I read a lot of C&D letters from celebrities here and on Reddit, and a lot of them are in the form of "I am important so I am requesting that you do not take advantage of your legal rights." I am not a fan. (If you don't want someone to track how often you fly your private jet, buy a new one for each trip. That is the legal option that is available to you. But I digress...)
Is there a name for this AI fallacy? The one where programmers make an inductive leap like, for example, if a human can read one book to learn something, then it’s ok to scan millions of books into a computer system because it’s just another kind of learning.
Since this comes up all the time, I ask: What exactly is the number of books a human can ingest before it becomes illegal?
IANAL, but parody and criticism are covered under Fair Use doctrine for Copyright law in the United States [1]. The Simpsons generally falls into that category, which is why they rarely get into trouble.
Thinking about that episode, I imagine the legal risk is less in trying to sound like Scarlett Johansson, and more in trying to sound like Samantha, the AI character in Her. Warner Brothers or Spike Jonze probably has some legal rights to the character, and an argument could be made that OpenAI was infringing on that. The viability of that argument probably depends on how much people conflate the two or believe that the one was meant to represent the other.
If Annapurna Pictures (the production company that owns the rights to “Her”) made a sequel where the voice AI is played by someone else than Johansson but sounded the same and was marketed as a direct continuation, I think there would be a lawsuit.
She didn’t write the script or develop the character, but I think there’s enough creative authorship in her voice portrayal that it would be risky for the production company.
Not having idiots (or ChatGPT) for judges.
For something more general look at Midler vs Ford [1], and lots of other similar cases. Ford wanted to use get Midler to sing some of her songs (that Ford owned the copyright to) for a commercial. She refused, so they hired an impersonator. They never stated it was Midler in the commercial, but nonetheless were sued and lost for abuse of 'rights of personality' even for content they owned the copyright to! Uncopyrightable characteristics highly associated with a person are still legally protected. Similar stuff with fight refs. Various trademark lines like 'Let's get it on!' or 'Let's get readddy to rumble.' are literally trademarked, but it's probably not even strictly necessary since it would be implicitly protected by rights of personality.
Always the Achilles heel of software engineers' (not so) clever legal strategies.
It misses the point, which is that cars aren't people. Arguments like "well a car uses friction to travel along the ground and fuel to create kinetic energy, just like humans do", aren't convincing to me. An algorithm is not a human, and we should stop pretending the same rules apply to each.
What about if they have augmentation that allows them to read and interpret books really fast?
It’s not an easy question to answer…
If we're at an analogy to "cars aren't people", then it sounds like it doesn't matter how many books the AI reads, even one book would cause problems.
But if that's the case, why make the argument about how many books it reads?
Are you sure you're arguing the same thing as the ancestor post? Or do you merely agree with their conclusion but you're making an entirely different argument?
If voices being similar to each other is found to be grounds for a successful tort action then it'd establish a legal precedent, and it's very unlikely that precedent would be interpreted as "whoever the judge heard of first wins".
People and software are different things, and it makes total sense that there should be different rules for what they can and cannot do.
Natural life is plenty simple in this context.
And if we wanted to replicate copyrighted text with a LLM, it would still be a bad idea, better to just find a copy online, faster and more precise, and usually free. We here are often posting paywalled articles in the comments, it's so easy to circumvent the paywalls we don't even blink twice at it.
Using LLMs to infringe is not even the intended purpose, and it only happens when the user makes a special effort to prompt the model with the first paragraph.
What I find offensive is restricting the circulation of ideas under the guise of copyright. In fact copyright should only protect expression not the underlying ideas and styles, those are free to learn, and AIs are just an extension of their human users.
Reading all these musings here about a possible "there is no bad publicity" approach, I'm starting to wonder if the plan for if Johansson signed up was achieving court drama publicity by getting sued by Annapurna Pictures. "Can a three-letter tweet be the base of a copyright case?"
No, it's whoever's voice is famous. The voice per se isn't valuable, its fame is. Personality rights are precedented [1].
> voices being similar to each other is found to be grounds for a successful tort action then it'd establish a legal precedent
It's not about similarity. It's about property. Johansson developed her voice into a valuable asset. It's valuable because it's Scarlet Johansson's voice.
Tweeting Her explicitly tied it to Johansson, even if that wasn't the case up to that point.
Those aren't cars.
But you've identified that the closer something comes to a human in terms of speed and scale, the blurrier the lines become. In these terms I would argue that GPT-4 is far, far removed from a human.
It's not her voice. But it may have been intended to sound like her voice. (I believe this less than twenty-four hours ago, but I'm hesitant to grant Altman the benefit of doubt.)
If it were her voice, would you agree that seems distasteful?
> one that sounds similar, but is different, and thus belongs to the true voice actress
They marketed it as her voice when Altman tweeted Her.
You were conditioned to give that response.
If I ask an AI about the book Walden Two, for example, it can reproduce and/or remix that. Knowing is copying.
[Why Walden Two? BF Skinner. And an excellent book about how the book was lived: https://www.amazon.com/Living-Walden-Two-Behaviorist-Experim... ]
There are too many differences to understand what you're saying. Is the problem too much money is in the company doing it? Fox is also pretty wealthy.
I think the pertinent question is: does having it sound like Scarlett Johansenn mean they get to access billions of people? If not, then while she might get paid out a few million, it'll be from OpenAI's marketing budget and not because of actual value added.
I think demonstrating that this is a substantial part of the attraction of OpenAI's tech will be difficult.
> I think demonstrating that this is a substantial part of the attraction of OpenAI's tech will be difficult.
I think it's totally irrelevant if her voice "is a substantial part of the attraction of OpenAI's tech." What matters is they took something from her that was her valuable property (her likeness). It doesn't matter if what they took makes op 99% of the value or 0.00001%.
They didn't take her likeness; they recorded someone else. The only claim she has is that someone who sounds like her will add value to their product more than if the person didn't sound like her. At which point the question is: how much value?
(Even that isn't a claim in and of itself, of course, but it might be the basis for a "I'll make people not like you so pay me restitution from your marketing budget to avoid a court case" shakedown.)
In iron man 1, Rhodey is played by terrance howard. For iron man 2, he wanted too much money in the contract, so they replaced with with don cheadle.
Wouldn't it be a dumb world to live in if a single actor in the cast can halt the production of a new work via lawsuit because they own the character?
Even that is not open and shut. He tweeted one word. He certainly wanted an association between the product and the movie, but it is a much more specific assertion that that one word demonstrates an intent to associate the product's voice actress with the voice actress who portrayed the comparable product's voice actress in the movie.
Those aren't mutually exclusive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co. Also, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/sky-voice-actor-...:
> The timeline may not matter as much as OpenAI may think, though. In the 1990s, Tom Waits cited Midler's case when he won a $2.6 million lawsuit after Frito-Lay hired a Waits impersonator to perform a song that "echoed the rhyming word play" of a Waits song in a Doritos commercial. Waits won his suit even though Frito-Lay never attempted to hire the singer before casting the soundalike.
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> The only claim she has is that someone who sounds like her will add value to their product more than if the person didn't sound like her. At which point the question is: how much value?
That may be relevant when damages are calculated, but I don't think that's relevant to the question of if OpenAI can impersonate her or not.
Both arguably contributing the same minuscule amount to the "public discourse"..
I suppose in this case the claim has to be something like: "They hired someone who sounds like my impersonation of a character in a film called Her".
Yes. It is pertinent not only to this particular instance (or instances, plural; AI copyright violations and scooters on sidewalks), but illustrates for example why treating corporations as "people" in freedom-of-speech law is misguided (and stupid, corrupt, and just fucking wrong). So it is a very good example.