18 ms·

Tom Waits vs. Frito-Lay, Inc (2003)

381 points by Borrible 2y ago

asimpletune 2y ago
This is a good example of the case Scarlett Johansson has against OpenAI
- tptacek 2y ago
  ... and that the Washington Post just comprehensively refuted, finding the voice actor and reviewing contemporaneous documentation showing that they were hired months before Johansson was ever contacted.
  - dragonwriter 2y ago
    That…doesn’t refute the case at all. It, at best, makes it slightly less likely that the original intent was commercial imitation, but it doesn’t do anything to refute the case that that’s what the ultimate use was. Adding one extra round to the back and forth of how they got to that point doesn’t really change anything important.
    - tptacek 2y ago
      These are a lot of words that don't do anything to change the fact that the voice alleged to be an imitation of SJ is in fact the natural speaking voice of a professional voice actor hired months before OpenAI contacted SJ, in an open call that mentioned nothing at all about SJ or "Her".
      - dragonwriter 2y ago
        It being the “natural speaking voice” of the voice actor is immaterial to what the intent or effect was when it was publicly used, which is what is legally relevant. Yes, that they didn’t record the intent to imitate at the time of the selection is absence of evidence of intent at that time, which is, viewed extremely generously, very weak evidence of absence of intent at that time, but…that’s it. You seem to be looking at this as if right of publicity were like copyright, where what is essentially protected is, well, the act of copying. Right of publicity is a separate area of law, but it is more like trademark than copyright. The mechanism by which a resemblance which is commercially leveraged is attained is not relevant.
        Matticus_Rex 2y ago
        But it doesn't sound that much like her, and wasn't positioned publicly in a way that in any way touches on right of publicity considerations. The Midler reasoning also rested on how much of the artist's brand recognition (though that's not the term used) was in the voice. Intentional impression of a singer doing that singer's song is very different than "they hired someone with moderately similar vocal features to ScarJo and Rashida Jones to speak in their own voice."
        KennyBlanken 2y ago
        Except many, many people including a lot of HNers thought Johannson had done the voice. That is exactly what Midler tort is.
        Matticus_Rex 2y ago
        People mistaking one person's real voice for another person's real voice is basically nothing like what happened in the Midler case. The Midler case was a vocal impersonation using one of Midler's songs. As discussed in the Midler case, where there's an imitation of the voice, one of the keys is also how much of the likeness/recognition/brand of the person is tied up in their voice, and that's substantially different between a singer's voice on their own song vs. an actress's voice. And given that it's not an impression/impersonation, and literally sounds more like another famous actress than it does ScarJo? This is a great example of facts you'd give to show where the Midler precedent doesn't apply — it's certainly in no way "exactly" like Midler.
      - Teever 2y ago
        It sounds like you're skeptical that ScarJo will be entitled to compensation should this go to court? Would you be willing to bet a small sum on this?
        Matticus_Rex 2y ago
        I would. They'd probably settle just to get the distraction out of the way, but I'd be willing to bet that if it's decided in court, ScarJo would lose.
      - criddell 2y ago
        Don’t get too hung up on facts like that. If it goes to court you will have an extraordinarily likable actress standing up to a giant soulless tech company. Good luck finding a jury sympathetic to the tech company. All SJ has to do is show that they wanted her and plant the idea that they may have been thinking of her when they hired the other actor. The end results sounds enough like her that I think OpenAI is going to have a very rough time in court. I think the chances of this getting to court are almost nothing. OpenAI will replace the voice and settle with SJ. Remember the Blurred Lines vs Got to Give It Up lawsuit? I personally think they sound way different yet Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams lost that one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziz9HW2ZmmY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziz9HW2ZmmY
        dingnuts 2y ago
        >All SJ has to do is show that they wanted her and plant the idea that they may have been thinking of her when they hired the other actor. The end results sounds enough like her that I think OpenAI is going to have a very rough time in court. Wait, are you alleging that an individual has a right to faithful imitations of their voice, as well as to their actual performance? So if I do a really good Morgan Freeman impression and I want to use that voice for a voiceover that I make, and I intentionally do an impression, he should have the right to tell me I cannot use the voiceover that I made, because I intended it to sound like Mr Freeman? Even if there is no intent to mislead and it's rightfully credited etc (not like the Tom Waits situation in TFA where the ad was intended to deceive) What stops that from extending to parody? Should Sarah Palin be able to sue Tina Fey for the impression on SNL all those years ago? If all it boils down to is >The end results sounds enough like her this starts to sound like celebrities with sufficient popularity and clout can trademark likenesses that are sufficiently similar to them. So is the voice actor who happens to sound like Scarlett Johnansson but is insufficiently famous not allowed to use their own voice in recordings because it might sound too much like the famous person? Absurd absurd absurd
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        glitz 2y ago
      - calmworm 2y ago
        Agreed. Not only does it not sound like SJ, at all, it’s someone else’s actual voice. Would this voice actor then be barred from doing voice acting? None of it makes sense.
        gs17 2y ago
        >Would this voice actor then be barred from doing voice acting? That's where this has always gotten odd to me. There's obvious impersonation, sure, but what if this same actress wanted to e.g. be the Major in a new Ghost in the Shell dub? Is she responsible for making sure everyone who hires her very definitely isn't hiring her as a soundalike if she wants her work to get released? I'm sure it would be fine in reality, but if saying "her" (when advertising an app you can have a conversation with) is enough to make this impersonation, then the same logic says she's barred from certain roles (or categories of role) because someone more famous got there first.
        tptacek 2y ago
        Bette Midler sued Ford for hiring an impersonator. She lost in the circuit court and won on appeal. The fact pattern in the appeal was that Ford had explicitly asked their actress to "sound as much as possible like Bette Midler". That's exactly what didn't happen here: not only did they not ask the actor to impersonate SJ or her character from "Her", they didn't even mention SJ. The actor used her natural speaking voice.
        Retric 2y ago
        However knowing saying such a thing would be problematic they would be looking for workarounds. Considering they did giver her directions and the end result was closer to ‘her’ than the voice accesses natural voice they didn’t need to ask for a specific impersonation for people to make the connection. I’m thinking of a number, bigger, no smaller. Keep playing the game and the end result is arbitrarily close to the number you’re thinking of. The search space for generic seductive female voice is huge and they happened to end up with one that objectively sounds like someone they tried to recruit. They can’t argue random chance at this point.
      - KennyBlanken 2y ago
        Why would Altman, two days before they went live, feel the need to try to get her to agree a second time if they'd done what you had said and used another voice actor? Of course they didn't mention "sound like SJ" in the casting call - it might as well say "Please violate Midler tort." Actors wouldn't do it, casting agencies wouldn't do it. She / her agency would have found out almost immediately, and C&D'd them into the ground within hours. I'm not sure why you're believing OpenAI when they say that the voice actor is who they actually used, and not that after bringing in the voice actor, they didn't just toss the recordings aside, have an intern collect clips of SJ in interviews, and throw that in to the machine? Altman has a long history of demonstrating incredibly poor morals. Stop taking anything he says at face value.
        Matticus_Rex 2y ago
        If it was created from ScarJo's voice to sound like her, then it was done badly, because it lacks her voice's most distinctive feature and sounds more like Rashida Jones than it does ScarJo.
    - mdorazio 2y ago
      That completely refutes the case. There is no imitation. There was no intent to bypass Scarlett saying “no”. It doesn’t even sound that much like her.
  - flutas 2y ago
    And yet the CEO of OpenAI tweeted a reference to the character she played[0], and a co-founder of OpenAI less than 24 hours later tweeted "The killer app of LLMs is Scarlett Johansson."[1] Yeah, not really damning evidence either way but it certainly looks like, according to their own words, OpenAI intended to use her as marketing. [0]: https://x.com/sama/status/1790075827666796666?lang=en https://x.com/sama/status/1790075827666796666?lang=en [1]: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1790373216537502106 https://x.com/karpathy/status/1790373216537502106
    - legitster 2y ago
      It's probably the CEO just clumsily stumbled into the comparison. He was probably not personally aware she was contacted, and it just so happened that his dumb movie reference hit a nerve. The alternative is that he knew they were ripping off Scarlett Johansson and then publicly compared them. Which seems too stupid to be true.
      - dragonwriter 2y ago
        > The alternative is that he knew they were ripping off Scarlett Johansson and then publicly compared them. Which seems too stupid to be true. People, even Silicon Valley CEOs, doing things that seem “too stupid to be true”, happens a lot more than most people think.
        bnralt 2y ago
        The problem is, a lot of conspiracy thinking relies on people being publicly stupid and careless, then privately extremely cautious and careful. The Washington Post looks at what was happening internally when the voice was created, and finds that the casting call didn’t ask for anyone who sounds like Johansson, and the actress wasn’t told to sound like her or imitate anything from Her. People say, “That doesn’t mean anything, maybe they were just keeping their intent hidden!” OK, but then they openly blast it all over Twitter? If you’re so open about what you’re trying to do with everyone in the world, yet you didn’t bother mentioning to the voice actress who’s supposedly going to implement this?
        2y ago
  - cdme 2y ago
    A truly convenient piece for a company so transparent and demonstrably trustworthy.
  - gamblor956 2y ago
    All of which is irrelevant, since the Waits case is about impersonation of likeness, not stealing likeness. OpenAI might have had a leg to stand on if their CEO hadn't gone on the internet and blasted out "Her" when advertising the Sky voice, and another co-founder had not specifically name-dropped using SJ to market their voice product. (And reading the WaPo article, they hired a film director to handle the voice recording, and the individual in charge of artistic decision-making, apparently an avid Her fan, was conveniently not made available to interview...Hm...)
- IncreasePosts 2y ago
  Tom Waits has a 1 in a billion voice. I'm fairly confident most people couldn't pick Scarlett Johansson's voice out of a lineup of 10 random 35 year old female professional voice actors.
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    You'd be wrong. We're almost as good at recognizing voices as we are at recognizing faces. Recently I had a friend message me to ask me if it was me asking a question at a recorded event with audience questions that they were watching on YouTube (the camera only showed the stage, not audience members at the microphones). They had absolutely no reason to think I would have been at that particular event. And I told them, yup -- it was me asking that question a few years ago. And there is nothing particularly distinctive about my voice. If anything, my voice is probably particularly generic. But it's just timbre, accent, and the unique "fingerprint" of my particular vocal personality.
    - IncreasePosts 2y ago
      I don't think I would be. How many hours has your friend heard you talk? How many hours has the average person heard Scarlett talk? Coupled with the fact that Scarlett is acting when people generally hear her voice, which means some aspects of her vocal qualities change(black widow doesn't sound exactly like her character from Her)
      - crazygringo 2y ago
        It has nothing to do with hours of exposure. You don't need time to learn someone's voice, in the same way you don't need time to recognize their face. And obviously we're talking about "normal" voices as opposed to impressions or accents. But we still recognize voices even if the voice is doing a wide range of emotions. The same way we don't stop recognizing someone's face when they change from a smile to a frown.
        IncreasePosts 2y ago
- spiralpolitik 2y ago
  A better one is Bette Middler vs Ford: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co. (TLDR; Ford licenses a Bette Midler track and gets a sound-a-like to perform it for a commercial after Bette Midler refuses to participate. Midler sues and wins)
  - lolinder 2y ago
    Midler is actually the foundation for Waits. The appeal hinged in part on whether Midler was still valid precedent (the court ruled it was): > In sum, our holding in Midler, upon which Waits' voice misappropriation claim rests, has not been eroded by subsequent authority. https://casetext.com/case/waits-v-frito-lay-inc https://casetext.com/case/waits-v-frito-lay-inc
withinboredom 2y ago
[1988]?
- Jtsummers 2y ago
  2003, apparently. The cause of the suit occurred in 1988, this writeup about it has quotes through 2002.
  - dang 2y ago
    I could only find it going back to 2019 (https://web.archive.org/web/20191213165922/http://tomwaitslibrary.info/biography/copyright/frito-lay/ https://web.archive.org/web/20191213165922/http://tomwaitsli...) but you're right, it does feel 2003-ey. We'll put that year above. Thanks!
    - Jtsummers 2y ago
      I got the date from http://tomwaitslibrary.info/updates/ http://tomwaitslibrary.info/updates/. If you C-f for "frito", the only mention is 2003.
mvkel 2y ago
The actual Sky voice actor was interviewed and, surprise, she sounds way more like the OpenAI voice than Scarlett. That said, this is certainly a problem we will see in the future.
- yyyyybb 2y ago
  But it’s more like identity theft, they are stealing his identity, not mimicking him. They are hijacking his fame, obviously that’s the just of the commercial. This is free speech.
  - mvkel 2y ago
    Oh of course, I don't disagree with the Waits decision at all. I just presume this was posted as a proxy for the OpenAI situation.
- frank_nitti 2y ago
  I think your confusion may be the difference between the popular demo people are referencing and the Sky voice actress’s actual voice. Copying a comment from another HN user (not sure if appropriate to name them): * This one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgYi3Wr7v_g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgYi3Wr7v_g * compare it to: https://youtu.be/GV01B5kVsC0?feature=shared&t=158 https://youtu.be/GV01B5kVsC0?feature=shared&t=158 That seems like quite a strong resemblance to me.
  - collingreen 2y ago
    I think openai looks pretty bad right now, especially with the "her" tweet, but I can't honestly say these voices sound similar. The her clip is so iconically scarjo and I don't think the sky voice is even that close. I'm not a voice expert and I dont know all the technical terms but it isn't very similar in tone, cadence, or what I want to call texture (?) I wanted to laugh at and belittle openai when I first saw scarjos claim that her friends and family couldn't tell the difference but from the samples you just linked I find that so unlikely that I think she is lying.
pwil30 2y ago
Funny timing as I just revisited the brilliant "Step Right Up" (and the entire Small Change album) a few days ago, and had no idea about this case. Glad Tomcat won. Can't help but see some parallels between this and current Scarlett Johansson vs. OpenAI debacle. My very favourite line, among many, from "Step Right Up": __The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.__
- ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
  Her debut solo album was Waits and Waits/Brennan covers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anywhere_I_Lay_My_Head https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anywhere_I_Lay_My_Head Eclectic choices even for Waits songs. Though I'd like to hear her take on Poor Edward or Fish And Bird or Soldier's Things
  - tootie 2y ago
    Speaking of which, Waits name drops KCRW Morning Becomes Eclectic which is still an outstanding way to hear new music. https://www.kcrw.com/music/shows/eclectic24 https://www.kcrw.com/music/shows/eclectic24
    - ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
      I (a Brit) used to listen to this pretty much religiously in the Nic Harcourt days.
- drewzero1 2y ago
  > Can't help but see some parallels between this and current Scarlett Johansson vs. OpenAI debacle. I think that's why this was posted... I saw it referenced in a comment on that thread.
- sandworm101 2y ago
  The logical parallels might be there but in legal substance they are different cases. A deliberate replication of an artist's distinct singing voice, while singing lyrics associated with that artist, is very different than a passing similarity to someone's non-unique speaking voice. Note that the Johansson issue is playing out only in the court of public opinion.
binarymax 2y ago
"Two and a half million bucks. Spent it all on candy." A true artist. Here's my favorite work of his: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Psk3rmjonQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Psk3rmjonQA
- busyant 2y ago
  > https://youtu.be/8h6TYV3Tz00?si=hT51w3JvdGsJTPmW https://youtu.be/8h6TYV3Tz00?si=hT51w3JvdGsJTPmW There was a time in my life when I was aware of just about every bit of Waits arcana available to the public. Then I got older and lost my way. Thank you for that link. #PEHDTSCKJMBA
cess11 2y ago
"If there's one thing you can say about mankind There's nothing kind about man You can drive out nature with a pitch fork But it always comes roaring back again For want of a bird The sky was lost For want of a nail A shoe was lost For want of a life A knife was lost For want of a toy A child was lost" I like that Waits never became an entertainment industry pushover.
facialwipe 2y ago
“The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.” ―Tom Waits
labrador 2y ago
My favorite Tom Waits story is the one when he was in a legal battle with an avante-garde French circus performer https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/oct/08/tom-waits-angry-bartabas-furious-intellectual-property-france-circus https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/oct/08/tom-waits-angr...
Theodores 2y ago
Interesting that the law suit was just against Frito Lay rather than PepsiCo. > When I was a kid, if I saw an artist I admired doing a commercial, I'd think, "Too bad, he must really need the money." But now it's so pervasive. It's a virus. Artists are lining up to do ads. The money and exposure are too tantalizing for most artists to decline. Corporations are hoping to hijack a culture's memories for their product. They want an artist's audience, credibility, good will and all the energy the songs have gathered as well as given over the years. They suck the life and meaning from the songs and impregnate them with promises of a better life with their product. Tom Waits did have a point that I think today's content creators need to take onboard. With music it was not always about money for everyone, the love of music was motivating enough, bringing people together for a good time. I do not see many content creators in it 'for the content' and bringing a community together. There are definitely some but the algorithm isn't helping them. > Eventually, artists will be going onstage like race-car drivers covered in hundreds of logos. John, stay pure. Your credibility, your integrity and your honor are things no company should be able to buy. I wish politicians were obliged to wear suits decorated in all the logos of their sponsors.
- Intralexical 2y ago
  For the words of the prophets were written on the subway walls Not so coldly charted, it's really just a question of your honesty
- jimmydddd 2y ago
  I think part of it is that 60's and 70's music artists were a bit idealistic and "precious" about their "art." I think today's artists are more practical. Like, today, most rap songs with explicit lyrics have a sanitized version for general broadcast. Music artists in the 60's would have fought hard against that.
  - autoexec 2y ago
    That's because in the 60s and 70s artists were much more likely to write their own music and develop their own sound. Today artists are mostly just performers who record labels hired because they were pretty and can be autotuned to sound okay and their songs are the product of committees that buy and then assemble a few hooks written by hitmakers and Swedish people before handing those hooks off to producers to finish, while the performer might get provide some token input or come up with a few lyrics as long as they work around the mentions of whatever products corporations paid the record label to include in the song (https://www.wired.com/2008/09/products-placed/ https://www.wired.com/2008/09/products-placed/). That's obviously not always the case, but it's often not too far off. I'd recommend reading "The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory" for some ugly details It doesn't mean that that kind of music isn't any good, but it's often entirely commercial from the very start which makes it hard for artists who had little if anything to do with the creation of those songs to care about "selling out".
WizardClickBoy 2y ago
The m3u link is broken but the recording of the "corn chip sermon" Waits was referring to is on the same site: http://www.tomwaitslibrary.info/audio/fritolay.mp3 http://www.tomwaitslibrary.info/audio/fritolay.mp3. I can see why he was upset, I'd fall for it.
gnfargbl 2y ago
A fantastic read, but slightly different from the OpenAI debacle? It sounds like Frito-Lay got to air their commercial for the usual period. Yes, there was a small downside in that it cost them $2.5M (plus their own lawyer's fees), which I imagine was beyond their budget for Genuine 100% Certified Tom Waits, but they did at least achieve their aim.
- mullingitover 2y ago
  > That said, with all the publicity around this, maybe OpenAI at least partially achieved their aim? I think they 1000% did, because despite all the fuss there is actually no resemblance between the Sky voice and Scarlett Johansson's. The Sky voice is in a different pitch, doesn't have the vocal fry, doesn't have the slightly nasal tone. Listen for yourself[1]. This was a marketing coup for both OpenAI and Johannson. OpenAI, because they're in no danger of a negative judgment, Johansson because she gets her name all the place in the press and drums up free publicity for her film. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1cx1np4/voice_comparison_between_gpt4o_and_scarlett/ https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1cx1np4/voice_...
  - lolinder 2y ago
    > The Sky voice is in a different pitch, doesn't have the vocal fry, doesn't have the slightly nasal tone. In the sample you linked to you're correct, but in this sample the vocal fry is present and in fact quite pronounced: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vgYi3Wr7v_g https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vgYi3Wr7v_g I can't hear the nasal tone in either voice, but the video linked above sounds much closer to Johansson's than the sample the reddit poster chose. It's definitely not a home run, though.
    - atsuzaki 2y ago
      Thanks for that video. I was really confused because I only watched those voice comparison videos that doesn’t sound much like her, but that OpenAI video made me go “wow, that’s definitely Scarlett Johansson”. I get how she’s upset.
  - 2y ago
Grustaf 2y ago
”Killers, thieves, and lawyers”
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
legitster 2y ago
> "Yeah, we nailed 'em. It was David and Goliath... They were lame. The problem with a big company like that is that its hands don't talk to its feet, and nobody knows what anyone else is doing. In this case, it was an ad agency that hired a fan of mine actually, in Texas." Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence (at least, until the legal team gets involved). But in my experience, this is how 95% of corporate controversies happen - just some guy somewhere is an idiot and no one checks their work. But as soon as lawyers are involved they will pull out the Magna Carta if they have to in order to prove that you they were actually geniuses and within their rights to screw up.
cratermoon 2y ago
Too bad there's no "Stephen Carter" to provide testimony for imitating ScarJo. It's amusing to think of an AI giving testimony in lawsuit, though. eta: all the folks saying the voice actor doesn't sound exactly like ScarJo and was hired before the negotiations with ScarJo are neglecting to remember: AI is really good at making voice imitations from snippets. So Sky's voice is almost certainly not unprocessed voice acting. That's how the There I Ruined It guy does his covers.
- sangnoir 2y ago
  > Too bad there's no "Stephen Carter" to provide testimony for imitating ScarJo. It's amusing to think of an AI giving testimony in lawsuit, though. Perhaps Andrey Karpathy if he has a change if heart - he's been hinted to have led the AI personality effort at OpenAI before he left. If not him, then the discovery process ought to be good. Scarlett's lawyers asked for details on how OpenAI trained the voice, then the voice got pulled ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. If/when the voice returns and this goes to court, we may find out if there was any fine-tuning on ScarJo's interviews/movie audio.
codelikeawolf 2y ago
Tom Waits did some advertising work when he narrated a dog food commercial [1], but I think his artistic integrity is still intact considering all he did was a voiceover (no singing). In true Tom Waits fashion, when he was asked about why he did it, his response was "I was down on my luck and I like dogs". One of the things I love about Tom Waits is that his interviews are just as entertaining as his songs. [1] https://youtu.be/8h6TYV3Tz00?si=hT51w3JvdGsJTPmW https://youtu.be/8h6TYV3Tz00?si=hT51w3JvdGsJTPmW
- chefandy 2y ago
  Yeah. I agree that voiceover work is way different than having some amalgamated version of your primary artistic output and advertising copy get slapped on corn chips.
- karaterobot 2y ago
  > The advertisers are banking on your credibility, but the problem is it's no longer yours. I think nowadays, the idea that doing a commercial damages your artistic integrity is considered sort of an anachronism. For better and worse, I guess, and largely driven by the consequences of technology in any case. But, a similar lawsuit today would probably be about damaging the monetary value of the artist's brand, rather than about damaging their artistic credibility per se, as it was with Waits at the time. It used to be a truism that taking money from sponsors changed your allegiances, and changed the nature of your art. For the worse. Whether time has been proven that true or false is an exercise for the reader. Point is, that's where Waits seems to be coming from. It's not about "they didn't pay me first," it's about the commercial diminishing his credibility because it looks like he might have agreed to do it in the first place.
  - ska 2y ago
    > is considered sort of an anachronism. I'm not sure this is true. It was always the case that these things were contextual and based a lot on how the artist/musician/author presented themselves. The whole idea of "selling out" is predicated on the assumption you have some high ground to give up, or at least that the action you are taking would undermine strongly held beliefs of your fan base. When popularity swings more to (obviously) commercially driven output, there is plenty of selling, but less selling "out", as it were. The pendulum will likely swing again.
cdme 2y ago
I'm glad he got paid. It was done in bad faith (much like the ScarJo case). He does allow for covers — Rod Stewart's Downtown Train cover paid for his swimming pool.
- cossatot 2y ago
  The Blind Boys of Alabama do great covers of Jesus Gonna Be Here and Way Down in the Hole, both on the Spirit of the Century album. The version of Amazing Grace set to the music of House of the Rising Sun, though, is to me the standout on an excellent album.
- Hasu 2y ago
  In the US, artists don't get to 'allow' for covers or not. The words and composition of a song are covered under a mechanical license. The recording and performance is covered under a different license. Under U.S. law, the mechanical license is a compulsory license - the rightsholder must give a license to anyone who applies and pays for it. The payment is standardized and includes royalties, so it's a pretty good deal for anyone who writes a song that gets a popular cover.
dzink 2y ago
There is a very strong music copyright system in the US and in the Tom Waits case they had both music and voice impersonation. In Sky situation a person who sounds similar to Scarlet also sounds similar to some % of humanity as well. But no creative work of Scarlet was infringed upon. You can’t protect just a voice. People are born with it and if that was possible, many people on TikTok would liable for sounding like some celebrity. Being a celebrity doesn’t entitle you to a share of income from anyone who sounds like you and broadcasts.
- lupusreal 2y ago
  They didn't infringe on a Tom Waits song, they got an impersonator to sing an entirely novel song. My take is that for a certain cohort of AI hypersters and Sam fans, it is literally impossible for OpenAI to do wrong. Sam could probably shoot a man in cold blood on national television and we'd have somebody explaining how technically it's legal because reasons.
  - nsvd 2y ago
    And similarly, some people are always hungry for an opportunity to villanize OpenAI. This kind of polarized, black-and-white thinking is not productive.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - hitekker 2y ago
      Neither is false balance or enlightened centrism. The point of the GP is that we shouldn't worshipping these companies. They're not your Lord.
      - tavavex 2y ago
        Yes, and the point of the "enlightened centrist" is that bad actions by a company don't mean that any complaints thrown at them are automatically valid, or that every employee at the company is acting maliciously. Pledging your allegiance to a megacorp is bad, but thinking that the court of public opinion is always correct is just as foolish.
ApolloFortyNine 2y ago
I think if SJ went to court and won (though I doubt it'd ever get that far), the precedent would be downright dooming for the entire VA industry. If your voice sounded close to any other major VA, no one would touch you for fear of their liability going through the roof. It probably could be stretched to musicians as well. Maybe lookalike actors too if we go down that route. I just can't imagine it'd be a good thing to have your voice be owned by someone else just because they became famous first.
- superb-owl 2y ago
  I disagree with the slippery slope argument here. Waits won because they were clearly intending to impersonate his voice, while singing his song. Not because a random guy on the radio sounded like him. Ditto for SJ--there was a clear intent to reproduce her specific voice, based on her role in "Her".
  - ApolloFortyNine 2y ago
    >Ditto for SJ--there was a clear intent to reproduce her specific voice, based on her role in "Her". Again, there wasn't. An article literally came out today that they had contracted the VA before contacting SJ. [1] Honestly this argument right here is what the slippery slope argument is all about. If you continue any further, you're just further proving it. They literally didn't even contact SJ before hand. >while singing his song You even added this caveat before, its already the slippery slope in action. No song was being sung here. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/05/22/openai-scarlett-johansson-chatgpt-ai-voice/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/05/22/openai-...
- philistine 2y ago
  Do keep in mind that the supposed soundalike actor they supposedly used for the voice that sounds exactly like SJ is not coming forward at this point to defend their work, and OpenAI refuses to make them available to journalists. It's understandable at this point, but with how duplicitous OpenAI has shown itself to be, I will need proof of their existence beyond just OpenAI saying so. I'm betting on the actor sounding nothing like SJ at all. Their voice was used as a baseline in the training of the tool, but ultimately it was modified to copy SJ.
RecycledEle 2y ago
Ahhh the good old days before Frito Lay murdered people who were about to win lawsuits against them.
- robxorb 2y ago
  Sorry, what?
  - RecycledEle 2y ago
    Sorry. It's been pushed down the Memory Hole.
kmeisthax 2y ago
>Tom Waits did not sue Frito-Lay for copyright infringement. At the time Waits didn't own the copyright (in the work of authorship) to the song "Step Right Up". This was, and is, owned by Fifth Floor Music Inc (controlled by Martin/ Herb, Evan Cohen). One might assume Frito-Lay did indeed obtain the "synch" license from Fifth Floor Music to use the song in the commercial. And as they were not using the song as recorded by Waits himself, they didn't have to worry about copyright in the musical work (owned by Elektra/ Asylum). Is there any reason why Elektra/Asylum didn't license the actual recording copyright[0] to Frito-Lay? I'm assuming Tom Waits (like any other musical artist) wouldn't have veto rights over licensing the recordings, in the same way he apparently couldn't stop Fifth Floor Music from licensing the song itself to Frito-Lay. The thing is, if Frito-Lay had actually licensed the recording, Tom Waits wouldn't have a leg to stand on in court, because of a very funny concept in copyright law called federal preemption. Any claim under any other law - state[1] or federal - that looks and quacks like a copyright is null and void. You only get to sue for copyright with copyright. So you can't, say, trademark a public domain work[2] and then sue people for reproducing it. Misappropriation, false endorsement and publicity rights are very much trademark-shaped laws, so they also lack any jurisdiction over copyright matters. There really just isn't room in the law for "I license you this work" but also "you reproducing this work is a false endorsement". The public is not confused when copyrighted works are used with permission. However, I'm also not sure why suing for copyright infringement was off the table in the first place. The thing is, when you make a derivative work, you own what you added. If you and me both go to Disney and buy licenses to produce Avengers merch, but I decide to copy your design for the merch, you get to sue me. My license to make my own derivative version of something does not entitle me to copy other derivatives of that same work. So Frito-Lay, having a license to record their own version of Step Right Up, doesn't get the right to copy Tom Waits' recording of Step Right Up. Who knows, maybe recording copyright is a lot narrower than other forms of copyright, but it's hard not to shake the feeling that he could have gone up against Frito-Lay for a lot more. [0] Music copyright has two souls: the copyright over the song itself - lyrics, sheet music, and so on - and a separate copyright over a recording of a specific performance of the song. Originally you could only copyright the song and not the recording. [1] The reason why federal preemption exists is that states started inventing their own recording copyrights for music. Which sounds absolutely wild to lawyers today, who are taught that copyright is inherently a federal question and that states have no say in how it works. What's even more wild is that some state recording copyright laws were actually perpetual, this somehow survived the "for limited times" language in the Copyright Clause, we didn't establish federal preemption and shut down these schemes until the 1970s, and we didn't extinguish already extant perpetual recording copyrights until the Music Modernization act in 2018. [2] i.e. Disney putting Steamboat Willie in their logo
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
> <object ... </object> Oops. I hope they get that fixed. I love Tom Waits.
boomboomsubban 2y ago
As an aside, anyone know if Tom Waits is still making music? It's been thirteen years since his last album, and he's at the age where I wouldn't be surprised if he's done.
noslenwerdna 2y ago
I've seen this discussion a lot, but what about when they hire a sound-a-like voice actor for a cartoon after a popular movie? Case in point, Owen Wilson was the voice of the main character in the Cars movie, but they got a different voice actor for some of the cartoons who sounded similar. Same thing for the ghostbuster cartoon after the movie was a big success in the 80s. Why is that ok?
- CodeWriter23 2y ago
  Work for hire vs. work owned by artist
- fathyb 2y ago
  Isn't because in Cars the character itself is the IP, not the actor? For example, if Owen Wilson started cosplaying as the Cars character and making money out of it, he could be sued. Reminds me of an Archer bit: https://youtu.be/c9uuITbtl-g?t=2 https://youtu.be/c9uuITbtl-g?t=2 - Oh my god, Slim Goodbody! - No! No, this is absolutely not that trademark character. Just a unitard with the systems of the human body on it. On a guy. - On a guy named TV's Michael Gray.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - ketralnis 2y ago
    The video description is > All credits to FX. I do not own any rights. Appropriate
- LastTrain 2y ago
  I keep seeing this point, in various forms, being regurgitated. The answer is: because it is OK with Owen Wilson is why. And likely stipulated in contract.
- kleiba 2y ago
  Corollary: what if the replacement voice isn't actually a voice actor but an AI?
localfirst 2y ago
Read the whole thing in his voice with Going out West playing in the background. What a true boss.
bmitc 2y ago
Tom Waits is the ultimate artist. He is also quite intelligent and hilarious. I always liked his appearances on Letterman.
TechDebtDevin 2y ago
We all read these things and are moved, but we do nothing. Let's do something.
dudeinjapan 2y ago
OpenAI should have chosen Gilbert Gottfried for its voice.
rob137 2y ago
A little off topic, but for anyone who hasn't seen this live performance of Step Right Up, I highly recommend it: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ByomIJf5n9w&si https://youtube.com/watch?v=ByomIJf5n9w&si
dudeinjapan 2y ago
TLDR; AI summary: ScarJo is eating too many Cheetos
jasonlotito 2y ago
So many people flocking to defend a corporation based on bad audio samples and ignorance of first-hand reports. This whole OpenAI/SJ issue can be solved in the courts. The people saying "it does not sound like her at all" just sound rediculous and the entire thing just reminds me that HN isn't some place "better than the rest of the internet." It just has more people that think because they are smart in one area it applies to everything else.
- wvenable 2y ago
  People were saying that Juniper sounded like her (the current OpenAI voice)! Personally I think Sky and ScarJo are not the same human voice. They are perhasps the same "performance" as both ScarJo in Her and Sky are playing a friendly/bubbly AI.
barfbagginus 2y ago
POV: Tom Waits is the reason unwashed dogs smell like Fritos. He won that concession in this lawsuit. If it were not for the generosity of Tom Waits, unwashed dogs might easily smell like worse things.
- rufus_foreman 2y ago
  The unwashed dogs will be fine as long as it doesn't rain.
johnthescott 2y ago
i met waits briefly in a bar in occidental california during late 1990s. he was behind the piano, playing away. looked healthier than i expected.

381 points by Borrible 2y ago

asimpletune 2y ago

This is a good example of the case Scarlett Johansson has against OpenAI

tptacek 2y ago
... and that the Washington Post just comprehensively refuted, finding the voice actor and reviewing contemporaneous documentation showing that they were hired months before Johansson was ever contacted.
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  That…doesn’t refute the case at all. It, at best, makes it slightly less likely that the original intent was commercial imitation, but it doesn’t do anything to refute the case that that’s what the ultimate use was. Adding one extra round to the back and forth of how they got to that point doesn’t really change anything important.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    These are a lot of words that don't do anything to change the fact that the voice alleged to be an imitation of SJ is in fact the natural speaking voice of a professional voice actor hired months before OpenAI contacted SJ, in an open call that mentioned nothing at all about SJ or "Her".
    - dragonwriter 2y ago
      It being the “natural speaking voice” of the voice actor is immaterial to what the intent or effect was when it was publicly used, which is what is legally relevant. Yes, that they didn’t record the intent to imitate at the time of the selection is absence of evidence of intent at that time, which is, viewed extremely generously, very weak evidence of absence of intent at that time, but…that’s it. You seem to be looking at this as if right of publicity were like copyright, where what is essentially protected is, well, the act of copying. Right of publicity is a separate area of law, but it is more like trademark than copyright. The mechanism by which a resemblance which is commercially leveraged is attained is not relevant.
      - Matticus_Rex 2y ago
        But it doesn't sound that much like her, and wasn't positioned publicly in a way that in any way touches on right of publicity considerations. The Midler reasoning also rested on how much of the artist's brand recognition (though that's not the term used) was in the voice. Intentional impression of a singer doing that singer's song is very different than "they hired someone with moderately similar vocal features to ScarJo and Rashida Jones to speak in their own voice."
        KennyBlanken 2y ago
        Except many, many people including a lot of HNers thought Johannson had done the voice. That is exactly what Midler tort is.
        Matticus_Rex 2y ago
        People mistaking one person's real voice for another person's real voice is basically nothing like what happened in the Midler case. The Midler case was a vocal impersonation using one of Midler's songs. As discussed in the Midler case, where there's an imitation of the voice, one of the keys is also how much of the likeness/recognition/brand of the person is tied up in their voice, and that's substantially different between a singer's voice on their own song vs. an actress's voice. And given that it's not an impression/impersonation, and literally sounds more like another famous actress than it does ScarJo? This is a great example of facts you'd give to show where the Midler precedent doesn't apply — it's certainly in no way "exactly" like Midler.
    - Teever 2y ago
      It sounds like you're skeptical that ScarJo will be entitled to compensation should this go to court? Would you be willing to bet a small sum on this?
      - Matticus_Rex 2y ago
        I would. They'd probably settle just to get the distraction out of the way, but I'd be willing to bet that if it's decided in court, ScarJo would lose.
    - criddell 2y ago
      Don’t get too hung up on facts like that. If it goes to court you will have an extraordinarily likable actress standing up to a giant soulless tech company. Good luck finding a jury sympathetic to the tech company. All SJ has to do is show that they wanted her and plant the idea that they may have been thinking of her when they hired the other actor. The end results sounds enough like her that I think OpenAI is going to have a very rough time in court. I think the chances of this getting to court are almost nothing. OpenAI will replace the voice and settle with SJ. Remember the Blurred Lines vs Got to Give It Up lawsuit? I personally think they sound way different yet Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams lost that one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziz9HW2ZmmY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziz9HW2ZmmY
      - dingnuts 2y ago
        >All SJ has to do is show that they wanted her and plant the idea that they may have been thinking of her when they hired the other actor. The end results sounds enough like her that I think OpenAI is going to have a very rough time in court. Wait, are you alleging that an individual has a right to faithful imitations of their voice, as well as to their actual performance? So if I do a really good Morgan Freeman impression and I want to use that voice for a voiceover that I make, and I intentionally do an impression, he should have the right to tell me I cannot use the voiceover that I made, because I intended it to sound like Mr Freeman? Even if there is no intent to mislead and it's rightfully credited etc (not like the Tom Waits situation in TFA where the ad was intended to deceive) What stops that from extending to parody? Should Sarah Palin be able to sue Tina Fey for the impression on SNL all those years ago? If all it boils down to is >The end results sounds enough like her this starts to sound like celebrities with sufficient popularity and clout can trademark likenesses that are sufficiently similar to them. So is the voice actor who happens to sound like Scarlett Johnansson but is insufficiently famous not allowed to use their own voice in recordings because it might sound too much like the famous person? Absurd absurd absurd
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        glitz 2y ago
    - calmworm 2y ago
      Agreed. Not only does it not sound like SJ, at all, it’s someone else’s actual voice. Would this voice actor then be barred from doing voice acting? None of it makes sense.
      - gs17 2y ago
        >Would this voice actor then be barred from doing voice acting? That's where this has always gotten odd to me. There's obvious impersonation, sure, but what if this same actress wanted to e.g. be the Major in a new Ghost in the Shell dub? Is she responsible for making sure everyone who hires her very definitely isn't hiring her as a soundalike if she wants her work to get released? I'm sure it would be fine in reality, but if saying "her" (when advertising an app you can have a conversation with) is enough to make this impersonation, then the same logic says she's barred from certain roles (or categories of role) because someone more famous got there first.
        tptacek 2y ago
        Bette Midler sued Ford for hiring an impersonator. She lost in the circuit court and won on appeal. The fact pattern in the appeal was that Ford had explicitly asked their actress to "sound as much as possible like Bette Midler". That's exactly what didn't happen here: not only did they not ask the actor to impersonate SJ or her character from "Her", they didn't even mention SJ. The actor used her natural speaking voice.
        Retric 2y ago
        However knowing saying such a thing would be problematic they would be looking for workarounds. Considering they did giver her directions and the end result was closer to ‘her’ than the voice accesses natural voice they didn’t need to ask for a specific impersonation for people to make the connection. I’m thinking of a number, bigger, no smaller. Keep playing the game and the end result is arbitrarily close to the number you’re thinking of. The search space for generic seductive female voice is huge and they happened to end up with one that objectively sounds like someone they tried to recruit. They can’t argue random chance at this point.
    - KennyBlanken 2y ago
      Why would Altman, two days before they went live, feel the need to try to get her to agree a second time if they'd done what you had said and used another voice actor? Of course they didn't mention "sound like SJ" in the casting call - it might as well say "Please violate Midler tort." Actors wouldn't do it, casting agencies wouldn't do it. She / her agency would have found out almost immediately, and C&D'd them into the ground within hours. I'm not sure why you're believing OpenAI when they say that the voice actor is who they actually used, and not that after bringing in the voice actor, they didn't just toss the recordings aside, have an intern collect clips of SJ in interviews, and throw that in to the machine? Altman has a long history of demonstrating incredibly poor morals. Stop taking anything he says at face value.
      - Matticus_Rex 2y ago
        If it was created from ScarJo's voice to sound like her, then it was done badly, because it lacks her voice's most distinctive feature and sounds more like Rashida Jones than it does ScarJo.
  - mdorazio 2y ago
    That completely refutes the case. There is no imitation. There was no intent to bypass Scarlett saying “no”. It doesn’t even sound that much like her.
- flutas 2y ago
  And yet the CEO of OpenAI tweeted a reference to the character she played[0], and a co-founder of OpenAI less than 24 hours later tweeted "The killer app of LLMs is Scarlett Johansson."[1] Yeah, not really damning evidence either way but it certainly looks like, according to their own words, OpenAI intended to use her as marketing. [0]: https://x.com/sama/status/1790075827666796666?lang=en https://x.com/sama/status/1790075827666796666?lang=en [1]: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1790373216537502106 https://x.com/karpathy/status/1790373216537502106
  - legitster 2y ago
    It's probably the CEO just clumsily stumbled into the comparison. He was probably not personally aware she was contacted, and it just so happened that his dumb movie reference hit a nerve. The alternative is that he knew they were ripping off Scarlett Johansson and then publicly compared them. Which seems too stupid to be true.
    - dragonwriter 2y ago
      > The alternative is that he knew they were ripping off Scarlett Johansson and then publicly compared them. Which seems too stupid to be true. People, even Silicon Valley CEOs, doing things that seem “too stupid to be true”, happens a lot more than most people think.
      - bnralt 2y ago
        The problem is, a lot of conspiracy thinking relies on people being publicly stupid and careless, then privately extremely cautious and careful. The Washington Post looks at what was happening internally when the voice was created, and finds that the casting call didn’t ask for anyone who sounds like Johansson, and the actress wasn’t told to sound like her or imitate anything from Her. People say, “That doesn’t mean anything, maybe they were just keeping their intent hidden!” OK, but then they openly blast it all over Twitter? If you’re so open about what you’re trying to do with everyone in the world, yet you didn’t bother mentioning to the voice actress who’s supposedly going to implement this?
      - 2y ago
- cdme 2y ago
  A truly convenient piece for a company so transparent and demonstrably trustworthy.
- gamblor956 2y ago
  All of which is irrelevant, since the Waits case is about impersonation of likeness, not stealing likeness. OpenAI might have had a leg to stand on if their CEO hadn't gone on the internet and blasted out "Her" when advertising the Sky voice, and another co-founder had not specifically name-dropped using SJ to market their voice product. (And reading the WaPo article, they hired a film director to handle the voice recording, and the individual in charge of artistic decision-making, apparently an avid Her fan, was conveniently not made available to interview...Hm...)
IncreasePosts 2y ago
Tom Waits has a 1 in a billion voice. I'm fairly confident most people couldn't pick Scarlett Johansson's voice out of a lineup of 10 random 35 year old female professional voice actors.
- crazygringo 2y ago
  You'd be wrong. We're almost as good at recognizing voices as we are at recognizing faces. Recently I had a friend message me to ask me if it was me asking a question at a recorded event with audience questions that they were watching on YouTube (the camera only showed the stage, not audience members at the microphones). They had absolutely no reason to think I would have been at that particular event. And I told them, yup -- it was me asking that question a few years ago. And there is nothing particularly distinctive about my voice. If anything, my voice is probably particularly generic. But it's just timbre, accent, and the unique "fingerprint" of my particular vocal personality.
  - IncreasePosts 2y ago
    I don't think I would be. How many hours has your friend heard you talk? How many hours has the average person heard Scarlett talk? Coupled with the fact that Scarlett is acting when people generally hear her voice, which means some aspects of her vocal qualities change(black widow doesn't sound exactly like her character from Her)
    - crazygringo 2y ago
      It has nothing to do with hours of exposure. You don't need time to learn someone's voice, in the same way you don't need time to recognize their face. And obviously we're talking about "normal" voices as opposed to impressions or accents. But we still recognize voices even if the voice is doing a wide range of emotions. The same way we don't stop recognizing someone's face when they change from a smile to a frown.
      - IncreasePosts 2y ago
spiralpolitik 2y ago
A better one is Bette Middler vs Ford: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co. (TLDR; Ford licenses a Bette Midler track and gets a sound-a-like to perform it for a commercial after Bette Midler refuses to participate. Midler sues and wins)
- lolinder 2y ago
  Midler is actually the foundation for Waits. The appeal hinged in part on whether Midler was still valid precedent (the court ruled it was): > In sum, our holding in Midler, upon which Waits' voice misappropriation claim rests, has not been eroded by subsequent authority. https://casetext.com/case/waits-v-frito-lay-inc https://casetext.com/case/waits-v-frito-lay-inc

withinboredom 2y ago

[1988]?

Jtsummers 2y ago
2003, apparently. The cause of the suit occurred in 1988, this writeup about it has quotes through 2002.
- dang 2y ago
  I could only find it going back to 2019 (https://web.archive.org/web/20191213165922/http://tomwaitslibrary.info/biography/copyright/frito-lay/ https://web.archive.org/web/20191213165922/http://tomwaitsli...) but you're right, it does feel 2003-ey. We'll put that year above. Thanks!
  - Jtsummers 2y ago
    I got the date from http://tomwaitslibrary.info/updates/ http://tomwaitslibrary.info/updates/. If you C-f for "frito", the only mention is 2003.

mvkel 2y ago

The actual Sky voice actor was interviewed and, surprise, she sounds way more like the OpenAI voice than Scarlett. That said, this is certainly a problem we will see in the future.

yyyyybb 2y ago
But it’s more like identity theft, they are stealing his identity, not mimicking him. They are hijacking his fame, obviously that’s the just of the commercial. This is free speech.
- mvkel 2y ago
  Oh of course, I don't disagree with the Waits decision at all. I just presume this was posted as a proxy for the OpenAI situation.
frank_nitti 2y ago
I think your confusion may be the difference between the popular demo people are referencing and the Sky voice actress’s actual voice. Copying a comment from another HN user (not sure if appropriate to name them): * This one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgYi3Wr7v_g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgYi3Wr7v_g * compare it to: https://youtu.be/GV01B5kVsC0?feature=shared&t=158 https://youtu.be/GV01B5kVsC0?feature=shared&t=158 That seems like quite a strong resemblance to me.
- collingreen 2y ago
  I think openai looks pretty bad right now, especially with the "her" tweet, but I can't honestly say these voices sound similar. The her clip is so iconically scarjo and I don't think the sky voice is even that close. I'm not a voice expert and I dont know all the technical terms but it isn't very similar in tone, cadence, or what I want to call texture (?) I wanted to laugh at and belittle openai when I first saw scarjos claim that her friends and family couldn't tell the difference but from the samples you just linked I find that so unlikely that I think she is lying.

pwil30 2y ago

Funny timing as I just revisited the brilliant "Step Right Up" (and the entire Small Change album) a few days ago, and had no idea about this case. Glad Tomcat won. Can't help but see some parallels between this and current Scarlett Johansson vs. OpenAI debacle. My very favourite line, among many, from "Step Right Up": __The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.__

ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
Her debut solo album was Waits and Waits/Brennan covers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anywhere_I_Lay_My_Head https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anywhere_I_Lay_My_Head Eclectic choices even for Waits songs. Though I'd like to hear her take on Poor Edward or Fish And Bird or Soldier's Things
- tootie 2y ago
  Speaking of which, Waits name drops KCRW Morning Becomes Eclectic which is still an outstanding way to hear new music. https://www.kcrw.com/music/shows/eclectic24 https://www.kcrw.com/music/shows/eclectic24
  - ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
    I (a Brit) used to listen to this pretty much religiously in the Nic Harcourt days.
drewzero1 2y ago
> Can't help but see some parallels between this and current Scarlett Johansson vs. OpenAI debacle. I think that's why this was posted... I saw it referenced in a comment on that thread.
sandworm101 2y ago
The logical parallels might be there but in legal substance they are different cases. A deliberate replication of an artist's distinct singing voice, while singing lyrics associated with that artist, is very different than a passing similarity to someone's non-unique speaking voice. Note that the Johansson issue is playing out only in the court of public opinion.

binarymax 2y ago

"Two and a half million bucks. Spent it all on candy." A true artist. Here's my favorite work of his: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Psk3rmjonQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Psk3rmjonQA

busyant 2y ago
> https://youtu.be/8h6TYV3Tz00?si=hT51w3JvdGsJTPmW https://youtu.be/8h6TYV3Tz00?si=hT51w3JvdGsJTPmW There was a time in my life when I was aware of just about every bit of Waits arcana available to the public. Then I got older and lost my way. Thank you for that link. #PEHDTSCKJMBA

cess11 2y ago

"If there's one thing you can say about mankind There's nothing kind about man You can drive out nature with a pitch fork But it always comes roaring back again For want of a bird The sky was lost For want of a nail A shoe was lost For want of a life A knife was lost For want of a toy A child was lost" I like that Waits never became an entertainment industry pushover.

facialwipe 2y ago

“The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.” ―Tom Waits

labrador 2y ago

My favorite Tom Waits story is the one when he was in a legal battle with an avante-garde French circus performer https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/oct/08/tom-waits-angry-bartabas-furious-intellectual-property-france-circus https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/oct/08/tom-waits-angr...

Theodores 2y ago

Interesting that the law suit was just against Frito Lay rather than PepsiCo. > When I was a kid, if I saw an artist I admired doing a commercial, I'd think, "Too bad, he must really need the money." But now it's so pervasive. It's a virus. Artists are lining up to do ads. The money and exposure are too tantalizing for most artists to decline. Corporations are hoping to hijack a culture's memories for their product. They want an artist's audience, credibility, good will and all the energy the songs have gathered as well as given over the years. They suck the life and meaning from the songs and impregnate them with promises of a better life with their product. Tom Waits did have a point that I think today's content creators need to take onboard. With music it was not always about money for everyone, the love of music was motivating enough, bringing people together for a good time. I do not see many content creators in it 'for the content' and bringing a community together. There are definitely some but the algorithm isn't helping them. > Eventually, artists will be going onstage like race-car drivers covered in hundreds of logos. John, stay pure. Your credibility, your integrity and your honor are things no company should be able to buy. I wish politicians were obliged to wear suits decorated in all the logos of their sponsors.

Intralexical 2y ago
For the words of the prophets were written on the subway walls Not so coldly charted, it's really just a question of your honesty
jimmydddd 2y ago
I think part of it is that 60's and 70's music artists were a bit idealistic and "precious" about their "art." I think today's artists are more practical. Like, today, most rap songs with explicit lyrics have a sanitized version for general broadcast. Music artists in the 60's would have fought hard against that.
- autoexec 2y ago
  That's because in the 60s and 70s artists were much more likely to write their own music and develop their own sound. Today artists are mostly just performers who record labels hired because they were pretty and can be autotuned to sound okay and their songs are the product of committees that buy and then assemble a few hooks written by hitmakers and Swedish people before handing those hooks off to producers to finish, while the performer might get provide some token input or come up with a few lyrics as long as they work around the mentions of whatever products corporations paid the record label to include in the song (https://www.wired.com/2008/09/products-placed/ https://www.wired.com/2008/09/products-placed/). That's obviously not always the case, but it's often not too far off. I'd recommend reading "The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory" for some ugly details It doesn't mean that that kind of music isn't any good, but it's often entirely commercial from the very start which makes it hard for artists who had little if anything to do with the creation of those songs to care about "selling out".

WizardClickBoy 2y ago

The m3u link is broken but the recording of the "corn chip sermon" Waits was referring to is on the same site: http://www.tomwaitslibrary.info/audio/fritolay.mp3 http://www.tomwaitslibrary.info/audio/fritolay.mp3. I can see why he was upset, I'd fall for it.

gnfargbl 2y ago

A fantastic read, but slightly different from the OpenAI debacle? It sounds like Frito-Lay got to air their commercial for the usual period. Yes, there was a small downside in that it cost them $2.5M (plus their own lawyer's fees), which I imagine was beyond their budget for Genuine 100% Certified Tom Waits, but they did at least achieve their aim.

mullingitover 2y ago
> That said, with all the publicity around this, maybe OpenAI at least partially achieved their aim? I think they 1000% did, because despite all the fuss there is actually no resemblance between the Sky voice and Scarlett Johansson's. The Sky voice is in a different pitch, doesn't have the vocal fry, doesn't have the slightly nasal tone. Listen for yourself[1]. This was a marketing coup for both OpenAI and Johannson. OpenAI, because they're in no danger of a negative judgment, Johansson because she gets her name all the place in the press and drums up free publicity for her film. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1cx1np4/voice_comparison_between_gpt4o_and_scarlett/ https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1cx1np4/voice_...
- lolinder 2y ago
  > The Sky voice is in a different pitch, doesn't have the vocal fry, doesn't have the slightly nasal tone. In the sample you linked to you're correct, but in this sample the vocal fry is present and in fact quite pronounced: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vgYi3Wr7v_g https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vgYi3Wr7v_g I can't hear the nasal tone in either voice, but the video linked above sounds much closer to Johansson's than the sample the reddit poster chose. It's definitely not a home run, though.
  - atsuzaki 2y ago
    Thanks for that video. I was really confused because I only watched those voice comparison videos that doesn’t sound much like her, but that OpenAI video made me go “wow, that’s definitely Scarlett Johansson”. I get how she’s upset.
- 2y ago

Grustaf 2y ago

”Killers, thieves, and lawyers”

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

legitster 2y ago

> "Yeah, we nailed 'em. It was David and Goliath... They were lame. The problem with a big company like that is that its hands don't talk to its feet, and nobody knows what anyone else is doing. In this case, it was an ad agency that hired a fan of mine actually, in Texas." Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence (at least, until the legal team gets involved). But in my experience, this is how 95% of corporate controversies happen - just some guy somewhere is an idiot and no one checks their work. But as soon as lawyers are involved they will pull out the Magna Carta if they have to in order to prove that you they were actually geniuses and within their rights to screw up.

cratermoon 2y ago

Too bad there's no "Stephen Carter" to provide testimony for imitating ScarJo. It's amusing to think of an AI giving testimony in lawsuit, though. eta: all the folks saying the voice actor doesn't sound exactly like ScarJo and was hired before the negotiations with ScarJo are neglecting to remember: AI is really good at making voice imitations from snippets. So Sky's voice is almost certainly not unprocessed voice acting. That's how the There I Ruined It guy does his covers.

sangnoir 2y ago
> Too bad there's no "Stephen Carter" to provide testimony for imitating ScarJo. It's amusing to think of an AI giving testimony in lawsuit, though. Perhaps Andrey Karpathy if he has a change if heart - he's been hinted to have led the AI personality effort at OpenAI before he left. If not him, then the discovery process ought to be good. Scarlett's lawyers asked for details on how OpenAI trained the voice, then the voice got pulled ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. If/when the voice returns and this goes to court, we may find out if there was any fine-tuning on ScarJo's interviews/movie audio.

codelikeawolf 2y ago

Tom Waits did some advertising work when he narrated a dog food commercial [1], but I think his artistic integrity is still intact considering all he did was a voiceover (no singing). In true Tom Waits fashion, when he was asked about why he did it, his response was "I was down on my luck and I like dogs". One of the things I love about Tom Waits is that his interviews are just as entertaining as his songs. [1] https://youtu.be/8h6TYV3Tz00?si=hT51w3JvdGsJTPmW https://youtu.be/8h6TYV3Tz00?si=hT51w3JvdGsJTPmW

chefandy 2y ago
Yeah. I agree that voiceover work is way different than having some amalgamated version of your primary artistic output and advertising copy get slapped on corn chips.
karaterobot 2y ago
> The advertisers are banking on your credibility, but the problem is it's no longer yours. I think nowadays, the idea that doing a commercial damages your artistic integrity is considered sort of an anachronism. For better and worse, I guess, and largely driven by the consequences of technology in any case. But, a similar lawsuit today would probably be about damaging the monetary value of the artist's brand, rather than about damaging their artistic credibility per se, as it was with Waits at the time. It used to be a truism that taking money from sponsors changed your allegiances, and changed the nature of your art. For the worse. Whether time has been proven that true or false is an exercise for the reader. Point is, that's where Waits seems to be coming from. It's not about "they didn't pay me first," it's about the commercial diminishing his credibility because it looks like he might have agreed to do it in the first place.
- ska 2y ago
  > is considered sort of an anachronism. I'm not sure this is true. It was always the case that these things were contextual and based a lot on how the artist/musician/author presented themselves. The whole idea of "selling out" is predicated on the assumption you have some high ground to give up, or at least that the action you are taking would undermine strongly held beliefs of your fan base. When popularity swings more to (obviously) commercially driven output, there is plenty of selling, but less selling "out", as it were. The pendulum will likely swing again.

cdme 2y ago

I'm glad he got paid. It was done in bad faith (much like the ScarJo case). He does allow for covers — Rod Stewart's Downtown Train cover paid for his swimming pool.

cossatot 2y ago
The Blind Boys of Alabama do great covers of Jesus Gonna Be Here and Way Down in the Hole, both on the Spirit of the Century album. The version of Amazing Grace set to the music of House of the Rising Sun, though, is to me the standout on an excellent album.
Hasu 2y ago
In the US, artists don't get to 'allow' for covers or not. The words and composition of a song are covered under a mechanical license. The recording and performance is covered under a different license. Under U.S. law, the mechanical license is a compulsory license - the rightsholder must give a license to anyone who applies and pays for it. The payment is standardized and includes royalties, so it's a pretty good deal for anyone who writes a song that gets a popular cover.

dzink 2y ago

There is a very strong music copyright system in the US and in the Tom Waits case they had both music and voice impersonation. In Sky situation a person who sounds similar to Scarlet also sounds similar to some % of humanity as well. But no creative work of Scarlet was infringed upon. You can’t protect just a voice. People are born with it and if that was possible, many people on TikTok would liable for sounding like some celebrity. Being a celebrity doesn’t entitle you to a share of income from anyone who sounds like you and broadcasts.

lupusreal 2y ago
They didn't infringe on a Tom Waits song, they got an impersonator to sing an entirely novel song. My take is that for a certain cohort of AI hypersters and Sam fans, it is literally impossible for OpenAI to do wrong. Sam could probably shoot a man in cold blood on national television and we'd have somebody explaining how technically it's legal because reasons.
- nsvd 2y ago
  And similarly, some people are always hungry for an opportunity to villanize OpenAI. This kind of polarized, black-and-white thinking is not productive.
  - deleted 2y ago
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  - hitekker 2y ago
    Neither is false balance or enlightened centrism. The point of the GP is that we shouldn't worshipping these companies. They're not your Lord.
    - tavavex 2y ago
      Yes, and the point of the "enlightened centrist" is that bad actions by a company don't mean that any complaints thrown at them are automatically valid, or that every employee at the company is acting maliciously. Pledging your allegiance to a megacorp is bad, but thinking that the court of public opinion is always correct is just as foolish.

ApolloFortyNine 2y ago

I think if SJ went to court and won (though I doubt it'd ever get that far), the precedent would be downright dooming for the entire VA industry. If your voice sounded close to any other major VA, no one would touch you for fear of their liability going through the roof. It probably could be stretched to musicians as well. Maybe lookalike actors too if we go down that route. I just can't imagine it'd be a good thing to have your voice be owned by someone else just because they became famous first.

superb-owl 2y ago
I disagree with the slippery slope argument here. Waits won because they were clearly intending to impersonate his voice, while singing his song. Not because a random guy on the radio sounded like him. Ditto for SJ--there was a clear intent to reproduce her specific voice, based on her role in "Her".
- ApolloFortyNine 2y ago
  >Ditto for SJ--there was a clear intent to reproduce her specific voice, based on her role in "Her". Again, there wasn't. An article literally came out today that they had contracted the VA before contacting SJ. [1] Honestly this argument right here is what the slippery slope argument is all about. If you continue any further, you're just further proving it. They literally didn't even contact SJ before hand. >while singing his song You even added this caveat before, its already the slippery slope in action. No song was being sung here. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/05/22/openai-scarlett-johansson-chatgpt-ai-voice/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/05/22/openai-...
philistine 2y ago
Do keep in mind that the supposed soundalike actor they supposedly used for the voice that sounds exactly like SJ is not coming forward at this point to defend their work, and OpenAI refuses to make them available to journalists. It's understandable at this point, but with how duplicitous OpenAI has shown itself to be, I will need proof of their existence beyond just OpenAI saying so. I'm betting on the actor sounding nothing like SJ at all. Their voice was used as a baseline in the training of the tool, but ultimately it was modified to copy SJ.

RecycledEle 2y ago

Ahhh the good old days before Frito Lay murdered people who were about to win lawsuits against them.

robxorb 2y ago
Sorry, what?
- RecycledEle 2y ago
  Sorry. It's been pushed down the Memory Hole.

kmeisthax 2y ago

>Tom Waits did not sue Frito-Lay for copyright infringement. At the time Waits didn't own the copyright (in the work of authorship) to the song "Step Right Up". This was, and is, owned by Fifth Floor Music Inc (controlled by Martin/ Herb, Evan Cohen). One might assume Frito-Lay did indeed obtain the "synch" license from Fifth Floor Music to use the song in the commercial. And as they were not using the song as recorded by Waits himself, they didn't have to worry about copyright in the musical work (owned by Elektra/ Asylum). Is there any reason why Elektra/Asylum didn't license the actual recording copyright[0] to Frito-Lay? I'm assuming Tom Waits (like any other musical artist) wouldn't have veto rights over licensing the recordings, in the same way he apparently couldn't stop Fifth Floor Music from licensing the song itself to Frito-Lay. The thing is, if Frito-Lay had actually licensed the recording, Tom Waits wouldn't have a leg to stand on in court, because of a very funny concept in copyright law called federal preemption. Any claim under any other law - state[1] or federal - that looks and quacks like a copyright is null and void. You only get to sue for copyright with copyright. So you can't, say, trademark a public domain work[2] and then sue people for reproducing it. Misappropriation, false endorsement and publicity rights are very much trademark-shaped laws, so they also lack any jurisdiction over copyright matters. There really just isn't room in the law for "I license you this work" but also "you reproducing this work is a false endorsement". The public is not confused when copyrighted works are used with permission. However, I'm also not sure why suing for copyright infringement was off the table in the first place. The thing is, when you make a derivative work, you own what you added. If you and me both go to Disney and buy licenses to produce Avengers merch, but I decide to copy your design for the merch, you get to sue me. My license to make my own derivative version of something does not entitle me to copy other derivatives of that same work. So Frito-Lay, having a license to record their own version of Step Right Up, doesn't get the right to copy Tom Waits' recording of Step Right Up. Who knows, maybe recording copyright is a lot narrower than other forms of copyright, but it's hard not to shake the feeling that he could have gone up against Frito-Lay for a lot more. [0] Music copyright has two souls: the copyright over the song itself - lyrics, sheet music, and so on - and a separate copyright over a recording of a specific performance of the song. Originally you could only copyright the song and not the recording. [1] The reason why federal preemption exists is that states started inventing their own recording copyrights for music. Which sounds absolutely wild to lawyers today, who are taught that copyright is inherently a federal question and that states have no say in how it works. What's even more wild is that some state recording copyright laws were actually perpetual, this somehow survived the "for limited times" language in the Copyright Clause, we didn't establish federal preemption and shut down these schemes until the 1970s, and we didn't extinguish already extant perpetual recording copyrights until the Music Modernization act in 2018. [2] i.e. Disney putting Steamboat Willie in their logo

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

> <object ... </object> Oops. I hope they get that fixed. I love Tom Waits.

boomboomsubban 2y ago

As an aside, anyone know if Tom Waits is still making music? It's been thirteen years since his last album, and he's at the age where I wouldn't be surprised if he's done.

noslenwerdna 2y ago

I've seen this discussion a lot, but what about when they hire a sound-a-like voice actor for a cartoon after a popular movie? Case in point, Owen Wilson was the voice of the main character in the Cars movie, but they got a different voice actor for some of the cartoons who sounded similar. Same thing for the ghostbuster cartoon after the movie was a big success in the 80s. Why is that ok?

CodeWriter23 2y ago
Work for hire vs. work owned by artist
fathyb 2y ago
Isn't because in Cars the character itself is the IP, not the actor? For example, if Owen Wilson started cosplaying as the Cars character and making money out of it, he could be sued. Reminds me of an Archer bit: https://youtu.be/c9uuITbtl-g?t=2 https://youtu.be/c9uuITbtl-g?t=2 - Oh my god, Slim Goodbody! - No! No, this is absolutely not that trademark character. Just a unitard with the systems of the human body on it. On a guy. - On a guy named TV's Michael Gray.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ketralnis 2y ago
  The video description is > All credits to FX. I do not own any rights. Appropriate
LastTrain 2y ago
I keep seeing this point, in various forms, being regurgitated. The answer is: because it is OK with Owen Wilson is why. And likely stipulated in contract.
kleiba 2y ago
Corollary: what if the replacement voice isn't actually a voice actor but an AI?

localfirst 2y ago

Read the whole thing in his voice with Going out West playing in the background. What a true boss.

bmitc 2y ago

Tom Waits is the ultimate artist. He is also quite intelligent and hilarious. I always liked his appearances on Letterman.

TechDebtDevin 2y ago

We all read these things and are moved, but we do nothing. Let's do something.

dudeinjapan 2y ago

OpenAI should have chosen Gilbert Gottfried for its voice.

rob137 2y ago

A little off topic, but for anyone who hasn't seen this live performance of Step Right Up, I highly recommend it: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ByomIJf5n9w&si https://youtube.com/watch?v=ByomIJf5n9w&si

dudeinjapan 2y ago

TLDR; AI summary: ScarJo is eating too many Cheetos

jasonlotito 2y ago

So many people flocking to defend a corporation based on bad audio samples and ignorance of first-hand reports. This whole OpenAI/SJ issue can be solved in the courts. The people saying "it does not sound like her at all" just sound rediculous and the entire thing just reminds me that HN isn't some place "better than the rest of the internet." It just has more people that think because they are smart in one area it applies to everything else.

wvenable 2y ago
People were saying that Juniper sounded like her (the current OpenAI voice)! Personally I think Sky and ScarJo are not the same human voice. They are perhasps the same "performance" as both ScarJo in Her and Sky are playing a friendly/bubbly AI.

barfbagginus 2y ago

POV: Tom Waits is the reason unwashed dogs smell like Fritos. He won that concession in this lawsuit. If it were not for the generosity of Tom Waits, unwashed dogs might easily smell like worse things.

rufus_foreman 2y ago
The unwashed dogs will be fine as long as it doesn't rain.

johnthescott 2y ago

i met waits briefly in a bar in occidental california during late 1990s. he was behind the piano, playing away. looked healthier than i expected.