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Comments full of people reading the headline and assuming that what OpenAI did here is fine because it's a different actress, but that's not how "Right of publi

Comments full of people reading the headline and assuming that what OpenAI did here is fine because it's a different actress, but that's not how "Right of publicity" (*) laws work. The article itself explains that there is significant legal risk here: > Mitch Glazier, the chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, said that Johansson may have a strong case against OpenAI if she brings forth a lawsuit. > He compared Johansson’s case to one brought by the singer Bette Midler against the Ford Motor Co. in the 1980s. Ford asked Midler to use her voice in ads. After she declined, Ford hired an impersonator. A U.S. appellate court ruled in Midler’s favor, indicating her voice was protected against unauthorized use. > But Mark Humphrey, a partner and intellectual property lawyer at Mitchell, Silberberg and Knupp, said any potential jury probably would have to assess whether Sky’s voice is identifiable as Johansson. > Several factors go against OpenAI, he said, namely Altman’s tweet and his outreach to Johansson in September and May. “It just begs the question: It’s like, if you use a different person, there was no intent for it to sound like Scarlett Johansson. Why are you reaching out to her two days before?” he said. “That would have to be explained.” * A.K.A. "Personality rights": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights

scoot 2y ago
They contacted Johansson after the Sky voice was created, they didn’t create it because she declined. The voice actor isn’t a Johansson imitator, and the voice isn’t an imitation. The only similarity between the Sky voice and Johansson’s is that it’s a white American female, so by your logic a significant percentage of the US population has a case.
- dragonelite 2y ago
  Imaging this to be such a legal minefield, can't sell my own voice because a celeb sounds a bit alike as my own voice.
  - moralestapia 2y ago
    Exactly, that would be absolutely nonsensical.
  - nhinck3 2y ago
    You can sell your voice to whoever you want. What you can't do is USE that voice in a way that seeks to mislead (by however much) people into believing it is someone else. I'm really not sure why people can't understand that it is intent that matters.
    - flanked-evergl 2y ago
      I don't think OpenAI wants people to think ChatGPT 4 or whatever is Scarlett Johansson, that would not make any sense.
      - nhinck3 2y ago
        Then what were OpenAI hoping to get out of their association with her? Why go to the effort of getting in contact? Why reference the film Her?
        flanked-evergl 2y ago
        What is the angle here? They tell people that it's Scarlett Johansson responding to them instead of a computer? To what end? I just don't get it. And I think anyone who confuses a computer program for a real person has bigger problems than being potentially defrauded by OpenAI. And people have been making computers sound like humans without anyone suggesting that it's some attempt at fraud for very long.
        nhinck3 2y ago
        The angle is that most people understand the value of celebrity endorsement? And that OpenAI is seeking the endorsement that would come along with association with Scarlett Johansson and the movie Her?
- greg_V 2y ago
  The jury will decide on the latter. At any rate, Altman made clear allusions to hint that they are capable of synthesizing ScarJo's voice as a product feature. The actress retaliated saying she verbally did not consent, and now OpenAI's defense is that they hired a different actress anyway. ...which means they lied to everyone else on the capabilities of the tech, which is y'know, even worse
  - johnbellone 2y ago
    Exactly. And regardless of the timeline outlined, when discovery happens, they’ll be a bunch of internal messages saying they want ScarJo to do the voice or find someone they can match her close enough. They went down both paths. This will settle out of court.
- gnicholas 2y ago
  > The only similarity between the voice and Johansson’s is that it’s female, so by your logic half of California has a case. My understanding was that the voices sound quite similar. I haven't heard the original Sky voice so don't know. Are there any samples online?
  - exitb 2y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uM8jhcqDP0&t=30s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uM8jhcqDP0&t=30s
    - numpad0 2y ago
      Wait, what's the music artifact at 0:54? What are they even doing!?
  - czl 2y ago
    Listen to the voices side by side: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1cwy6wz/vocal_comparison_scarjo_vs_samantha_vs_sky/l4z9726/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1cwy6wz/vocal_comp... And here is voice of another actress ( Rashida Jones ): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=385414AVZcA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=385414AVZcA If you click through and listen please reply and answer these questions: which actress do 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?
    - gnicholas 2y ago
      Thanks! Hadn’t heard it before now. They don’t sound all that similar to me, though perhaps I am a bit detail-oriented on account of my linguistics background.
    - itronitron 2y ago
      Are you asking me to trust that a video clip posted to the ChatGPT subreddit by u/SWAMPMONK is providing an accurate audio recording of the openAI sky voice?
- hyfgfh 2y ago
  her
- helsinkiandrew 2y ago
  > They contacted Johansson after the Sky voice was created, they didn’t create it because she declined. Her statement says otherwise: "Last September, I received an offer from Sam Altman, who wanted to hire me to voice the current ChatGPT 4.0 system. He told me that he felt that by my voicing the system, I could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and Al. He said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people. https://twitter.com/BobbyAllyn/status/1792679435701014908 https://twitter.com/BobbyAllyn/status/1792679435701014908
  - s-lambert 2y ago
    The Sky voice was released with the first ChatGPT voices last year in September, so there's no contradiction there unless they asked her on the 1st of September and somehow trained another voice within the few weeks after she said no. Here's a video that someone posted in October talking to the same Sky voice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SamGnUqaOfU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SamGnUqaOfU
    - gwern 2y ago
      > and somehow trained another voice within the few weeks after she said no. Er, that is totally possible? You act like it's not a machine learning system. You train new stuff in hours or days easily, especially if you have good tooling. Imagine saying this of, say, Stable Diffusion image LoRAs: "this X artist LoRA couldn't be based on X because it was somehow trained within the few weeks after X said no!" All the timing means is that, in good management & startup fashion, because they needed multiple voices, they had a voice pipeline going, and so could have a bunch of female voices in the pipeline for optionality. And if licensing Johansson didn't work out, you have a plan B (and C, and preferably D). This is big business, you don't do things serially or not have backups: "'hope' is not a plan".
      - s-lambert 2y ago
        They could do it but my point is that people are using the September rejection date as evidence for them copying her voice afterwards because it was 7 months before GPT-4o and they aren't aware that the voice has been in the app for 7 months already.
- huxley 2y ago
  Hmmm. This isn’t voice acting though. I suspect that we’ll find that OpenAI used thousands of Johansson’s voice samples for general training to give the voice a “Her” feel and then found someone with a similar voice for fine tuning but had Johansson said yes, they could then have had her do it instead. If the records show that they did train Sky with Johansson’s voice samples it will be an interesting case.
gnicholas 2y ago
The Midler case is readily distinguishable. From Wikipedia: > Ford Motor created an ad campaign for the Mercury Sable that specifically was meant to inspire nostalgic sentiments through the use of famous songs from the 1970s sung by their original artists. When the original artists refused to accept, impersonators were used to sing the original songs for the commercials. Midler was asked to sing a famous song of hers for the commercial and refused. Subsequently, the company hired a voice-impersonator of Midler and carried on with using the song for the commercial, since it had been approved by the copyright-holder. [1] If you ask an artist to sing a famous song of hers, she says no, and you get someone else to impersonate her, that gets you in hot water. If you (perhaps because you are savvy) go to some unknown voice actress, have her record a voice for your chatbot, later go to a famous actress known for one time playing a chatbot in a movie, and are declined, you are in a much better position. The tweet is still a thorn in OA's side, of course, but that's not likely to be determinative IMO (IAAL). 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
- marcus_holmes 2y ago
  The actress did impersonate Her though. It's not just a random "voice for your chatbot", it's that particularly breathy, chatty, voice that she performed for the movie. I would agree with you completely if they'd created a completely different voice. Even if they'd impersonated a different famous actress. But it's the fact that Her was about an AI, and this is an AI, and the voices are identical. It's clearly an impersonation of her work.
  - z7 2y ago
    How do you explain the many people saying that the voices do not sound especially similar? "The pitch is kiiiiiind of close, but that's about it. Different cadence, different levels of vocal fry, slightly different accent if you pay close attention. Johansson drops Ts for Ds pretty frequently, Sky pronounces Ts pretty sharply. A linguist could probably break it down better than me and identify the different regions involved." https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1cx24sy/vocal_comparison_scarjo_vs_samantha_vs_sky/ https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1cx24sy/vocal_... There is also a faction claiming that Sky's voice is more similar to Rashida Jones's than Scarlett Johansson's: https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1cx9t8b/vocal_comparison_rashida_jones_vs_chatgpt_sky/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1cx9t8b/vocal_comp...
moralestapia 2y ago
You misunderstand how personality rights work. Called it in the other thread and calling it in this one, there is no wrongdoing on OpenAI's side. Looking/sounding like somebody else (even if its famous) is not prosecutable. Scarlet Johansson has nothing in this case, whether people like it or not. That's the reality.
- eynsham 2y ago
  Who said it was ‘prosecutable’?
  - moralestapia 2y ago
    Scarlet Johansson is threatening legal action against OpenAI for this. Are you not aware of this?
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > Scarlet Johansson is threatening legal action against OpenAI for this Scarlet Johansson cannot prosecute anyone. She can sue them, in civil court, for civil damages. Prosecution is done in connection with crimes. Nobody is alleging any crimes here.
      - moralestapia 2y ago
        prosecute: to officially accuse someone of committing an illegal act, and to bring a case against that person in a court of law Source: Cambridge's dictionary (but any other would work as well)
        JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > From Cambridge's (or any other) dictionary Where did you get this? I'm seeing "to officially accuse someone of committing a crime" [1]. Criminality is esssential to the term. (EDIT: Found it. Cambridge Academic Content dictionary. It seems to be a simplified text [2]. I'm surprised they summarised the legal definition that way versus going for the colloquial one.) You have to go back to the 18th century to find the term used to refer to initiating any legal action [3][4]. [1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/prosecute https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/prosecut... [2] https://www.cambridge.org/us/cambridgeenglish/catalog/dictionaries/cambridge-academic-content-dictionary https://www.cambridge.org/us/cambridgeenglish/catalog/dictio... [3] https://verejnazaloba.cz/en/more-about-public-prosecution/history-of-public-prosecution/ https://verejnazaloba.cz/en/more-about-public-prosecution/hi... [4] https://www.etymonline.com/word/prosecute https://www.etymonline.com/word/prosecute
sheepscreek 2y ago
Here’s the thing though - if I was OpenAI, I’d be more interested in the actor sounding like the voice agent in Her, than Scarlett Johansen. After all, Scarlett was playing a role in the movie (lending her voice to it), and they wanted to replicate this acted out role. If the intent alone mattered, OpenAI should be in the clear. More so if they never specially instructed this voice actor to “sound like Scarlett”. On the other hand, Sama reaching out to Scarlett directly over a number of times doesn’t lend a good look. Perhaps they felt that Scarlett has already done it (acted out as a voice agent they were trying to bring to life) and she would truly understand what they were going for. Maybe, it was also a bit for marketing and the buzz-worthy story it might generate (“OpenAI worked with ScarJo to create their life-like AI voice. Scarlett was also the voice behind the AI in “Her”). However, I’m not a lawyer and the the law could very well view this more favourably towards Scarlett.
IanCal 2y ago
> > Several factors go against OpenAI, he said, namely Altman’s tweet and his outreach to Johansson in September and May. “It just begs the question: It’s like, if you use a different person, there was no intent for it to sound like Scarlett Johansson. Why are you reaching out to her two days before?” he said. “That would have to be explained.” I think there's a pretty reasonable answer here in that the similarities to Her are quite obvious, and would be regardless of whose voice it was. If you wanted it to be SJ, reaching out right at the last minute seems rather odd, surely you'd reach out at the start? There are three timelines that seem to be suggested here * OAI want the voice to sound like SJ * They don't ask her, they go and hire someone else specifically to sound like her * They work on, train and release the voice * OAI, too late to release a new voice as part of the demo, ask SJ if they can use her voice This requires multiple people interviewed to be lying Or * OAI hire someone for a voice * They train and release the voice * People talking to a computer that reacts in this way is reminiscent of Her * "We should get SJ as an actual voice, that would be huge" * Asks SJ One third one, probably more middle of the road? * OAI hire someone for a voice * They train and release the voice * People talking to a computer that reacts in this way is reminiscent of Her * "Is this too similar to SJ? Should we ask them?" * Asks SJ > He compared Johansson’s case to one brought by the singer Bette Midler against the Ford Motor Co. in the 1980s. Ford asked Midler to use her voice in ads. After she declined, Ford hired an impersonator. A U.S. appellate court ruled in Midler’s favor, indicating her voice was protected against unauthorized use. Sure, though worth noting that they hired a Bette Midler impersonator to sing a cover of a Better Midler song (edit - after asking and getting a "no") To be honest, I'm not really that convinced it sounds like her https://youtu.be/GV01B5kVsC0?t=165 https://youtu.be/GV01B5kVsC0?t=165 https://youtu.be/D9byh4MAsUQ?t=33 https://youtu.be/D9byh4MAsUQ?t=33
- Andrew_nenakhov 2y ago
  Maybe they didn't need SJ to do anything to train the voicebot as it was already trained with the material from the movie. (I'm in a camp that Sky voice doesn't really like Johansson's)
baxtr 2y ago
The sad thing is: most probably absolutely nothing will happen. These startups break laws, pay the fines and end up just fine. Remember that it was Sam Altman who proposed to change the YC questionnaire to screen applicants by incidents where they have successfully broken rules. YC even boasts about that.
- staticautomatic 2y ago
  Then you don’t know ScarJo. She doesn’t fuck around and she has enough money to put legal fees where her mouth is. She was the vanguard of actors suing for streaming royalties, for example.
- varispeed 2y ago
  Or to rephrase it, the laws don't apply to the rich. They just have to pay a little bit more "tax" (which probably still works out to be less than typical small business has to pay % wise anyway) to be allowed to break them.
- AvAn12 2y ago
  > These startups break laws, pay the fines and end up just fine. That thought process puts them in the same boat as: Theranos, FTX, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Countrywide Financial, Enron, Washington Mutual, Kidder Peabody, and many other companies which no longer exist. So if (since?) they lack the ethical compass to not break the rules, perhaps a simple history of what happens to companies that do break the rules might be useful guidance...
- bko 2y ago
  Do we really want someone's voice to be copyrightable, to a point where similar sounding people can't be used? This is such a weird issue for HN to be upset about when other IP related issues (e.g. companies suing for recreating generic code, patent trolls, trademark colors, disregard of paywall, reverse engineering, etc), people here overwhelmingly fall on the side of weaker IP protections. I guess the diff is some people just pick the side of "the little guy" and the example of centi millionaire beautiful actress vs billion dollar founder, the scales tip to the actress
- 2y ago
pyeri 2y ago
However strong her case may be but in lawsuits like these, the prosecution usually needs to prove *beyond reasonable doubt* that OpenAI copied her voice and that too intentionally. This, in all likelihood, seems very tough to come given the evidence so far. Yes, she might drag on the case for a long time but doubt that will cause the slightest dent in OpenAI's business.
- V__ 2y ago
  > Crimes must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, whereas civil claims are proven by lower standards of proof, such as the preponderance of the evidence. [1] https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-law-basics/the-differences-between-a-criminal-case-and-a-civil-case.html https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-law-basics/the-dif...
- huxley 2y ago
  This would be a civil not criminal case, there is no prosecution as well “beyond a reasonable doubt” is not the standard, rather Johansson’s lawyers only need to show that the balance of probabilities lies in her favour.
loongloong 2y ago
What sort of damages can Scarlett Johansson expect to get if OpenAI launches with the Sky voice for a short while, then pulls it quickly after the backlash (like they did)? Are punitive damages commonplace for such scenarios?
- amelius 2y ago
  Any damages are probably going to be way cheaper than the cost of an equivalent publicity campaign. Bad PR is also PR.
- conductr 2y ago
  I’m sure someone can do some type of math about her general pay rate per performance minute then multiply it by the millions of hours Sky has been heard using her voice. I think that number would likely be quite high.
dangoodmanUT 2y ago
> After she declined, Ford hired an impersonator. A U.S. appellate court ruled in Midler’s favor, indicating her voice was protected against unauthorized use. That's because it was impersonating them, not sounding like them. If they didn't try to sell it as them they would have been fine
- boesboes 2y ago
  That's the problem here too right? Sam implies the voice is scarlet with his references to Her. To me it all just shows these tech-bro's are just spoiled little brads with strong incel energy. I 100% expect a scandal in a few months where it turns out Sam has a bunch of VR porn bots generated by AI that just 'happen' to look and sound EXACTLY like some celebs...
  - sieabahlpark 2y ago
    [dead]
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
OpenAI hires voice actress. Then it contacts famous actress for a license. Why. The implication is that OpenAI knows there is a potential legal issue. Then later, when OpenAI promotes voice actress with an apparent reference to famous actress' work, and famous actress complains, OpenAI "pauses" the project. If OpenAI believes there is no issue, then why pause the project. This behaviour certainly looks like OpenAI thought it needed a license from famous actress. If there is another explanation, OpenAI has not provided it.
afavour 2y ago
I’ll admit that my cynicism is in overdrive but I wonder if OpenAI deliberately provoked this. Or at least didn’t mind it as an outcome. More and more you see legal action as a form of publicity (people filing frivolous lawsuits etc), a lawsuit like this would help keep OpenAI looking like an underdog startup being crushed by the rich and powerful rather than the billion dollar entity it actually is.
rootlocus 2y ago
> indicating her voice was protected against unauthorized use But it wasn't her voice, it was the voice of the impersonator. By that logic, the impersonator can never speak without authorization because the impersonator would use Bette Midler's voice.
- ljf 2y ago
  They wanted people to either think that is was Bette Midler, or someone that sounded very like her to gain the benefit of association with her. They wanted to use some of Bette's cultural cachet, without her permission.
scotty79 2y ago
I don't get it. He was looking for specific voice. Scarlett Johansson is one of the people who has the voice of this kind. She wasn't interested. It's only logical to approach a different person with the same kind of voice. It's kinda nasty for one person to monopolize work for all actors that have similar voice to them just because she's most famous of all of them.
- can16358p 2y ago
  100% this. I'm in the exact same camp, bur for some reason HN crowd thinks that Scarlet has a right here as the other voice actor has a similar voice. Apparently there's an [archaic] law called right to publicity (or something like that) that makes even working with someone with a similar voice illegal. According to that restrictive logic no one can do anything on Earth as they might be doing/looking/sounding similar to someone else who might get offended, as everyone's offended by literally anything nowadays. I frankly want to see a lawsuit of OpenAI vs Scarlet on this one, where OpenAI wins.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ThinkBeat 2y ago
"Mitch Glazier, the chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, said that Johansson may have a strong case against OpenAI" Of course he does. RIAA thinks nearly everything is illegal, and in general mocked or critiqued on the site when they go after some shared mp3s or whatever. His opinion is neither authoritative or informative.
- CRConrad 2y ago
  Oh lovely, RIAA mingling in among the good guys... This may well be the only taint on Johansson's case.

scoot 2y ago

They contacted Johansson after the Sky voice was created, they didn’t create it because she declined. The voice actor isn’t a Johansson imitator, and the voice isn’t an imitation. The only similarity between the Sky voice and Johansson’s is that it’s a white American female, so by your logic a significant percentage of the US population has a case.

dragonelite 2y ago
Imaging this to be such a legal minefield, can't sell my own voice because a celeb sounds a bit alike as my own voice.
- moralestapia 2y ago
  Exactly, that would be absolutely nonsensical.
- nhinck3 2y ago
  You can sell your voice to whoever you want. What you can't do is USE that voice in a way that seeks to mislead (by however much) people into believing it is someone else. I'm really not sure why people can't understand that it is intent that matters.
  - flanked-evergl 2y ago
    I don't think OpenAI wants people to think ChatGPT 4 or whatever is Scarlett Johansson, that would not make any sense.
    - nhinck3 2y ago
      Then what were OpenAI hoping to get out of their association with her? Why go to the effort of getting in contact? Why reference the film Her?
      - flanked-evergl 2y ago
        What is the angle here? They tell people that it's Scarlett Johansson responding to them instead of a computer? To what end? I just don't get it. And I think anyone who confuses a computer program for a real person has bigger problems than being potentially defrauded by OpenAI. And people have been making computers sound like humans without anyone suggesting that it's some attempt at fraud for very long.
        nhinck3 2y ago
        The angle is that most people understand the value of celebrity endorsement? And that OpenAI is seeking the endorsement that would come along with association with Scarlett Johansson and the movie Her?
greg_V 2y ago
The jury will decide on the latter. At any rate, Altman made clear allusions to hint that they are capable of synthesizing ScarJo's voice as a product feature. The actress retaliated saying she verbally did not consent, and now OpenAI's defense is that they hired a different actress anyway. ...which means they lied to everyone else on the capabilities of the tech, which is y'know, even worse
- johnbellone 2y ago
  Exactly. And regardless of the timeline outlined, when discovery happens, they’ll be a bunch of internal messages saying they want ScarJo to do the voice or find someone they can match her close enough. They went down both paths. This will settle out of court.
gnicholas 2y ago
> The only similarity between the voice and Johansson’s is that it’s female, so by your logic half of California has a case. My understanding was that the voices sound quite similar. I haven't heard the original Sky voice so don't know. Are there any samples online?
- exitb 2y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uM8jhcqDP0&t=30s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uM8jhcqDP0&t=30s
  - numpad0 2y ago
    Wait, what's the music artifact at 0:54? What are they even doing!?
- czl 2y ago
  Listen to the voices side by side: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1cwy6wz/vocal_comparison_scarjo_vs_samantha_vs_sky/l4z9726/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1cwy6wz/vocal_comp... And here is voice of another actress ( Rashida Jones ): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=385414AVZcA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=385414AVZcA If you click through and listen please reply and answer these questions: which actress do 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?
  - gnicholas 2y ago
    Thanks! Hadn’t heard it before now. They don’t sound all that similar to me, though perhaps I am a bit detail-oriented on account of my linguistics background.
  - itronitron 2y ago
    Are you asking me to trust that a video clip posted to the ChatGPT subreddit by u/SWAMPMONK is providing an accurate audio recording of the openAI sky voice?
hyfgfh 2y ago
her
helsinkiandrew 2y ago
> They contacted Johansson after the Sky voice was created, they didn’t create it because she declined. Her statement says otherwise: "Last September, I received an offer from Sam Altman, who wanted to hire me to voice the current ChatGPT 4.0 system. He told me that he felt that by my voicing the system, I could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and Al. He said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people. https://twitter.com/BobbyAllyn/status/1792679435701014908 https://twitter.com/BobbyAllyn/status/1792679435701014908
- s-lambert 2y ago
  The Sky voice was released with the first ChatGPT voices last year in September, so there's no contradiction there unless they asked her on the 1st of September and somehow trained another voice within the few weeks after she said no. Here's a video that someone posted in October talking to the same Sky voice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SamGnUqaOfU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SamGnUqaOfU
  - gwern 2y ago
    > and somehow trained another voice within the few weeks after she said no. Er, that is totally possible? You act like it's not a machine learning system. You train new stuff in hours or days easily, especially if you have good tooling. Imagine saying this of, say, Stable Diffusion image LoRAs: "this X artist LoRA couldn't be based on X because it was somehow trained within the few weeks after X said no!" All the timing means is that, in good management & startup fashion, because they needed multiple voices, they had a voice pipeline going, and so could have a bunch of female voices in the pipeline for optionality. And if licensing Johansson didn't work out, you have a plan B (and C, and preferably D). This is big business, you don't do things serially or not have backups: "'hope' is not a plan".
    - s-lambert 2y ago
      They could do it but my point is that people are using the September rejection date as evidence for them copying her voice afterwards because it was 7 months before GPT-4o and they aren't aware that the voice has been in the app for 7 months already.
huxley 2y ago
Hmmm. This isn’t voice acting though. I suspect that we’ll find that OpenAI used thousands of Johansson’s voice samples for general training to give the voice a “Her” feel and then found someone with a similar voice for fine tuning but had Johansson said yes, they could then have had her do it instead. If the records show that they did train Sky with Johansson’s voice samples it will be an interesting case.

gnicholas 2y ago

The Midler case is readily distinguishable. From Wikipedia: > Ford Motor created an ad campaign for the Mercury Sable that specifically was meant to inspire nostalgic sentiments through the use of famous songs from the 1970s sung by their original artists. When the original artists refused to accept, impersonators were used to sing the original songs for the commercials. Midler was asked to sing a famous song of hers for the commercial and refused. Subsequently, the company hired a voice-impersonator of Midler and carried on with using the song for the commercial, since it had been approved by the copyright-holder. [1] If you ask an artist to sing a famous song of hers, she says no, and you get someone else to impersonate her, that gets you in hot water. If you (perhaps because you are savvy) go to some unknown voice actress, have her record a voice for your chatbot, later go to a famous actress known for one time playing a chatbot in a movie, and are declined, you are in a much better position. The tweet is still a thorn in OA's side, of course, but that's not likely to be determinative IMO (IAAL). 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

marcus_holmes 2y ago
The actress did impersonate Her though. It's not just a random "voice for your chatbot", it's that particularly breathy, chatty, voice that she performed for the movie. I would agree with you completely if they'd created a completely different voice. Even if they'd impersonated a different famous actress. But it's the fact that Her was about an AI, and this is an AI, and the voices are identical. It's clearly an impersonation of her work.
- z7 2y ago
  How do you explain the many people saying that the voices do not sound especially similar? "The pitch is kiiiiiind of close, but that's about it. Different cadence, different levels of vocal fry, slightly different accent if you pay close attention. Johansson drops Ts for Ds pretty frequently, Sky pronounces Ts pretty sharply. A linguist could probably break it down better than me and identify the different regions involved." https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1cx24sy/vocal_comparison_scarjo_vs_samantha_vs_sky/ https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1cx24sy/vocal_... There is also a faction claiming that Sky's voice is more similar to Rashida Jones's than Scarlett Johansson's: https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1cx9t8b/vocal_comparison_rashida_jones_vs_chatgpt_sky/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1cx9t8b/vocal_comp...

moralestapia 2y ago

You misunderstand how personality rights work. Called it in the other thread and calling it in this one, there is no wrongdoing on OpenAI's side. Looking/sounding like somebody else (even if its famous) is not prosecutable. Scarlet Johansson has nothing in this case, whether people like it or not. That's the reality.

eynsham 2y ago
Who said it was ‘prosecutable’?
- moralestapia 2y ago
  Scarlet Johansson is threatening legal action against OpenAI for this. Are you not aware of this?
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > Scarlet Johansson is threatening legal action against OpenAI for this Scarlet Johansson cannot prosecute anyone. She can sue them, in civil court, for civil damages. Prosecution is done in connection with crimes. Nobody is alleging any crimes here.
    - moralestapia 2y ago
      prosecute: to officially accuse someone of committing an illegal act, and to bring a case against that person in a court of law Source: Cambridge's dictionary (but any other would work as well)
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > From Cambridge's (or any other) dictionary Where did you get this? I'm seeing "to officially accuse someone of committing a crime" [1]. Criminality is esssential to the term. (EDIT: Found it. Cambridge Academic Content dictionary. It seems to be a simplified text [2]. I'm surprised they summarised the legal definition that way versus going for the colloquial one.) You have to go back to the 18th century to find the term used to refer to initiating any legal action [3][4]. [1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/prosecute https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/prosecut... [2] https://www.cambridge.org/us/cambridgeenglish/catalog/dictionaries/cambridge-academic-content-dictionary https://www.cambridge.org/us/cambridgeenglish/catalog/dictio... [3] https://verejnazaloba.cz/en/more-about-public-prosecution/history-of-public-prosecution/ https://verejnazaloba.cz/en/more-about-public-prosecution/hi... [4] https://www.etymonline.com/word/prosecute https://www.etymonline.com/word/prosecute

sheepscreek 2y ago

Here’s the thing though - if I was OpenAI, I’d be more interested in the actor sounding like the voice agent in Her, than Scarlett Johansen. After all, Scarlett was playing a role in the movie (lending her voice to it), and they wanted to replicate this acted out role. If the intent alone mattered, OpenAI should be in the clear. More so if they never specially instructed this voice actor to “sound like Scarlett”. On the other hand, Sama reaching out to Scarlett directly over a number of times doesn’t lend a good look. Perhaps they felt that Scarlett has already done it (acted out as a voice agent they were trying to bring to life) and she would truly understand what they were going for. Maybe, it was also a bit for marketing and the buzz-worthy story it might generate (“OpenAI worked with ScarJo to create their life-like AI voice. Scarlett was also the voice behind the AI in “Her”). However, I’m not a lawyer and the the law could very well view this more favourably towards Scarlett.

IanCal 2y ago

> > Several factors go against OpenAI, he said, namely Altman’s tweet and his outreach to Johansson in September and May. “It just begs the question: It’s like, if you use a different person, there was no intent for it to sound like Scarlett Johansson. Why are you reaching out to her two days before?” he said. “That would have to be explained.” I think there's a pretty reasonable answer here in that the similarities to Her are quite obvious, and would be regardless of whose voice it was. If you wanted it to be SJ, reaching out right at the last minute seems rather odd, surely you'd reach out at the start? There are three timelines that seem to be suggested here * OAI want the voice to sound like SJ * They don't ask her, they go and hire someone else specifically to sound like her * They work on, train and release the voice * OAI, too late to release a new voice as part of the demo, ask SJ if they can use her voice This requires multiple people interviewed to be lying Or * OAI hire someone for a voice * They train and release the voice * People talking to a computer that reacts in this way is reminiscent of Her * "We should get SJ as an actual voice, that would be huge" * Asks SJ One third one, probably more middle of the road? * OAI hire someone for a voice * They train and release the voice * People talking to a computer that reacts in this way is reminiscent of Her * "Is this too similar to SJ? Should we ask them?" * Asks SJ > He compared Johansson’s case to one brought by the singer Bette Midler against the Ford Motor Co. in the 1980s. Ford asked Midler to use her voice in ads. After she declined, Ford hired an impersonator. A U.S. appellate court ruled in Midler’s favor, indicating her voice was protected against unauthorized use. Sure, though worth noting that they hired a Bette Midler impersonator to sing a cover of a Better Midler song (edit - after asking and getting a "no") To be honest, I'm not really that convinced it sounds like her https://youtu.be/GV01B5kVsC0?t=165 https://youtu.be/GV01B5kVsC0?t=165 https://youtu.be/D9byh4MAsUQ?t=33 https://youtu.be/D9byh4MAsUQ?t=33

Andrew_nenakhov 2y ago
Maybe they didn't need SJ to do anything to train the voicebot as it was already trained with the material from the movie. (I'm in a camp that Sky voice doesn't really like Johansson's)

baxtr 2y ago

The sad thing is: most probably absolutely nothing will happen. These startups break laws, pay the fines and end up just fine. Remember that it was Sam Altman who proposed to change the YC questionnaire to screen applicants by incidents where they have successfully broken rules. YC even boasts about that.

staticautomatic 2y ago
Then you don’t know ScarJo. She doesn’t fuck around and she has enough money to put legal fees where her mouth is. She was the vanguard of actors suing for streaming royalties, for example.
varispeed 2y ago
Or to rephrase it, the laws don't apply to the rich. They just have to pay a little bit more "tax" (which probably still works out to be less than typical small business has to pay % wise anyway) to be allowed to break them.
AvAn12 2y ago
> These startups break laws, pay the fines and end up just fine. That thought process puts them in the same boat as: Theranos, FTX, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Countrywide Financial, Enron, Washington Mutual, Kidder Peabody, and many other companies which no longer exist. So if (since?) they lack the ethical compass to not break the rules, perhaps a simple history of what happens to companies that do break the rules might be useful guidance...
bko 2y ago
Do we really want someone's voice to be copyrightable, to a point where similar sounding people can't be used? This is such a weird issue for HN to be upset about when other IP related issues (e.g. companies suing for recreating generic code, patent trolls, trademark colors, disregard of paywall, reverse engineering, etc), people here overwhelmingly fall on the side of weaker IP protections. I guess the diff is some people just pick the side of "the little guy" and the example of centi millionaire beautiful actress vs billion dollar founder, the scales tip to the actress
2y ago

pyeri 2y ago

However strong her case may be but in lawsuits like these, the prosecution usually needs to prove *beyond reasonable doubt* that OpenAI copied her voice and that too intentionally. This, in all likelihood, seems very tough to come given the evidence so far. Yes, she might drag on the case for a long time but doubt that will cause the slightest dent in OpenAI's business.

V__ 2y ago
> Crimes must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, whereas civil claims are proven by lower standards of proof, such as the preponderance of the evidence. [1] https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-law-basics/the-differences-between-a-criminal-case-and-a-civil-case.html https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-law-basics/the-dif...
huxley 2y ago
This would be a civil not criminal case, there is no prosecution as well “beyond a reasonable doubt” is not the standard, rather Johansson’s lawyers only need to show that the balance of probabilities lies in her favour.

loongloong 2y ago

What sort of damages can Scarlett Johansson expect to get if OpenAI launches with the Sky voice for a short while, then pulls it quickly after the backlash (like they did)? Are punitive damages commonplace for such scenarios?

amelius 2y ago
Any damages are probably going to be way cheaper than the cost of an equivalent publicity campaign. Bad PR is also PR.
conductr 2y ago
I’m sure someone can do some type of math about her general pay rate per performance minute then multiply it by the millions of hours Sky has been heard using her voice. I think that number would likely be quite high.

dangoodmanUT 2y ago

> After she declined, Ford hired an impersonator. A U.S. appellate court ruled in Midler’s favor, indicating her voice was protected against unauthorized use. That's because it was impersonating them, not sounding like them. If they didn't try to sell it as them they would have been fine

boesboes 2y ago
That's the problem here too right? Sam implies the voice is scarlet with his references to Her. To me it all just shows these tech-bro's are just spoiled little brads with strong incel energy. I 100% expect a scandal in a few months where it turns out Sam has a bunch of VR porn bots generated by AI that just 'happen' to look and sound EXACTLY like some celebs...
- sieabahlpark 2y ago
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1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

OpenAI hires voice actress. Then it contacts famous actress for a license. Why. The implication is that OpenAI knows there is a potential legal issue. Then later, when OpenAI promotes voice actress with an apparent reference to famous actress' work, and famous actress complains, OpenAI "pauses" the project. If OpenAI believes there is no issue, then why pause the project. This behaviour certainly looks like OpenAI thought it needed a license from famous actress. If there is another explanation, OpenAI has not provided it.

afavour 2y ago

I’ll admit that my cynicism is in overdrive but I wonder if OpenAI deliberately provoked this. Or at least didn’t mind it as an outcome. More and more you see legal action as a form of publicity (people filing frivolous lawsuits etc), a lawsuit like this would help keep OpenAI looking like an underdog startup being crushed by the rich and powerful rather than the billion dollar entity it actually is.

rootlocus 2y ago

> indicating her voice was protected against unauthorized use But it wasn't her voice, it was the voice of the impersonator. By that logic, the impersonator can never speak without authorization because the impersonator would use Bette Midler's voice.

ljf 2y ago
They wanted people to either think that is was Bette Midler, or someone that sounded very like her to gain the benefit of association with her. They wanted to use some of Bette's cultural cachet, without her permission.

scotty79 2y ago

I don't get it. He was looking for specific voice. Scarlett Johansson is one of the people who has the voice of this kind. She wasn't interested. It's only logical to approach a different person with the same kind of voice. It's kinda nasty for one person to monopolize work for all actors that have similar voice to them just because she's most famous of all of them.

can16358p 2y ago
100% this. I'm in the exact same camp, bur for some reason HN crowd thinks that Scarlet has a right here as the other voice actor has a similar voice. Apparently there's an [archaic] law called right to publicity (or something like that) that makes even working with someone with a similar voice illegal. According to that restrictive logic no one can do anything on Earth as they might be doing/looking/sounding similar to someone else who might get offended, as everyone's offended by literally anything nowadays. I frankly want to see a lawsuit of OpenAI vs Scarlet on this one, where OpenAI wins.

deleted 2y ago

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ThinkBeat 2y ago

"Mitch Glazier, the chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, said that Johansson may have a strong case against OpenAI" Of course he does. RIAA thinks nearly everything is illegal, and in general mocked or critiqued on the site when they go after some shared mp3s or whatever. His opinion is neither authoritative or informative.

CRConrad 2y ago
Oh lovely, RIAA mingling in among the good guys... This may well be the only taint on Johansson's case.