zlacker

>>mjcl+(OP)
Well, this confirms that OpenAI have been shooting from the hip, not that we needed much confirmation. The fact that they repeatedly tried to hire Johansson, then went ahead and made a soundalike while explicitly describing that they were trying to make it be like her voice in the movie … is pretty bad for them.

>>aaronh+L1
It’s definitely sketchy (classic OpenAI) But my question is: is what they did actually illegal? Can someone copyright their own voice?

>>infota+84
It's not precisely copyright, but most states recognize some form of personality rights, which encompass a person's voice just as much as the person's name or visual appearance.

>>duskwu+S5
But where it will get murky is people sound like other people. Most voices are hardly unique. It will be interesting to see where this lands.

>>bhhask+k9
It isn't murky, because law is about intent more than result. It doesn't matter if they hired someone who sounds like Scarlett, it matters if they intended to do so.

If they accidentally hired someone who sounds identical, that's not illegal. But if they intended to, even if it is a pretty poor imitation, it would be illegal because the intent to do it was there.

A court of law would be looking for things like emails about what sort of actress they were looking for, how they described that requirement, how they evaluated the candidate and selected her, and of course, how the CEO announced it alongside a movie title Scarlett starred in.

>>ocdtre+ld
Under what legal theory is intending to do something which is legal (hiring a person that has a voice you want) becomes illegal because there is another person who has a similar voice?

>>howbad+nq
It's not intending to do something legal, it's intending to do something illegal: Stealing their likeness. The fact you used an otherwise legal procedure to do the illegal activity doesn't make it less illegal.

>>ocdtre+or
How can something be illegal if every step towards the objective is legal? This would result in an incoherent legal system where selective prosecution/corruption is trivial.

>>howbad+nz
What's illegal, in general, is not the action itself but the intent to do an action and the steps taken in furtherance of that intent.

Hiring someone with a voice you want isn't illegal; hiring someone with a voice you want because it is similar to a voice that someone expressly denied you permission to use is illegal.

Actually, it's so foundational to the common law legal system that there's a specialized Latin term to represent the concept: mens rea (literally 'guilty mind').