> 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.
It amounts to nothing as it was a single word and they could spin that any way they want, it's even a generic word, lol. The "worst" interpretation on that tweet could be "we were inspired by said movie to create a relatable product" which is not an unlawful thing to do.
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.
"The pitch is kiiiiiind of close, but that's about it. Different cadence, different levels of vocal fry, slightly different accent if you pay close attention. Johansson drops Ts for Ds pretty frequently, Sky pronounces Ts pretty sharply. A linguist could probably break it down better than me and identify the different regions involved."
https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1cx24sy/vocal_...
There is also a faction claiming that Sky's voice is more similar to Rashida Jones's than Scarlett Johansson's:
https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1cx9t8b/vocal_comp...
By your logic, I could go find a Tim Cook looking and sounding guy, make a promotion video with him praising my new startup, ping Tim Cook to check if by any chance he wouldn't miraculously be willing to do me a favor to avoid me all the trouble in the first place, but still go on and release my video ads without any permission.
"I did all the preparation way before asking the celebrity" wouldn't be a valid defense.
This is unclear. What is clear is OpenAI referenced Her in marketing it. That looks like it was a case of poor impulse control. But it's basis for a claim.
Good luck proving that in court.
“You’re honor our evidence is that the audio clips both sound breathy”
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 [...]")
I lack the knowledge to make a judgment one way or another about whether this will go anywhere, because I know very little about this area of law, more so in the US. However, this idea that tweeting the title of that specific movie in the context of such a product release couldn't possibly be connected to one of those voices having a similar cadence and sound of a specific actor in that same movie they approched beforehand, couldn't have no legal bearing seems naive. Is it that doubtful that a high-priced legal team couldn't bring a solid case, leading to a severe settlement, or more if she wants to create a precedent?
Clichéd Mafia talk is not a foolproof way to prevent conviction in most jurisdictions.
In OpenAI's case the voice only sounds like her (although many disagree) but it isn't repeating some famous line of dialog from one of her movies etc, so you can't really definitively say it's impersonating SJ.
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.
But they asked her first!:
"Last September, 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....
https://twitter.com/BobbyAllyn/status/1792679435701014908
So its: ask Johansson, get declined, ask casting directors for the type of voice actors they are interested in, listened to 400 voices, choose one that sounds like the actor, ask Johansson again, get declined again, publish with a reference to Johansson film, claim the voice has nothing todo with Johansson.
[EDIT] Actually it looks like they selected the Sky actor before they asked Johansson and claim that she would have been the 6th voice, its still hard to believe they didn't intend it to sound like the voice in her though:
https://openai.com/index/how-the-voices-for-chatgpt-were-cho...
It's likely that someone internally must have noticed the similarity so there's like some kind of comms around it so it very much will depend on what was written in those conversations.
This would mean that a celebrity could possess a voice similar to 0.5 million to 5 million other women, and potentially claim royalties if their voice is used.
At most the obviousness should the burden of discovery on them, and if they have no records or witnesses that would demonstrate the intent, then they should be in the clear.
> I would start to collect a LOT of paperwork documenting that the casting selection was done without a hint of bias towards a celebrity's impression.
IMO having records that explicitly mention SJ or Her in any way would be suspicious.
IANAL
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?
Listening to them side by side, the OpenAI voice is more similar to Siri than to SJ. That Sam Altman clearly wanted SJ to do the voice acting is irrelevant, considering the timings and the voice differences.
The phone call and tweet were awkward tho.
Suppose someone asked Dall-e for an image of Black Widow like in the first Avengers movie, promoting their brand. If they then use that in advertising, Johansson's portrait rights would likely be violated. Even (especially) if they never contacted her about doing the ad herself.
This is similar to that, but with voice, not portrait.
They had a voice, the natural comparison watching the interaction is to Her, and they there is likely still time to get actually SJs voice before a public rollout.
I think part of this PR cycle is also the priming effect, where if you're primed to hear something and then listen you do great it.
So your theory is that this was completely coincidental. But after the voice was recorded, they thought, "Wow, it sounds just like the voice of the computer in Her! We should contact that actress and capitalize on it!"
That's what you're going with? It doesn't make sense, to me.
See my comment from yesterday re him being a known conman: >>40435120
... that it would be even better to have a famous voice from Her than a rather generic female voice they had, but their proposal was declined. Well oops, but SJ, famous as she is, doesn't have a copyright right on all female voices other than her own.
Except it doesn't sound like Johansson, I don't know why people keep saying this. At best, the voice has a couple of similar characteristics, but I didn't think for one second that it was her. Can James Earl Jones sue if someone uses a voice actor with a deep voice?
I think people thinks others sound same not because they're similar from beginning, but because voices must homogenize under peer pressures. There's a proverb "nails that sticks out gets hammered". Most people probably has hammered flat voices intended to not stand out.
Because they're building a voice-mediated AI, duh.
Much of the coverage I've seen thorough social media on this (including Johansson's statement) gives the impression that this is what OpenAI did. If the quality of doing that would be worse than using a voice actor to imitate Johansson's voice, what is the value of the publicity which gives the impression that their technology is more advanced than it is, compared to whatever they end up settling this for?
Imagine being a potential future employer of the lesser known artist, would you dare hire her in the face that Johansson's lawyers might come after you?
Is this lesser known voice artist now doomed to find a job in a different sector?
Voice archetypes are much much older than Johansson, so by symmetry arguments, could those earlier in line sue Johansson in turn?
When a strong person is offered a job at the docks, but refuses, and if then later another strong person accepts the job, can the first one sue the employer for "finding another strong man"?
At some point the courts are being asked to uphold exceptionalist treatment and effectuate it on tax-payers dollars moving executive branches in case of non-compliance.
Production ready? Probably not, but demos don't have to be.
If I ask which one is SJ, people that have seen her films know, those who don't, don't. (Hint, only one sounds hoarse like early smoker voice and self-assured even in the 'Her' role, only one sounds impossibly 2020s valley girl chipper and eager to please.)
Sure seems like all the dogpiling last week either didn't do a basic listen or ignored it, as it's much better for click farming to mock the cock of the walk.
> > 3. The actress's natural voice sounds identical to the AI-generated Sky voice
> No it doesn't.
That's a verbatim quote from the article (albeit based on brief recordings).
I haven't heard the anonymous voice actress's voice myself to corroborate WP's claim, but (unless there's information I'm unaware of) neither have you to claim the opposite.
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.
It won’t though, this is primarily a PR problem for OpenAI. Which is still a real problem when their future product development depends entirely on everyone giving them tons of data.
I think it would be hard to seat a jury that, after laying out the facts about the attempts to hire Johansen, and the tweet at the time of release, would have even one person credulous enough to be convinced this was all an honest mix-up.
Which is why it will never in a million years go to a trial.
The clips are all online for you to listen to them yourself. The article can say what it likes, it's just wrong.
Right, it would be one thing if there was evidence that OpenAI asked the actress to imitate Johansson. But people are saying that using this voice actress at all without Johansson's permission shouldn't be legal, which is a bizarre claim. If someone thinks my voice sounds similar to a celebrities, now that celebrity owns my voice? In any other situation, everyone here would think such a standard would be completely outrageous.
(For what it's worth, I didn't find the Sky voice to sound anything like Scarlett Johannson personally)
I immediately thought "grade school teacher", although I was listening to the clip where she was telling a story.
Would you ever say “except strawberries aren’t tasty, I don’t know why people keep saying this”?
Maybe it doesn’t sound like Johansson to you, but it does sound like her to a lot of people. Worse, evidence points to Altman wanting you to make that connection. It’s trying to sound like her performance in one specific movie.
The only reason people think it sounds like her is because they've biased themselves into it because of all the context surrounding it.
This is weird, if not bizarre. Scarlett didn't do anything. Literally no action besides saying no. Then a company decides to impersonate her and use her performance in a movie as implicit marketing for a product. That's the company's problem, not hers.
I guarantee you that nobody who's ever heard her voice actually thinks that, go on:
https://x.com/chriswiles87/status/1792909936189378653
> Worse, evidence points to Altman wanting you to make that connection. It’s trying to sound like her performance in one specific movie.
There is no such evidence.
Maybe the fault for that belongs to the company who tried to create the association in your mind by using a similar voice and tweeting about that one movie with the voice.
That’s basic advertising. They knew what they were doing. It’s just that it may have backfired.
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.
Not to over-analyze your use of language, but using the possessive here makes it seem like she personally owned that phrase or its use was associated with her. First, I don't know if that's true. Did she say, "Ooh la la," constantly, or is it just something she said at the beginning of the music video (and possibly studio recording) of the one hit from Deee-Lite, Groove Is In The Heart? Moreover, that phrase is a fairly well-known and widely-used one, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ooh_La_La. It certainly was not original to her nor would its use indicate an association to her. To your point, its use plus the aesthetic of the character does seem like a reference to Lady Miss Kier's appearance in that music video (if not also her style and appearance more generally, I don't know if that is how she always looks). But she didn't sue everyone else on this list for the use of her supposed catch phrase, ooh la la.
I hate to say one person's fame is so great that they get special or different treatment in court, but I think "Lady Miss Kier" was punching above her weight in trying to sue over use of her image. Her fame was a flash-in-the-pan one-hit-wonder in the early 90s, no offense to any Deee-Lite fans. It was certainly a great song (with some help from Herbie Hancock, Bootsy Collins, and Q-Tip).
Now listen to SJ's Samantha in Her and the first thing you'll notice are the voice breaks and that they break to a higher register with a distinct breathy sound, it's clearly falsetto. SJ seems to have this habit in her normal speaking voice as well but it's not as exaggerated and seems more accidental. Her voice is very much in her head or mask. The biggest commonality I can hear is that they both have a sibilant S and their regional accents are pretty close.
He's wasn't citing Lucy or whatever other garbage.
You definitely do not. Think of the craziest conspiracy theory you can, one that has been debunked countless times, and I’ll show you people that have been shown the evidence yet still believe the conspiracy.
This case is not a conspiracy theory. But it is something where you disagree with a popular opinion. The point is that you’re projecting your thought pattern and way of understanding the world into everyone else instead of being empathetic and putting yourself on the other side.
Look, I get it. I also thought that the outrage about Apple’s recent ad was disproportionate. But I’m not going to go out of my way to defend the ad. I don’t give a hoot that a massive corporation is getting a bit of bad press for something largely inconsequential, I just wish the outrage had been directed at something which actually matters and go on with my life.
> There is no such evidence.
With this kind of dismissal, I don’t think it’s worth continuing the conversation. I’ll leave you to it. Have a genuinely good weekend.
It's saying that the anonymous voice actress's natural voice sounds identical to the AI-generated Sky voice (which implies it has not been altered by OpenAI to sound more like SJ, nor that they had her do some impression beyond her own natural voice).
If so, could you link the clips of the voice actress's natural voice, to compare to the AI version? I've searched but was unable to find such clips.
To add to this, the legal standard isn't whether it sounds "like" her. It has to be a replication of her voice. Millions of people may sound or look "like" another person, that doesn't mean they are a copy of that person.
The best case study in voices imho is David Attenborough. He has a distinct voice that many have sought to replicate. But you know who else had that voice? Richard Attenborough (the actor from Jurassic Park). They are brothers. Sadly, Richard recently passed. Their voices are unsurprisingly nearly interchangeable, along with a thousand other people with similar life stories. So who gets to own complete rights to the distinctive "Attenborough" voice? In any other area of intellectual property the answer is simple: nobody. It doesn't exist and/or was created by people long before any living Attenborough walked the earth.
Similarly, courts ruled that GTA did not steal from Lindsay Lohan. One cannot own the image of generic California blonde in a red bikini. So why should Johansson own sexy/breathy voice of with a nondistinctive accent?
so who was doing the selecting, and were they instructed to perform their selection this way? If there was a law suit, discovery would reveal emails or any communique that would be evidence of this.
If, for some reason, there is _zero_ evidence that this was chosen as a criteria, then it's pretty hard pressed to prove the intent.
Is it a popular opinion? Where's the evidence of that? Or is it maybe just a manufactured clickbait outrage now bordering on conspiracy theory? I provided a link that clearly demonstrates the very foundational claim is wrong, and the article has already clarified the mistakes in the timeline that conspiracists are citing as evidence of malfeasance. This controversy is a textbook nothing burger and it annoys me to no end that people keep falling for these tactics.
I think the tweet was dumb but in my layperson's understanding of the law and the situation, I doubt OpenAI is at any huge legal risk here.
I think that's exactly it, or they're critical of all corporations, and they're jumping all over suspicious timelines, like that they tried to convince her 9 months ago and again 2 days before the new release as some kind of evidence of malfeasance.
Including Johansson herself and her family?
>After much consideration and for personal reasons, I declined the offer. Nine months later, my friends, family and the general public all noted how much the newest system named “Sky” sounded like me.
We can talk biases, but I think we're pretty far from "guarantee" in this matter.
>or is it manufactured clickbait outrage now bordering on conspiracy theory? I
Johannsen already has lawyers on the ready. This goes beyond some publicity stunt. You can be cynical, but I struggle to call a potential legal proceeding a conspiracy.
Linking to two small soindbites isn't going to undo an entire court case. I doubt I always sound the same in two identical line readings.
OpenAI did not want to copy her the actress, they wanted to copy HER the performance from the movie.
This opinion is independent of Sam being a conman, scammer, creepy Worldcoin weirdo, and so on.
> Is it a popular opinion or is it manufactured clickbait outrage now bordering on conspiracy theory?
Please realise that calling something “manufactured clickbait outrage” itself borders on conspiracy theory. Again, empathise, look at your argument with an outside eye.
> it annoys me to no end
Don’t let it. Being annoyed on the internet only ruins your day. And the more unhinged you become, the less sense your arguments will make and the more it will backfire.
Unless you have a personal relationship with either Altman or Johansson, I recommend you let this one go. It’s not worth the cost of any mental wellness. Some issues are, but not this one. Save yourself for the issues that are important.
Again I wish you a relaxing weekend.
Try to ask yourself: is it at all plausible that others operating in good faith might come to a different conclusion, particularly given the surrounding details? If you can't find your way to a "yes" then I'm not sure what to say, you must view everyone (seemingly the majority though who knows for sure) to be deluding themselves or trolling others.
The lesser-known voice actor is dooming themselves to find a job in a different sector by contributing to the development of technology that will almost certainly replace all voice actors.
And as far as I can tell, OpenAI also had 4 different female voices - two from the API, and two in ChatGPT. So there are several different types of voices they covered.
The only thing Sam did wrong was play too fast and loose with the implication of "Her" given that he had been talking to ScarJo. Lawyers should have told him to just STFU about it.
Especially when you have ex-OAers, who had been working there at the time on 'J.A.R.V.I.S.', tweeting things like https://x.com/karpathy/status/1790373216537502106 "The killer app of LLMs is Scarlett Johansson."
Completely false. Even the journalists at the launch of "Sky" last year were singling it out of the batch of voices, and specifically asking OA about how it sounded like Johansson: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/25/chatgpt...
Even if they are able to show irrefutable proof that it wasn't ScarJo and is in fact another person entirely it will not matter.
This is one of those times that no matter what the facts show people will be dug in one way or another.
You can't hire an artist to draw black widow in the style of Scarlett Johansson's widow. The issue isn't how the art is made, it's whether the end result looks like her.
I think there may be additional issues (to be determined either in courts or by Congress, in the US) with regard to how Dalle makes art, but elsewhere in the thread someone mentioned the Ford Bette middler case, and that does seem to be relevant (also, though, not exactly what happened here)
I don't have the expertise to know how similar this is to the case at hand.
Prompted by your comment I read up about the case and from what I understand Sega wanted to use the song in a promotion and not (what I remembered) her likeness.
I guess they decided to remove it for PR reasons or something.
In case it's not clear, my moderately low opinion of Open AI is bested only by my even lower opinion of journalists.
I listened again and you're right, it does sound more like Rashida Jones.
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.
In just the same way that if the context were "magical space villain in a black mask and cape" and someone was hired with a deep voice, it would be a clear rip-off of James Earl Jones.
And it requires a level of credulity that I find impossible to sustain to think that "the sequence of events" here doesn't start with "let's have a voice actor casting call and pick a voice that sounds like the one in the movie about this that everyone loves". I won't, however, be shocked if nobody ever wrote that down in a medium that is subject to legal discovery.
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"
> The new personas for ChatGPT are named Sky, Ember, Breeze, Juniper and Cove. 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.
And it is not unusual at all for there to be things that everyone knows should not be written down, but either discussed only in person, or left implicit. There is usually a few slip ups though, which would come out in discovery.
> "possibility of unconscious bias when selecting among auditions"
I think "conscious but not stated to the actress" is the more likely explanation, that is not inconsistent with this reporting.
For what it's worth, if this does go to court (which I doubt), and there is discovery and depositions, and they don't find any documentation, or get any statements suggesting that this was indeed understood to be the goal, then I would be a lot more convinced.
But I think it's a giant stretch to have the base case be that nobody thought of this and they were all shocked, shocked! that people made this connection after they released it.
The point is here is someone who 'actually listened to it' at the debut long ago, and immediately asked the OA people about it. I don't know what more you want for similarity. They launched several voices, without any of the mentions of Johansson or _Her_ that have been brought up here or the controversy, and back then and there, on the spot, people felt the need to ask about how one sounded 'somewhat similar' to Scarlett Johansson specifically.
If they just said "we loved the film, we wanted that feel, SJ wasn't willing, so we went for it anyway. Obviously that's backfired and we're rethinking" then I would have a thousand times more comfort than this corporate back-covering bullshit.
I'd be more convinced, at least of the fact that it would have even been a good call, if I saw outrage sparked by the possibility of unconscious bias, opposed to what can or has been addressed by other forms of evidence. Claims along the lines of "I'd totally have thought [...]" made in retrospect are entirely unconvincing, particuarly in cases where the suggested thought is not sufficient.
That's what I've been taking issue to from the beginning of this chain[0]. In all but one comment since then I've explicitly specified "[un|sub]conscious bias".
On that topic, would you agree with me that it is not "obvious" that they would predict a group would take issue in this very particular way such that it would necessitate setting up and documenting auditions to prove they have eliminated such bias, and then additionally determine it worthwhile to actually do so?
