zlacker

>>mjcl+(OP)
Well, that statement lays out a damning timeline:

- OpenAI approached Scarlett last fall, and she refused.

- Two days before the GPT-4o launch, they contacted her agent and asked that she reconsider. (Two days! This means they already had everything they needed to ship the product with Scarlett’s cloned voice.)

- Not receiving a response, OpenAI demos the product anyway, with Sam tweeting “her” in reference to Scarlett’s film.

- When Scarlett’s counsel asked for an explanation of how the “Sky” voice was created, OpenAI yanked the voice from their product line.

Perhaps Sam’s next tweet should read “red-handed”.

>>anon37+t5
This statement from scarlet really changed my perspective. I use and loved the Sky voice and I did feel it sounded a little like her, but moreover it was the best of their voice offerings. I was mad when they removed it. But now I’m mad it was ever there to begin with. This timeline makes it clear that this wasn’t a coincidence and maybe not even a hiring of an impressionist (which is where things get a little more wishy washy for me).

>>nickth+R7
I thought it sounded like Jodie Foster.

>>andrew+Me
Scar Jo thought it sounded like herself, and so did people who knew her personally.

That is what matters. OWNERSHIP over her contributions to the world.

>>ncr100+th
I mostly agree with you, but I actually don't think it matters if it sounded exactly like her or not. The crime is in the training: did they use her voice or not?

If someone licenses an impersonator's voice and it gets very close to the real thing, that feels like an impossible situation for a court to settle and it should probably just be legal (if repugnant).

>>smt88+4q
This has been settled law for 34 years. See Tom Waits v Frito-Lay.

They literally hired an impersonator, and it cost them 2.5 million (~6 million today).

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-05-09-me-238-st...

>>jonath+mK
That case seems completely dissimilar to what OpenAI did.

Frito-Lay copied a song by Waits (with different lyrics) and had an impersonator sing it. Witnesses testified they thought Waits had sung the song.

If OpenAI were to anonymously copy someone's voice by training AI on an imitation, you wouldn't have:

- a recognizable singing voice

- music identified with a singer

- market confusion about whose voice it is (since it's novel audio coming from a machine)

I don't think any of this is ethical and think voice-cloning should be entirely illegal, but I also don't think we have good precedents for most AI issues.