> Mitch Glazier, the chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, said that Johansson may have a strong case against OpenAI if she brings forth a lawsuit.
> He compared Johansson’s case to one brought by the singer Bette Midler against the Ford Motor Co. in the 1980s. Ford asked Midler to use her voice in ads. After she declined, Ford hired an impersonator. A U.S. appellate court ruled in Midler’s favor, indicating her voice was protected against unauthorized use.
> But Mark Humphrey, a partner and intellectual property lawyer at Mitchell, Silberberg and Knupp, said any potential jury probably would have to assess whether Sky’s voice is identifiable as Johansson.
> Several factors go against OpenAI, he said, namely Altman’s tweet and his outreach to Johansson in September and May. “It just begs the question: It’s like, if you use a different person, there was no intent for it to sound like Scarlett Johansson. Why are you reaching out to her two days before?” he said. “That would have to be explained.”
* A.K.A. "Personality rights": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights
> Ford Motor created an ad campaign for the Mercury Sable that specifically was meant to inspire nostalgic sentiments through the use of famous songs from the 1970s sung by their original artists. When the original artists refused to accept, impersonators were used to sing the original songs for the commercials. Midler was asked to sing a famous song of hers for the commercial and refused. Subsequently, the company hired a voice-impersonator of Midler and carried on with using the song for the commercial, since it had been approved by the copyright-holder. [1]
If you ask an artist to sing a famous song of hers, she says no, and you get someone else to impersonate her, that gets you in hot water.
If you (perhaps because you are savvy) go to some unknown voice actress, have her record a voice for your chatbot, later go to a famous actress known for one time playing a chatbot in a movie, and are declined, you are in a much better position. The tweet is still a thorn in OA's side, of course, but that's not likely to be determinative IMO (IAAL).
It's not just a random "voice for your chatbot", it's that particularly breathy, chatty, voice that she performed for the movie.
I would agree with you completely if they'd created a completely different voice. Even if they'd impersonated a different famous actress. But it's the fact that Her was about an AI, and this is an AI, and the voices are identical. It's clearly an impersonation of her work.
Did she? The article claims that:
1. Multiple people agree that the casting call mentioned nothing about SJ/her
2. The voice actress claims she was not given instructions to imitate SJ/her
3. The actress's natural voice sounds identical to the AI-generated Sky voice
I don't personally think it's anywhere near "identical" to SJ's voice. It seems most likely to me that they noticed the similarity in concept afterwards and wanted to try to capitalize on it (hence later contacting SJ), opposed to the other way around.
That's a very broad definition of impersonation, one that does not match the legal definition, and one that would would be incredibly worrying for voice actors whose natural voice happens to fall within a radius of a celebrity's natural voice ("their choice to cast you was unconsciously affected by similarity to a celebrity, therefore [...]")
Otherwise your argument lets off not just this scandal but an entire conceptual category of clever sleazy moves that are done "after the fact". It's not the the Kafka trap you're making it out to be.
I think optics-wise the best move at the moment is quelling the speculation that they resorted to a deepfake or impersonator of SJ after being denied by SJ herself. The article works towards this by attesting that it's a real person, speaking in her natural voice, without instruction to imitate SJ, from a casting call not mentioning specifics, casted months prior to contacting SJ. Most PR effort should probably be in giving this as much of a reach as possible among those that saw the original story.
Would those doing the casting have the foresight to predict, not just that this situation would emerge, but that there would be a group considering it impersonation for there to be any "hint of bias" towards voices naturally resembling a celebrity in selection between applicants? Moreover, would they consider it important to appeal to this group by altering the process to eliminate that possible bias and providing extensive documentation to prove they have done so, or would they instead see the group as either a small fringe or likely to just take issue to something else regardless?
Yes, this should all have been obvious to those people. It would require a pretty high degree of obliviousness for it to not be obvious that this could all blow up in exactly this way.
I don't think it blew up by way of people believing simply that those doing the casting could have a hint of a subconscious bias towards voices that sound like celebrities. To me that seems like trying to find anything to still take theoretical issue in, and would've just been about something else had they made the casting selection provably unbiased and thoroughly documented.
It seems way more likely to be a calculated risk than a failure of imagination. And this is where the "ethics" thing comes into play. They were probably right about the risk calculation! Even with this blow-up, this is not going to bring the company down, it will blow over and they'll be fine. And if it hadn't blown up, or if they had gotten her on board at any point, it would have been a very nice boon.
So while (in my view) it definitely wasn't the right thing to do from a "we're living in a society here people!" perspective, it probably wasn't even a mistake, from a "businesses take calculated risks" perspective.
I think it's deceptively easy to overestimate how likely it is for someone to have had some specific thought/consideration when constructing that thought retroactively, and this still isn't really a specific enough thought to have caused them to have set up the casting process in such a way to eliminate (and prove that they have eliminated) possible subconscious tendency towards selecting voice actors with voices more similar to celebrities.
But, more critically, I believe the anger was based on the idea that it may be an intentional SJ soundalike hired due to being turned down by SJ, or possibly even a deepfake. Focusing on refuting that seems to me the best PR move even when full knowledge of what happened is available, and that's what they're doing.
If you are an adult living and working in the US in the 2020s, and you are working on a product that is an AI assistant with a human voice, you are either very aware of the connection to the movie Her, or are disconnected from society to an incredible degree. I would buy this if it were a single nerd working on a passion project, but not from an entire company filled with all different kinds of people.
The answer is based on "they wanted a voice that sounds like the one in Her, but the person whose voice that is told them no, but then they did it anyway". The exact sequence of events isn't as important to the anger as you seem to think, though it may be more important to the legal process.
I would go further and say that chain of reasoning is not just uncertain to have occurred, but would probably be flawed if it did - in that I don't think it would noticeably sway that group. Opposed to the evidence in the article, or some forms of other possible possible evidence, which I think can sway people.
> The exact sequence of events isn't as important to the anger as you seem to think, though it may be more important to the legal process.
Less the order of events, and more "seeking out an impersonator and asking them to do an imitation" vs "possibility of unconscious bias when selecting among auditions"