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
Yes, but it changes the narrative from “they couldn’t get Scarlett to record the voice, so they copied her voice” to something much less malicious. Contacting Scarlett, when you already have voice recordings ready but would prefer someone famous, isn’t that bad of a thing imho.

>>stingr+HN
> Yes, but it changes the narrative from “they couldn’t get Scarlett to record the voice, so they copied her voice” to something much less malicious.

I don't think it's less malicious if they decided to copy her voice without her consent, but just didn't tell her until the project was underway, then continued even after she said no.

There's legal precedent that hiring a copycat is not OK, so it's not like proving it was a copycat salvages their situation.

I wouldn't be surprised if the real reason they hired a copycat early is because they realized they'd need far more of Johansson's time than she'd be willing to provide, and the plan was typical SV "ask forgiveness not permission, but do it anyway regardless."

>>tivert+iO
They used a different person, so it is not her voice.

>>MattGa+ZO
> They used a different person, so it is not her voice.

That doesn't matter because it's an impersonation. Ford lost, even though they didn't use Bette Midler's voice either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

>>tivert+jP
It seems like the key difference is that the advertisements in those cases involved people who sounded like particular musical artists, singing songs that those artists were well-known for singing. If you hired the woman who voiced Sky to say lines that Scarlett had in some of her movies, that would be similar. The fact that this is a chatbot makes it somewhat of an echo of those cases, but it strikes me (a former lawyer) as being a bridge too far. After all, you have to balance Scarlett's rights against the rights of someone who happens to have a voice that sounds like Scarlett's (it would be different if this were someone doing an impersonation of Scarlett, but whose natural voice sounds different).

>>gnicho+hQ
Tom Waits sued Frito Lay for using an impersonator to sing about Doritos.