- 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.
To me, it sounds like they had the idea to make their AI sound like "her". For the initial version, they had a voice actor that sounds like the movie, as a proof of concept.
They still liked it, so it was time to contact the real star. In the end, it's not just the voice, it would have been the brand, just imagine the buzz they would have got if Scarlett J was the official voice of the company. She said no, and they were like, "too bad, we already decided how she will sound like, the only difference is whether it will be labelled as SJ or not".
In the end, someone probably felt like it's a bit too dodgy as it resemblance was uncanny, they gave it another go, probably ready to offer more money, she still refused, but in the end, it didn't change a thing.
A more similar context would be: they ask Tom Hanks to create a voice similar to Woody, the cowboy from Toy Story . Tom Hanks says no, Disney says no. Then they ask you to voice their cowboy voice. It's obviously related: they tried the OG, failed, they're going for a copycat after.
But if never approached Tom Hanks or Disney, then there would be room for deniability - without mentions to real names, it would require someone to judge if it's an unauthorized copycat or just a random actor voicing a random cowboy voice.
It was a bad play from their part.
So in your opinion, if a movie needs to have a tall, skinny red head, and then they approach someone who has those qualities and the role is turned down, then it would be illegal to get any other different tall skinny red head.
That sounds absurd to me. If you have a role, obviously the role has qualities and requirements.
And just because person 1 who happens to have those qualities turns you down, it is still valid to get a different person who fulfils your original requirements.