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This shows how bad it is. If you're proactively sharing a package of docs with the Washingington Post, you're toast. Altman's outreach, his tweet, and the thou

This shows how bad it is. If you're proactively sharing a package of docs with the Washingington Post, you're toast. Altman's outreach, his tweet, and the thousands of tweets and comments talking about how similar Sky is to ScarJo is enough to win the case in California.

tptacek 2y ago
The Washington Post comprehensively refuted the story. This is like the "this is good for Bitcoin because ____" meme, but in reverse.
- slantedview 2y ago
  They refuted it based on select documents handed to them by OpenAI.
- FireBeyond 2y ago
  They literally didn't question any of OAI's claims. They just regurgitated them. They were desperate for a non-union-only actor in their casting. But repeatedly kept hitting up a union actor. What fears for the actress' safety have been portrayed such that not only does she needs to stay anonymous, but her agent does too? "Altman was not involved"... yet he personally reached out to SJ to try to close the deal?
pc86 2y ago
Then we can add this to the long list of insane lawsuits going the wrong way in California. They asked SJ, she said no. So they went to a voice actor and used her. Case closed, they didn't use SJ's voice without her permission. That doesn't violate any law to any reasonable person.
- freejazz 2y ago
  "Reasonable" is doing a ton of work here.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Turing_Machine 2y ago
    "Reasonable" does a lot of work throughout the entire legal system. If there's one constant that can be relied upon, it's that "things that are reasonable to a lawyer" and "things that are reasonable to a normal human being" are essentially disjoint sets.
    - dragonwriter 2y ago
      > “Reasonable” does a lot of work throughout the entire legal system. Yes, but here it’s not being invoked in the sense of “would a reasonable person believe based on this evidence that the facts which would violate the actual law exist” but “would a ‘reasonable’ person believe the law is what the law, indisputably, actually is”. It’s being invoked to question the reality of the law itself, based on its subjective undesirability to the speaker.
    - freejazz 2y ago
      >"Reasonable" does a lot of work throughout the entire legal system. Yet it never becomes anywhere near the significant fulcrum you made it out to be here, filtering between the laws you think are good and the laws you think are bad. Further, you seem to mistake attorneys with legislators. I'd be surprised if a reasonable person thinks it is okay to profit off the likeness of others without their permission. But I guess you don't think that's reasonable. What a valuable conversation we're having.
      - Turing_Machine 2y ago
        No, it has nothing to do with "legislators". The "reasonable man" standard is all over case law, and there are about a bazillion cases where attorneys have argued that their client's behavior was "reasonable", even when it was manifestly not so by the standards of an actual reasonable man. You can, as they say, look it up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person
- whycome 2y ago
  This has echoes of Crispin Glover and Back to the Future 2. They didn't rehire him and got someone else to play his character.
- mrtranscendence 2y ago
  It's nice of you to clearly state what reasonable persons should believe violates the law. Alas, your contention about what reasonable people believe about the law isn't actually the law.
- monocasa 2y ago
  Likeness rights are a real thing, and it's not out there to have infringed on them by going to a famous person to use their likeness, getting denied, then using another actor telling them to copy the first actor's likeness. This is why all Hollywood contracts have actors signing over their likeness in perpetuity now; which was one of the major sticking points of the recent strikes.
  - sib 2y ago
    >> "then using another actor telling them to copy the first actor's likeness" Assumes facts not in evidence
    - qingcharles 2y ago
      And in fact clearly rebutted by the evidence that the actor says they never told her to copy anyone or ever mentioned Johansson or Her.
      - monocasa 2y ago
        At a base minimum, the would have given her direction to sound the way she does. Voice actors have lots of range, and that range would have been on her demo reel.
        qingcharles 2y ago
        Agreed. I was married to a voiceover actress. Their range can be quite large :)
      - FireBeyond 2y ago
        The anonymous actor, as reported by the anonymous agent, "fearing for her safety".
    - gs17 2y ago
      It even assumes the opposite, since they asked SJ after recording the original voice.
- zug_zug 2y ago
  You have no idea what they did, unless you work there. All you know is that somebody being sued for multi-millions of dollars (and who's trustworthiness is pretty much shot) is claiming what they did. And frankly given the frequency and ease of voice cloning, there are very few people who can say with confidence that they know 100% that nobody at the company did anything to that effect. What employee, if any, could say with 100% confidence that this model was trained with 100% samples from the voice actress they alledge and 0% from samples from Scarlett Johansson/her? And if that employee had done so, would they rat out their employer and lose their job over it?
  - Turing_Machine 2y ago
    It's not (or shouldn't be) about things that have some finite probability (no matter how small) of being true, but rather about what can be proven to be true. There's no doubt a very small (but finite) probability that the voice sounds like a grey alien from Zeta Reticuli. That doesn't mean the alien is gonna win in court.
    - zug_zug 2y ago
      I'm not saying they'll necessarily win in court, all I'm saying is I'd wager my life savings that they intentionally created a voice that sounded like Scarlet's character from Her. Anybody on this forum who says that it's entirely impossible or that it's conclusive that they didn't use her voice samples simply isn't being logical about the evidence. TBH I really like the voice and the product, but I'm having a lot of trouble wrapping my head around the number of people who seem rather tribal about all this.
  - mwigdahl 2y ago
    If they did clone her voice, they did a poor job of it. Other than that the voice is female there's not a whole lot of resemblance in tone and timbre.
- bnralt 2y ago
  > They asked SJ, she said no. So they went to a voice actor and used her. My guess is they would have went with that voice actor either way. They had four different female voices available (in addition to multiple male voices) - 2 for the api, and I believe 2 for ChatGPT (different api voices are still available, different ChatGPT ones aren’t). If Johanssen had said yes, it’s likely they would have added a fifth voice, not gotten rid of Sky.
- gosub100 2y ago
  I predict the case will have parallels with Queen's lawsuit against Vanilla Ice: the two songs (under pressure and ice ice baby) are "different" in that one has an extra beat, yet it's an obvious rip-off of the former. Perhaps merely having person A sound like person B isn't enough, but combined with the movie and AI theme it will be enough. Anyway I hope he loses.
- gs17 2y ago
  > That doesn't violate any law to any reasonable person. Midler v Ford is already precedent that using a different actor isn't inherently safe legally.

tptacek 2y ago

The Washington Post comprehensively refuted the story. This is like the "this is good for Bitcoin because ____" meme, but in reverse.

slantedview 2y ago
They refuted it based on select documents handed to them by OpenAI.
FireBeyond 2y ago
They literally didn't question any of OAI's claims. They just regurgitated them. They were desperate for a non-union-only actor in their casting. But repeatedly kept hitting up a union actor. What fears for the actress' safety have been portrayed such that not only does she needs to stay anonymous, but her agent does too? "Altman was not involved"... yet he personally reached out to SJ to try to close the deal?

pc86 2y ago

Then we can add this to the long list of insane lawsuits going the wrong way in California. They asked SJ, she said no. So they went to a voice actor and used her. Case closed, they didn't use SJ's voice without her permission. That doesn't violate any law to any reasonable person.

freejazz 2y ago
"Reasonable" is doing a ton of work here.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Turing_Machine 2y ago
  "Reasonable" does a lot of work throughout the entire legal system. If there's one constant that can be relied upon, it's that "things that are reasonable to a lawyer" and "things that are reasonable to a normal human being" are essentially disjoint sets.
  - dragonwriter 2y ago
    > “Reasonable” does a lot of work throughout the entire legal system. Yes, but here it’s not being invoked in the sense of “would a reasonable person believe based on this evidence that the facts which would violate the actual law exist” but “would a ‘reasonable’ person believe the law is what the law, indisputably, actually is”. It’s being invoked to question the reality of the law itself, based on its subjective undesirability to the speaker.
  - freejazz 2y ago
    >"Reasonable" does a lot of work throughout the entire legal system. Yet it never becomes anywhere near the significant fulcrum you made it out to be here, filtering between the laws you think are good and the laws you think are bad. Further, you seem to mistake attorneys with legislators. I'd be surprised if a reasonable person thinks it is okay to profit off the likeness of others without their permission. But I guess you don't think that's reasonable. What a valuable conversation we're having.
    - Turing_Machine 2y ago
      No, it has nothing to do with "legislators". The "reasonable man" standard is all over case law, and there are about a bazillion cases where attorneys have argued that their client's behavior was "reasonable", even when it was manifestly not so by the standards of an actual reasonable man. You can, as they say, look it up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person
whycome 2y ago
This has echoes of Crispin Glover and Back to the Future 2. They didn't rehire him and got someone else to play his character.
mrtranscendence 2y ago
It's nice of you to clearly state what reasonable persons should believe violates the law. Alas, your contention about what reasonable people believe about the law isn't actually the law.
monocasa 2y ago
Likeness rights are a real thing, and it's not out there to have infringed on them by going to a famous person to use their likeness, getting denied, then using another actor telling them to copy the first actor's likeness. This is why all Hollywood contracts have actors signing over their likeness in perpetuity now; which was one of the major sticking points of the recent strikes.
- sib 2y ago
  >> "then using another actor telling them to copy the first actor's likeness" Assumes facts not in evidence
  - qingcharles 2y ago
    And in fact clearly rebutted by the evidence that the actor says they never told her to copy anyone or ever mentioned Johansson or Her.
    - monocasa 2y ago
      At a base minimum, the would have given her direction to sound the way she does. Voice actors have lots of range, and that range would have been on her demo reel.
      - qingcharles 2y ago
        Agreed. I was married to a voiceover actress. Their range can be quite large :)
    - FireBeyond 2y ago
      The anonymous actor, as reported by the anonymous agent, "fearing for her safety".
  - gs17 2y ago
    It even assumes the opposite, since they asked SJ after recording the original voice.
zug_zug 2y ago
You have no idea what they did, unless you work there. All you know is that somebody being sued for multi-millions of dollars (and who's trustworthiness is pretty much shot) is claiming what they did. And frankly given the frequency and ease of voice cloning, there are very few people who can say with confidence that they know 100% that nobody at the company did anything to that effect. What employee, if any, could say with 100% confidence that this model was trained with 100% samples from the voice actress they alledge and 0% from samples from Scarlett Johansson/her? And if that employee had done so, would they rat out their employer and lose their job over it?
- Turing_Machine 2y ago
  It's not (or shouldn't be) about things that have some finite probability (no matter how small) of being true, but rather about what can be proven to be true. There's no doubt a very small (but finite) probability that the voice sounds like a grey alien from Zeta Reticuli. That doesn't mean the alien is gonna win in court.
  - zug_zug 2y ago
    I'm not saying they'll necessarily win in court, all I'm saying is I'd wager my life savings that they intentionally created a voice that sounded like Scarlet's character from Her. Anybody on this forum who says that it's entirely impossible or that it's conclusive that they didn't use her voice samples simply isn't being logical about the evidence. TBH I really like the voice and the product, but I'm having a lot of trouble wrapping my head around the number of people who seem rather tribal about all this.
- mwigdahl 2y ago
  If they did clone her voice, they did a poor job of it. Other than that the voice is female there's not a whole lot of resemblance in tone and timbre.
bnralt 2y ago
> They asked SJ, she said no. So they went to a voice actor and used her. My guess is they would have went with that voice actor either way. They had four different female voices available (in addition to multiple male voices) - 2 for the api, and I believe 2 for ChatGPT (different api voices are still available, different ChatGPT ones aren’t). If Johanssen had said yes, it’s likely they would have added a fifth voice, not gotten rid of Sky.
gosub100 2y ago
I predict the case will have parallels with Queen's lawsuit against Vanilla Ice: the two songs (under pressure and ice ice baby) are "different" in that one has an extra beat, yet it's an obvious rip-off of the former. Perhaps merely having person A sound like person B isn't enough, but combined with the movie and AI theme it will be enough. Anyway I hope he loses.
gs17 2y ago
> That doesn't violate any law to any reasonable person. Midler v Ford is already precedent that using a different actor isn't inherently safe legally.