A company can't take a photo from your Facebook and plaster it across an advertisement for their product without you giving them the rights to do that.
And if you're a known public figure, this includes lookalikes and soundalikes as well. You can't hire a ScarJo impersonator that people will think is ScarJo.
This is clearly a ScarJo soundalike. It doesn't matter whether it's an AI voice or clone or if they hired someone to sound just like her. Because she's a known public figure, that's illegal if she hasn't given them the rights.
(However, if you generate a synthetic voice that just happens to sound exactly like a random Joe Schmo, it's allowed because Joe Schmo isn't a public figure, so there's no value in the association.)
If you imitate Darth Vader, I don't think James Earl Jones has as much case for likeliness as Star Wars franchise
If you just want ScarJo's (or James Earl Jones') voice, you need the rights from them. Period.
If you want to reuse the character of her AI bot from the movie (her name, overall personality, tone, rhythm, catchphrases, etc.), or the character of Darth Vader, you also need to license that from the producers.
And also from ScarJo/Jones if you want the same voice to accompany the character. (Unless they've sold all rights for future re-use to the producers, which won't usually be the case, because they want to be paid for sequels.)
Just find someone who sounds like her, then hire them for the rights to their voice.
There is no doubt that the hired actor was an impersonator, this was explicitly stated by scama himself.
That’s why she was the voice actor for the AI voice in Her.
And here's some caselaw where another major corporation got smacked down for doing the exact same thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
But given how unscrupulous Sam Altman appears to be, I wouldn't be surprised if OpenAI hired an impersonator as some kind half-ass legal cover, and went about using Johansson's voice anyway. Tech people do stupid shut sometimes because they assume they're so much cleverer than everyone else.
She was used in Her because she has a dry/monotone/lifeless form of diction that at the time seemed like a decent stand-in for an non-human AI.
IMDB is riddled with complaints about his vocal-style/diction/dead-pan on every one of her movies. Ghost World, Ghost in the Shell, Lost in Translation, Comic-Book-Movie-1-100 -- take a line from one movie and dub it across the character of another and most people would be fooled, that's impressive given the breadth of quality/style/age across the movies.
When she was first on the scene I thought it was bad acting, but then it continued -- now I tend to think that it's an effort to cultivate a character personality similar to Steven Wright or Tom Waits; the fact that she's now litigating towards protection of her character and likeness reinforces that fact for me.
It's unique to her though , that's for sure.
Do you have a source for this?
Yeah not moving from my position at all. Just a very generic featureless female voice. I suppose I hear some similarities in timbre, but it’s such an unremarkable voice and diction that it’s hard to put your finger on anything past “generic low affect American alto”.
It’s a great computer voice. Taking it down is for sure the right call PR wise, regardless of whether they may have done.