zlacker

>>richar+(OP)
The thing that worried me initially was that:

- the original report by Scarlett said she was approached months ago, and then two days prior to launch of GPT-4o she was approached again

Because of the above, my immediate assumption was that OpenAI definitely did her dirty. But this report from WaPo debunks at least some of it, because the records they have seen show that the voice actor was contacted months in advance prior to OpenAI contacting Scarlett for the first time. (also goes to show just how many months in advance OpenAI is working on projects)

However, this does not dispel the fact that OpenAI did contact Scarlett, and Sam Altman did post the tweet saying "her", and the voice has at least "some" resemblance of Scarlett's voice, at least enough to have two different groups saying that it does, and the other saying that it does not.

>>skille+CM
A plausible alternative explanation for asking Johansson:

  (1) They cast the current actor to test the technology and have a fallback.  The actor sounds somewhat different from Johansson but the delivery of the lines is similar.  

  (2) They then ask Johansson because they want to be the company that brought “Her” to life.  She declines.  

  (3) They try again shortly before the event because they really want it to happen.

  (4) They proceed with the original voice, and the “her” tweet happens because they want to be the ones that made it real. 

Asking shortly before the release is the weakest link here. It’s possible they already had a version trained or fine tuned on her voice that they could swap in at the last minute. That could explain some of the caginess. Not saying it’s what happened or is even likely, but it feels like a reasonable possibility.