zlacker

> They contacted Johansson after the Sky voice was created, they didn’t create it because she declined.

Her statement says otherwise:

"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

>>helsin+(OP)
The Sky voice was released with the first ChatGPT voices last year in September, so there's no contradiction there unless they asked her on the 1st of September and somehow trained another voice within the few weeks after she said no.

Here's a video that someone posted in October talking to the same Sky voice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SamGnUqaOfU

>>s-lamb+m8
> and somehow trained another voice within the few weeks after she said no.

Er, that is totally possible? You act like it's not a machine learning system. You train new stuff in hours or days easily, especially if you have good tooling. Imagine saying this of, say, Stable Diffusion image LoRAs: "this X artist LoRA couldn't be based on X because it was somehow trained within the few weeks after X said no!"

All the timing means is that, in good management & startup fashion, because they needed multiple voices, they had a voice pipeline going, and so could have a bunch of female voices in the pipeline for optionality. And if licensing Johansson didn't work out, you have a plan B (and C, and preferably D). This is big business, you don't do things serially or not have backups: "'hope' is not a plan".

>>gwern+9w
They could do it but my point is that people are using the September rejection date as evidence for them copying her voice afterwards because it was 7 months before GPT-4o and they aren't aware that the voice has been in the app for 7 months already.

>>helsin+(OP)
> Her statement says otherwise

In what way?

That in no way contradicts the fact that the Sky voice was created first, although it does seem to suggest a misunderstanding by Johansson that this was to be an exclusive deal to be "the" voice, leading to the incorrect conclusion that the Sky voice was created after she declined, and must therefore be an impersonation (despite sounding nothing like her/Her, as she herself must know better than anyone). Stretch after stretch after stretch. (Being kind.)

In fact the recordings used for training were made in June/July 2023, which is before Johansson was contact as a possible "also-ran": https://openai.com/index/how-the-voices-for-chatgpt-were-cho...