4 ms·

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
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        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

... 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