies just went bust... (and the ones that strive are probably not well known)
    - ryandrake 2y ago
      It's an exuberance bubble. Every tech company on earth is racing to "do something with AI" because all of their competitors are trying to "do something with AI" and they don't want to be left out of the excitement. The excitement and exuberance will inevitably cool, and then a new thing will emerge and they'll all race to "do something with that new thing."
    - 2y ago
stefan_ 2y ago
This is one of those “accuse a diver of being a paedophile” moments. Who knew Sam is a creep with a Scarlet Johansson obsession cooking up a voice model just like her on compute daddy Satya paid for (but books as revenue, 2000 dotcom style).
czl 2y ago
Had the film Her used someone else as the AI voice that sounded like Johansson would there be complaints about the film using a voice that sounded like Johansson? Does it matter if producers try to hire her first? Because only Johansson has that voice? Johansson does not visually show up the film Her and if not for the film credits could the voice in that film be used to use identity her from hundreds millions of other possible women? ( I had no idea who did the voice acting and would never had known if not for this news.) Now if the owners of the film Her were to request OpenAI licence a character from their film (like licencing say C3P0 character from Disney) maybe there would be a case but an actor claiming they own a natural human "voice" I think is a stretch when there are thousands of people with similar voices. And she is visually never in the film that made that AI voice famous so it could be anyone in that film with a similar voice.
- nradov 2y ago
  I don't know about complaints but Ms. Johansson might be able to win a civil suit in that hypothetical situation. It would depend on the facts of the particular case, particularly any evidence that the defendants acted in bad faith. I think a lot of technologists don't understand how burden of proof works in civil trials, or that there is no presumption of "innocence".
  - czl 2y ago
    Civil trails are based on a preponderance of evidence (aka 50%) burden of proof standard (vs beyond reasonable doubt standard in criminal trails). I can see a civil judge or jury being given evidence showing very few listeners think the voices match in _blind voice tests_. Here for example you can listen to the voices side by side: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1cwy6wz/comment/l4z9726/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1cwy6wz/comment/l4... And here is voice of another actress ( Rashida Jones ): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=385414AVZcA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=385414AVZcA This test is not blind but YOU tell me which you think is similar to the openAI sky voice? And what does that tell you about likely court result for Johansson? And having reached this conclusion yourself would you now think the other actress Rashida Jones is entitled to compensation based on this similarly test? Because there are no other women with similar voices?

andrewflnr 2y ago

That makes it weird, but it doesn't (itself) mean they literally used her voice. It just means they were inspired by the movie. It's not illegal to be weird.

lwansbrough 2y ago
The founding principle of Silicon Valley.
throwaway42668 2y ago
Perpetual benefit of the doubt given for every implication as though it’s happening in a vacuum is how humanity keeps putting megalomaniacs and sociopaths into positions of power and influence. It’s really a shame.
- andrewflnr 2y ago
  If we're going to pillory Sam Altman, it's important to do it for the right reasons. That was not a good reason. I really should not need to defend this principle.
  - jrflowers 2y ago
    What reason do you suggest is more appropriate to “pillory Sam Altman”
    - andrewflnr 2y ago
      Most of the other ones in this thread?
hluska 2y ago
I think it’s less the voice and more about how they went about it. They were apparently in negotiations with her and they fell apart. Then they tried to resume negotiations with her two days before the new model launched. If it was just an actor, it might be a case of inspiration gone awry. But this particular actor sued Disney in 2021 after making a lot of movies and a lot of money making movies for them. Deliberately poking a fight with a litigation happy actor is weird. Most weird is really benign. But this is the kind of weird that forces out of court settlements. It’s reckless. Edit - mistyped the date as 2001. Changed to 2021.
- andrewflnr 2y ago
  Oh, sure. There's plenty of other ways OpenAI have been boneheaded. I'm just saying the mere fact of referencing "Her" implies very little.
  - jprd 2y ago
    That's a fair statement if you take the "Her" post out-of-context and without the corroborating retort from ScarJo and his history. Which, of course, is not possible and also pretty boneheaded itself. This isn't some college kid with an idea and too much passion.
llamaimperative 2y ago
Legally they don’t need to have literally used her voice to have broken the law, never mind violating many people’s basic sense of what’s right and wrong.
- andrewflnr 2y ago
  They don't? Because if it's true that they used a sound-alike voice actress for the actual model, I don't see how any reasonable complaint about that could stand. You can't ban people from voice-acting who have similar voices to other celebrities. There needs to be something more to it.
  - pseudalopex 2y ago
    The something more is intent.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
  - CaptainZapp 2y ago
    > You can't ban people from voice-acting who have similar voices to other celebrities Actually, you probably can.[0] [0] https://casetext.com/case/waits-v-frito-lay-inc https://casetext.com/case/waits-v-frito-lay-inc Edit: Added the context for the reply
    - andrewflnr 2y ago
      Well that's... concerning? I'm not sure I disagree with the decision there but to apply it any more widely would be a problem.
      - llamaimperative 2y ago
        It's such a huge problem that it's only brought up in the context of someone (probably) doing exactly what it's designed to prevent... By some miracle, this actually isn't used to outlaw satire or put Elvis impersonators out of work. It's used to prevent people from implying endorsement where none exists.

meimo 2y ago

More likely he was drawing a line between the fictional AI assistant, and their real, actualised assistant.

HenryBemis 2y ago

He said/X-ed the quiet part loud.

yreg 2y ago

> He kind of ruined that argument when he tweeted "Her" Why? The grandparent is not saying it's coincidence. Why is it not okay to hire someone who has a voice similar to celebrity X who you intentionally want to immitate? I mean if you don't actually mislead people to believe that your immitation is actually X - which would be obviously problematic?

TylerE 2y ago
He strongly implied that it wasn’t an imitation.
- yreg 2y ago
  We are talking about miohtama's argument, not Sam Altman. I don't believe Sam Altman, but I am interested in the general “is it legal/ethical to immitate something uncopyrightable” argument.
  - TylerE 2y ago
    Altman tweeted the name of a film Johansson stared in in association with this launch.
FireBeyond 2y ago
Alright then, the solution is simple. All he has to do is name the actress that OpenAI -did- hire for the voice work, right? That would put any doubt to rest.
- CRConrad 2y ago
  Jennifer Tilly? ;-) (Can't for the life of me recall if she sounds anything like Johansson; just putting her forward to tease her relative here. (Who is in the wrong in his arguments above.))

btilly 2y ago

Let's take a parallel situation from around 20 years ago, and see how you feel about it. I'm going back that far as a reminder of what was long considered OK, before AI. In the movie The Seed of Chucky, Britney Spears gets killed. You can watch the clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3kCg5o0cHA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3kCg5o0cHA. It is very clearly Britney Spears. Except Britney Spears was not hired for the role. They hired a Britney Spears impersonator for the scene. They did everything that they could to make it look like Britney, and think it was Britney. But it really wasn't. Do you think that Britney should have sued the Chucky franchise for that? If so, should Elvis Presly's estate also sue all of the Elvis Presly impersonators out there? Where do you draw the line? And if not, where do you draw the line between what happened in Chucky, and what happened here? I really don't see a line between now having someone who sounded like the actress, and then tweeting the name of one of her movies, and what happened 20 years ago with Chucky killing someone who looked like Britney, then showing a license plate saying "BRITNEY1", and THEN saying, "Whoops I did it again." (The title of her most famous song at the time.) If anything, the movie was more egregious.

kcplate 2y ago
There is a distinction between the image of a celebrity and their voice. The image of a celebrity is usually pretty cut and dried, it’s them, or obviously intended to be them. If the use of their image isn’t meant to be satirical, it’s problematic. The Crispin Glover/Back to the Future 2 case is a good example of non-satirical use that was problematic. Zemeckis used previous footage of Glover, plus used facial molds of Glover to craft prosthetics for another actor. Voices…are usually not so distinctive. However, certain voices are very distinct—Tom Waits, Miley Cyrus, James Earl Jones, Matt Berry. Those voices are pretty distinctively those people and simulating their voices it would be obvious who you are simulating. Other celebrity voices are much more generic. Scarlett fits into this with a pretty generic female voice with a faint NY/NJ accent. Open AI screwed up by taking a generic voice and making it specific to the celebrity by reference and by actually pursuing the actor for the use of their voice.
SrslyJosh 2y ago
I don't think this is an apples-to-apples comparison. The movie producers didn't produce a simulation of Britney's voice and attempt to sell access to it. However you feel about an probably-unapproved celebrity cameo in a movie, it's not the same thing as selling the ability to impersonate that celebrity's voice to anyone willing to pay, in perpetuity.

dclowd9901 2y ago

I imagine he feels invincible at this point and gets off on displaying power.

px43 2y ago

Her was a movie with an AI assistant who talked like a normal human rather than an intentionally clunky "bleep blorp" dialect that lots of other movies go with. They even make fun of this in the movie when he asks her to read an email using a classic voice prompt, and she responds pretending to be a classic AI assistant. The new voice2voice from OpenAI allows for a conversational dialect, most prominently demonstrated in pop culture by the movie Her. Sam's tweet makes perfect sense in that context. Sky's voice has been the default voice in voice2voice for almost a year now, and no one has made a connection to the Her voice until it started acting more conversational. It seems pretty obvious that OpenAI was looking for a more conversational assistant, likely inspired by the movie Her, and it would have been cool if the actress had helped make that happen, but she didn't, and here we are. Also Juniper has always been the superior voice model. I just now realized that one of my custom GPTs kept having this annoying bug where the voice kept switching from Juniper to Sky, and that seems to be resolved now that Sky got removed.

pseudalopex 2y ago
> Sky's voice has been the default voice in voice2voice for almost a year now, and no one has made a connection to the Her voice until it started acting more conversational. No.[1] [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/177v8wz/i_have_a_really_hard_time_believing_the_sky_voice/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/177v8wz/i_have_a_r...

throwaway5959 2y ago

He knew there would be blowback, he just didn’t care. Look at how many people are talking about it.

SrslyJosh 2y ago

Given: 1. The plot of "Her" (guy falls in love with synthesized voice, played by Johansson) 2. Altman's affinity for the film (the article says he's called it his "favorite movie") Reaching out to Johansson about cloning her voice, then doing so without permission feels like Altman is creeping on her. The sooner this bubble pops, the better.

eastbound 2y ago
Oh, the irony. Actors are afraid of being digitalized and used without their content, and the first B2C AI company digitalizes a soundalike of the voice of one of the first 3 AI movies, without her consent…
couchdb_ouchdb 2y ago
What bubble? This isn't crypto. Have you used these tools? They aren't going anywhere.
- CRConrad 2y ago
  Maybe they aren't going anywhere, but they sure af ought to.
- hnfong 2y ago
  There could be a bubble in terms of stock valuation, but the tools are definitely going to stay. This could be kinda like the dot com bubble -- the Internet went on to become BIG, but the companies just went bust... (and the ones that strive are probably not well known)
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    It's an exuberance bubble. Every tech company on earth is racing to "do something with AI" because all of their competitors are trying to "do something with AI" and they don't want to be left out of the excitement. The excitement and exuberance will inevitably cool, and then a new thing will emerge and they'll all race to "do something with that new thing."
  - 2y ago

stefan_ 2y ago

This is one of those “accuse a diver of being a paedophile” moments. Who knew Sam is a creep with a Scarlet Johansson obsession cooking up a voice model just like her on compute daddy Satya paid for (but books as revenue, 2000 dotcom style).

czl 2y ago

Had the film Her used someone else as the AI voice that sounded like Johansson would there be complaints about the film using a voice that sounded like Johansson? Does it matter if producers try to hire her first? Because only Johansson has that voice? Johansson does not visually show up the film Her and if not for the film credits could the voice in that film be used to use identity her from hundreds millions of other possible women? ( I had no idea who did the voice acting and would never had known if not for this news.) Now if the owners of the film Her were to request OpenAI licence a character from their film (like licencing say C3P0 character from Disney) maybe there would be a case but an actor claiming they own a natural human "voice" I think is a stretch when there are thousands of people with similar voices. And she is visually never in the film that made that AI voice famous so it could be anyone in that film with a similar voice.

nradov 2y ago
I don't know about complaints but Ms. Johansson might be able to win a civil suit in that hypothetical situation. It would depend on the facts of the particular case, particularly any evidence that the defendants acted in bad faith. I think a lot of technologists don't understand how burden of proof works in civil trials, or that there is no presumption of "innocence".
- czl 2y ago
  Civil trails are based on a preponderance of evidence (aka 50%) burden of proof standard (vs beyond reasonable doubt standard in criminal trails). I can see a civil judge or jury being given evidence showing very few listeners think the voices match in _blind voice tests_. Here for example you can listen to the voices side by side: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1cwy6wz/comment/l4z9726/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1cwy6wz/comment/l4... And here is voice of another actress ( Rashida Jones ): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=385414AVZcA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=385414AVZcA This test is not blind but YOU tell me which you think is similar to the openAI sky voice? And what does that tell you about likely court result for Johansson? And having reached this conclusion yourself would you now think the other actress Rashida Jones is entitled to compensation based on this similarly test? Because there are no other women with similar voices?