https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/e913bd02-2582-4258-819f-2d5a00b...
You can certainly patent it.
"In general terms, a “utility patent” protects the way an article is used and works (35 U.S.C. 101), while a “design patent” protects the way an article looks (35 U.S.C. 171)."
I also think that he has bullied/twisted enough arms to get 'his way', but Scarlett doesn't give a poop about some tech-bro. He is a nothing to her.
Also, this tech-bro is stupid enough to not understand that her voice, as well as her image are of great value to her, and if she 'loses her voice', and her voice becomes a toy to everyone's whim, she will be losing money/contracts/etc. in the future. Or he does understand and he simply didn't care until the backlash.. (wuss...)
I would love to have the voice of Majel Barrett if I am to ever get an Alexa or a similar device. But Scarlett's voice would very soon be used for dirty-talk, if 'this' was to happen.
And I suggest the movie "The Congress" (2013!!!)(https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1821641/) with Robin Wright, that sets the discussion about AI, voice/image of actors, etc.
Well, here's Yishan Wong describing how Altman and the Reddit founders have conned Conde Nast: https://reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the_bes... he answers at https://reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the_bes...
Cool story bro.
Except I could never have predicted the part where you resigned on the spot :)
Other than that, child's play for me.
Thanks for the help. I mean, thanks for your service as CEO.
He sued Universal, and reportedly settled for $760,000.
Example article on the topic - https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/bac...
Cat's already out of the bag: https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intel...
Not your parent comenter but please allow me to enlighten you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Bright
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D_(programming_language)
When in doubt, always double-check who you're replying to in HN. We are lucky to have many great minds around.
See also Midler v. Ford Motor Co. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
It was ranked #1 a few minutes ago, and now below 20. It's 190 points posted < 60 minutes ago; other articles with this many points even 4 hours ago are top 5.
You can watch this submission sink in realtime by refreshing; it's amazing almost.
See a live screengrab here: https://imgur.com/a/E3fOEvF everything with this submissions point / time ratio is ranked way higher.
Have we? Certainly the people litigating haven't. And as this article notes, actors' newest contract does have protections against AI. SAG-AFTRA's press release states [0] they are pursuing legislation. That could be bluster or could go nowhere, but certainly people haven't given up.
[0]: https://www.sagaftra.org/sag-aftra-statement-regarding-scarl...
In the movie The Seed of Chucky, Britney Spears gets killed. You can watch the clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3kCg5o0cHA. It is very clearly Britney Spears.
Except Britney Spears was not hired for the role. They hired a Britney Spears impersonator for the scene. They did everything that they could to make it look like Britney, and think it was Britney. But it really wasn't.
Do you think that Britney should have sued the Chucky franchise for that? If so, should Elvis Presly's estate also sue all of the Elvis Presly impersonators out there? Where do you draw the line? And if not, where do you draw the line between what happened in Chucky, and what happened here?
I really don't see a line between now having someone who sounded like the actress, and then tweeting the name of one of her movies, and what happened 20 years ago with Chucky killing someone who looked like Britney, then showing a license plate saying "BRITNEY1", and THEN saying, "Whoops I did it again." (The title of her most famous song at the time.) If anything, the movie was more egregious.
Midler v Ford: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/849...
Waits v Frito-Lay: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/90...
One interesting thing is that these cases are really deep in common law. They are quite far removed from statues, and statues are cited in the opinion only to argue how they don't apply.
In these cases, the voice was "distinct", and they intentionally copied it. It's possible these don't apply to ScarJo, although the fact that they negotiated with her is a bad sign, since that was also a common fact in the prior cases.
40 minutes after posting: #17 with 171 points and 120 comments
50 minutes after posting: no longer on the front page with 207 points and 169 comments
"Amazing" isn't the word for it.
Oops, that sounds like a match with Rashida Jones. Here’s one one of Scarlett J.:
https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1cx24sy/vocal_...
I have a suspicion that most people with strong opinions on this haven’t actually compared Sky and Scarlett Johansson directly.
No.[1]
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/177v8wz/i_have_a_r...
> This scene was included in promotional spots for the film, most specifically Seed of Chucky's trailer, but the distributing company associated with the film, Focus Features, made the decision to significantly cut the scene down and add a disclaimer. The disclaimer that ran with the promotional spot, which was altered to only show a brief glimpse of Ariqat as Spears, stated: "Britney Spears does not appear in this film."
https://screenrant.com/seed-of-chucky-movie-promos-britney-s...
Waits v. Frito Lay, Inc was '92, and cited it. They used a Tom Waits-sounding voice on an original song, and Waits successfully sued:
> Discussing the right of publicity, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the jury’s verdict that the defendants had committed the “Midler tort” by misappropriating Tom Waits’ voice for commercial purposes. The Midler tort is a species of violation of the right of publicity that protects against the unauthorized imitation of a celibrity’s voice which is distinctive and widely known, for commercial purposes.
https://tiplj.org/wp-content/uploads/Volumes/v1/v1p109.pdf
Of course, who knows what a court will find at the end of this. There is precedent, however.
sci-fi author: I wrote about the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
tech bros: Finally we have built the Torment Nexus from beloved sci fi story “Do not build the Torment Nexus”
Enjoying a story is not justification for recreating any artifact that occurs within the story. Her is quite clearly a cautionary tale, not meant to be instructive. https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/why-is-sam-altman-so-obs...
so yes I do think it’s very relevant that when you say “he liked the film”, the contents of the film is an admissible area of inquiry.
https://www.npr.org/2024/05/20/1252495087/openai-pulls-ai-vo...
> Sky voice has been around for a very long time in the OpenAI app dating back to early 2023. No one was drawing similarities or crying foul and decrying how it "sounds just like Scarlett" ..
No.[1]
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/177v8wz/i_have_a_r...
Users flagged it and it also set off the flamewar detector. I don't think we'd turn the penalties off on this one because because this article is derivative of the threads HN has already had on the recent things - threads like these:
Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice - >>40421225 - May 2024 (970 comments)
Jan Leike Resigns from OpenAI - >>40363273 - May 2024 (391 comments)
Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI - >>40361128 - May 2024 (780 comments)
Edit: also OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk? - >>40393121 - May 2024 (961 comments)
Those were huge threads!
Sometimes media articles are driven by the topic getting discussed on Hacker News in the first place. That is: major HN thread -> journalist takes notice -> article about topic -> HN user submits article -> another HN thread—but now it's a repetitive one. We don't need that feedback loop, especially because the mind tends to resort to indignation to make up for the lack of amusement in repetitive content (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), and the earlier threads have been indignant (and repetitive) enough already.
> How much influence does @sama have around here nowadays?
Zero. He never asked for any change about anything HN-related even while he was running YC, and certainly not since then. Btw Sam was the person who posted https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/two-hn-announcements/.
> For the record, I was never impressed with him
(I'll add a personal bit even though that's usually a bad idea... I remember hearing this kind of comment about Sam going back to the Loopt days. My theory is that it had to do with pg praising him so publicly—I think it evoked a "why him and not me?" feeling in readers. The weird-ironic thing is that the complaint has only grown as Sam has achieved more. Running OpenAI through the biggest tech boom since the iPhone is...rather obviously massive. I think if Sam unifies gravity into quantum theory, brokers peace in the middle east, and cures cancer, we'll still be hearing these complaints—because they're not really grounded either in objective achievement or lack of it. It's some kind of second-order phenomenon, and actually rather interesting. At least if you aren't Sam!)
If you read that and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
You mean this?
"Each of the personas has a different tone and accent. “Sky” sounds somewhat similar to Scarlett Johansson, the actor who voiced the AI that Joaquin Phoenix’s character falls in love with in the movie “Her.” Deng, the OpenAI executive, said the voice personas were not meant to sound like any specific person."
As I stated prior, and thank you for making my point, despite being publicly available for near a year, there was minor mention of similarities with no general public sentiment.
>Altman hyped the May update with references to Her
If by "hype" you mean throwaway comments on social media that general population was unaware.
Drawing a parallel to a calming persona of an always on life assistant from pop culture in a few throwaway social media posts from personal accounts such as "Hope Everyone's Ready" isn't hyping it as Her any more than Anthropic is selling their offerings as a Star Trek communicator despite a few comments they've made on social media.
Ambiguous "some people" overstates any perceived concern and "most people don't use ChatGPT" understates how present they've been on the news.
Mobile app, which heavily emphasized voice and has "Sky" as it's default voice The ChatGPT mobile application had over 110+ million downloads across iOS and Android platforms before the May announcement.
In regards to the November announcement, yes, voice was very prominent in it with Sky as the default language. (https://youtu.be/pq34V_V5j18?si=66lEWxgteBbtKifl)
Correct, while Midler presents a similar fact pattern and is a frequently taught and cited foundational case in this area, the case law has evolved since Midler, to an even stronger protection of celebrity publicity rights, that is even more explicitly not concerned with with the mechanism by which the identity is appropriated. Waits v. Frito Lay (!992), another case where voice sound-alike was a specific issue, has been mentioned in the thread, but White v. Samsung Electronics America (1993) [0], while its fact pattern wasn't centered on sound-alike voice appropriation, may be more important in that it underlines that the mechanism of appropriation is immaterial so long as the appropriation can be shown:
—quote—
In Midler, this court held that, even though the defendants had not used Midler's name or likeness, Midler had stated a claim for violation of her California common law right of publicity because "the defendants … for their own profit in selling their product did appropriate part of her identity" by using a Midler sound-alike. Id. at 463-64.
In Carson v. Here's Johnny Portable Toilets, Inc., 698 F.2d 831 (6th Cir. 1983), the defendant had marketed portable toilets under the brand name "Here's Johnny"--Johnny Carson's signature "Tonight Show" introduction–without Carson's permission. The district court had dismissed Carson's Michigan common law right of publicity claim because the defendants had not used Carson's "name or likeness." Id. at 835. In reversing the district court, the sixth circuit found "the district court's conception of the right of publicity … too narrow" and held that the right was implicated because the defendant had appropriated Carson's identity by using, inter alia, the phrase "Here's Johnny." Id. at 835-37.
These cases teach not only that the common law right of publicity reaches means of appropriation other than name or likeness, but that the specific means of appropriation are relevant only for determining whether the defendant has in fact appropriated the plaintiff's identity. The right of publicity does not require that appropriations of identity be accomplished through particular means to be actionable. It is noteworthy that the Midler and Carson defendants not only avoided using the plaintiff's name or likeness, but they also avoided appropriating the celebrity's voice, signature, and photograph. The photograph in Motschenbacher did include the plaintiff, but because the plaintiff was not visible the driver could have been an actor or dummy and the analysis in the case would have been the same.
Although the defendants in these cases avoided the most obvious means of appropriating the plaintiffs' identities, each of their actions directly implicated the commercial interests which the right of publicity is designed to protect.
–end quote–
> Ford explicitly hired an impersonator. OpenAI hired someone that sounded like her, and it’s her natural voice.
Hiring a natural sound-alike voice vs. an impersonator as a mechanism is not the legal issue, the issue is the intent of the defendant in so doing (Ford in the Midler case, OpenAI in a hypothetical Johansson lawsuit) and the commercial effect of them doing so.
[0] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/971...
I went to ask the Internet "best AI tools", and there's no clear consensus:
Various Redditors go on to suggest "here's 100 you might like to try".
So there's clearly a bubble, thousands of startups all trying for similar things.
I am personally looking forward to try Wolfram GPT:
Actually, you probably can.[0]
[0] https://casetext.com/case/waits-v-frito-lay-inc
Edit: Added the context for the reply
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1cx24sy/vocal_...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1cwy6wz/vocal_comp...
[3] https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1cx9t8b/vocal_comp...
If you read the parent comments, you'd see that them, and many others, are complaining about the thread getting flagged off the front page. Those flaggers are the "we". I am talking about "The evidence of whether this community wants to see a story".
Also, the guidelines literally say that these kinds of stories and comments are off-topic.
I can see a civil judge or jury being given evidence showing very few listeners think the voices match in _blind voice tests_.
Here for example you can listen to the voices side by side:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1cwy6wz/comment/l4...
And here is voice of another actress ( Rashida Jones ):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=385414AVZcA
This test is not blind but YOU tell me which you think is similar to the openAI sky voice? And what does that tell you about likely court result for Johansson? And having reached this conclusion yourself would you now think the other actress Rashida Jones is entitled to compensation based on this similarly test? Because there are no other women with similar voices?
You can listen to the voices side by side:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1cwy6wz/comment/l4...
And here is voice of another actress ( Rashida Jones ):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=385414AVZcA
This test is not blind but YOU tell me which you think is similar to the openAI sky voice? And what does that tell you about likely court result for Johansson? And having reached this conclusion yourself would you now think the other actress Rashida Jones is entitled to compensation based on this similarly test? Because there are no other women with similar voices? What might support from friends and family of Rashida Jones be an indication of?
You can listen to the voices side by side:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1cwy6wz/comment/l4...
And here is voice of another actress ( Rashida Jones ):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=385414AVZcA
This test is not blind but YOU tell me which you think is similar to the openAI sky voice?
> And they failed with an actor who sued Disney shortly after they paid her $20 million to make a movie.
OpenAI did not fail. They suspended the sky voice and backed down not to further anger a segment of the public who views much of what OpenAI does in a negative light. Given the voice test above do you seriously think OpenAI would lose in court? Would that matter to the segment of population that is already outraged by AI? How are journalists and news companies affected by AI? How might their reporting be biased?
Nuclear fusion start-up Helion scores $375 million investment from Open AI CEO Sam Altman
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/05/sam-altman-puts-375-million-...
From her statement:
> I received an offer from Sam Altman, who wanted to hire me to voice the current ChatGPT 4.0 system. He told me that he felt that by my voicing the system, I could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and Al. He said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people.
So, they wanted to profit off of her voice, as her voice is comforting. She said no, and they did it anyway. Nothing about, "come in and do that song and dance from your old movie."
> where’s this case from 1992
I made this myself. They do not sound the same to me. Am I living in a bizarro world?
In fact I think Rashida Jones would be a closer (but still not identical) match vs Scarjo
IN FACT, I bet any young woman's voice spoken clearly would sound as similar
Rashida Jones, as your link indicates, might be a closer match.
Or literally any young woman who enunciates clearly.
https://soundcloud.com/peter-marreck-fb/sky-voice-and-scarjo...
I'm sorry but either you are tone-deaf or these are not remotely the same voice. I made this myself after getting fed up with this bullshit.
This is subjective. I, personally, don't hear it, at all: >>40435695
The difference with >>40448045 is that the latter story contained Significant New Information (SNI) relative to other recent threads. That's the criterion we apply when deciding whether or not to override penalties (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). It doesn't have to do with who an article is for or against; it has to do with not having the same discussions over and over.
> a manual override [...] might have improved at least the optics
Sure, and we often do that (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...), but in this case it didn't cross my mind because the current thread was so obviously derivative of previous discussions that had been on HN's front page for 18+ hours in recent days.
And in any case the next day it flipped back and this story spent 16 hours on the front page:
Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees - >>40447431 - May 2024 (515 comments)
... so I think we're good on "optics". The important point is that the last link (the vox.com article) contained SNI, whereas the slate.com article was a copycat piece piggybacking on other reporting . In the case of a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) like this one, that's the key distinction: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...