zlacker

>>richar+(OP)
Well, here are some things that aren't really being disputed:

* OpenAI wanted an AI voice that sounds like SJ

* SJ declined

* OpenAI got an AI voice that sounds like SJ anyway

I guess they want us to believe this happened without shenanigans, but it's bit hard to.

The headline of the article is a little funny, because records can't really show they weren't looking for an SJ sound-alike. They can just show that those records didn't mention it. The key decision-makers could simply have agreed to keep that fact close-to-the-vest -- they may have well understood that knocking off a high-profile actress was legally perilous.

Also, I think we can readily assume OpenAI understood that one of their potential voices sounded a lot like SJ. Since they were pursuing her they must have had a pretty good idea of what they were going after, especially considering the likely price tag. So even if an SJ voice wasn't the original goal, it clearly became an important goal to them. They surely listened to demos for many voice actors, auditioned a number of them, and may even have recorded many of them, but somehow they selected one for release who seemed to sound a lot like SJ.

>>jmull+P12
Clearly an SJ voice was the goal, given that Altman asked her to do it, asked her a second time just two days before the ChatGPT-4o release, and then tweeted "her" on the release day. The next day Karpathy, recently ex-OpenAI, then tweets "The killer app of LLMs is Scarlett Johansson".

Altman appears to be an habitual liar. Note his recent claim not to be aware of the non-disparagement and claw-back terms he had departing employees agree to. Are we supposed to believe that the company lawyer or head of HR did this without consulting (or more likely being instructed by) the co-founder and CEO?!

>>HarHar+r82
They hired the actor that did the voice months before they contacted SJ. The reaction on this site to the news that this story was false is kind of mindbending.

>>tptace+B82
Yeah, but then again, I totally expected this opening the comment threads. Same happened with RMS debacle, same happened with similar events earlier, same happened on many a Musk stories. It seems that a neat narrative with clear person/object to hate, once established, is extremely resilient to facts that disprove it.

>>TeMPOr+gg2
Right. Even if you think OpenAI isn’t a good place, this is an investigation by an established newspaper that refuted some of the more serious accusations (that OpenAI got a Johannson impersonator - they didn’t, that they modified the voice to sound like Johansson - evidence suggests this didn’t happen). When the reaction is “I don’t care that an investigation refuted some of the accusations”, it demonstrates someone isn’t openly approaching things in good faith.

Likewise, if someone’s attitude is - “OK, maybe there’s no paper trail, but I’m sure this is what the people were thinking”, then you’ve made an accusation that simply can’t be refuted, no matter how much evidence gets presented.

>>bnralt+Io2
> refuted some of the more serious accusations (that OpenAI got a Johannson impersonator - they didn’t

A lot of the argument here comes down to whether the article does refute that. I don't believe it does.

What it refutes is the accusation that they hired someone who sounds like Johansson after she told them she would not do it herself. That was certainly a more damning accusation, but it's not an identical one.

But in my view, it requires a pretty absurd level of benefit of the doubt to think that they didn't set out to make a voice that sounds like the one from the movie.

Maybe good for them that they felt icky about it, and tried to get her for real instead, but she said no, and they didn't feel icky enough about it to change the plan.

Do you believe the article "refutes" that? Does it truly not strike you as a likely scenario, given what is known, both before and after this reporting?

>>sander+Ir2
> A lot of the argument here comes down to whether the article does refute that.

It clearly refutes the claims that they got a Johansson impersonator. The article says this is a voice actress, speaking in her normal voice, who wasn’t told to mimic Johansson at all. You can say that you personally think she was chosen because people thought she sounded similar to Johansson, even though there’s no evidence for that at this point. But the claim - which was made several times in discussions on here before - that she is a Johansson impersonator is factually incorrect.

> But in my view, it requires a pretty absurd level of benefit of the doubt to think that they didn't set out to make a voice that sounds like the one from the movie.

I tried it several times in the past and never once thought it sounded like Johansson. When this controversy came out I looked at videos of Her, because I thought Johansson could have been using a different voice in that movie, but no - the voice in her is immediately recognizable as Johannson’s. Some have said Sky’s was much closer to Rashida Jones, and I agree, though I don’t know how close.

>>bnralt+4v2
I think this is quibbling over the definition of "impersonator"?

I think the most plausible thing that happened is that they thought "hey it would be so awesome to have an AI voice companion like the one in Her, and we can totally do that with these new models", and then auditioned and hired someone that sounded like that.

Does it not fit the definition of "impersonator", since they didn't explicitly tell the person the hired to impersonate the voice from the movie? Sure, fine, I guess I'll give it to you.

But it doesn't refute "they wanted to use a voice that sounded like the one in Her", and there are a number of indications the this was indeed the case.