No amount of unverifiable "records" (just pieces of paper provided by somebody who has a multimillion dollar incentive to show one outcome) will change my mind.
But if they can produce the actual voice artist I'd be more open-minded.
Altman's outreach, his tweet, and the thousands of tweets and comments talking about how similar Sky is to ScarJo is enough to win the case in California.
2. Look at these images and tell me they didn't intend to replicate "Her": https://x.com/michalwols/status/1792709377528647995
Also, whether they *intended* to replicate Her and whether they *did* in the end are very different.
While Sky's voice shares similar traits to SJ, it sounds different enough that I was never confused as to whether it was actually SJ or not.
They asked SJ, she said no. So they went to a voice actor and used her. Case closed, they didn't use SJ's voice without her permission. That doesn't violate any law to any reasonable person.
She's not exactly gilbert gottfried or morgan freeman.
This is why all Hollywood contracts have actors signing over their likeness in perpetuity now; which was one of the major sticking points of the recent strikes.
All you know is that somebody being sued for multi-millions of dollars (and who's trustworthiness is pretty much shot) is claiming what they did. And frankly given the frequency and ease of voice cloning, there are very few people who can say with confidence that they know 100% that nobody at the company did anything to that effect.
What employee, if any, could say with 100% confidence that this model was trained with 100% samples from the voice actress they alledge and 0% from samples from Scarlett Johansson/her? And if that employee had done so, would they rat out their employer and lose their job over it?
To be honest the new sky is obnoxious and overly emotive. I’m not trying to flirt with my phone.
She even set up the CEO by having him directly negotiate with her, which I’m sure he also did with the alleged small voice actor. Then she perfected her scheme by having that same CEO publicly tweet “her” - timed with the release of the voice product - referencing JS’s movie of the same name where she voiced a computer system with a personality.
She even managed to get OpenAI to take down the voice in OpenAI’s words “out of respect” for SJ while maintaining their legal defense publicly that the voice was not based on hers.
My guess is they would have went with that voice actor either way. They had four different female voices available (in addition to multiple male voices) - 2 for the api, and I believe 2 for ChatGPT (different api voices are still available, different ChatGPT ones aren’t). If Johanssen had said yes, it’s likely they would have added a fifth voice, not gotten rid of Sky.
Leaving the IP issue aside, they could clearly have hired a voice actor to closely resemble Johansson maybe without additional tweaks to the voice in post processing. If they did do that, I am not totally sure what position to take on the matter
Thank you for the laughter.
Assumes facts not in evidence
I think they might have mimicked the style. The voice, though, is not even close. If I heard both voices in a conversation, I would have thought 2 different people were talking.
I understand that it could be problematic if OpenAI did one of two things:
- imitated Scarlett Johansson's voice to impersonate her
- misled people into believing that GPT-4o is an official by-product of the film Her, like calling it “the official Her AI”
The first point is still unclear, and that's precisely the point of the article
For the second point, the tweets you posted clearly show that the AI from Her served as an inspiration for creating the GPT-4o model, but not a trademark infringement
Will Matt Damon receive royalties if a guy is ever stuck on Mars ?
If there's one constant that can be relied upon, it's that "things that are reasonable to a lawyer" and "things that are reasonable to a normal human being" are essentially disjoint sets.
Isn't that a suggestion that what they're doing is similar to "the Her AI"?
There's no doubt a very small (but finite) probability that the voice sounds like a grey alien from Zeta Reticuli.
That doesn't mean the alien is gonna win in court.
Would that be ethical?
EDIT: or even better, imagine how OpenAI would react if some company trained their own model by distilling from GPT4 outputs and then launched a product with it called “ChatGPC”. (They already go after products that have GPT in their name)
The thing is, there are several cases where a jury found this exact thing to warrant damages.
But honestly, that is irrelevant. The situation here is that OpenAI is facing a TON of criticism for running roughshod over intellectual property rights. They are claiming that we should trust them, they are trying to do the right thing.
But in this case, they're dancing on the edge of right and wrong.
I don't mind when a sleazy company makes "MacDougals" to sell hamburgers. But it's not something to be proud of. And it's definitely not a company that I'd trust.
I mean voice cloning a year or two ago was basically science fiction, now we’re talking about voices being distinguishable as proof it’s not cloned, sourced, or based on someone.
FWIW I also thought it was supposed to be the her/sj voice for a long time, until I heard them side by side. Not sure where to stand on the issue, so I’m glad I’m on the sidelines :)
If you can describe a woman's voice and mannerisms and the result sounds similar to a copyrighted performance, that is natural circumstance.
If you want an example of purposefully imitating something with a copyright, look at GNU. Anyone who looked at the UNIX code was realistically prevented from writing their own kernel with similar functions. But if a handful of folks describe what the kernel ended up doing and some <random> guy in his own head comes up with some C code and assembly to do end up with the same high level functions, well thats just fine, even if you include the original name.
The details matter. There is absolutely enough vocal difference, it doesn't take an audiologist to hear the two voices do sound different but very close. It would not be hard for the producers to describe "a" voice and that description would overlap heavily with ScarJo, and wow the marketing team reached out to see if she would attempt to fill the existing requirements. When she said no, they found a suitable alternative. If the intent was to have ScarJo do the voice and she said no and they did it anyways, thats illegal.
It's a movie, not a patent on women voice AI assistants
Perhaps merely having person A sound like person B isn't enough, but combined with the movie and AI theme it will be enough. Anyway I hope he loses.
Making a YouTube instructional view on how to imitate voices that includes clips of a film for example would be fine. Reusing the exact sounds from that YouTube video in a different context and you’re in legal trouble.
Anybody on this forum who says that it's entirely impossible or that it's conclusive that they didn't use her voice samples simply isn't being logical about the evidence.
TBH I really like the voice and the product, but I'm having a lot of trouble wrapping my head around the number of people who seem rather tribal about all this.
Is my my google-fu failing me and I'm not looking in the right place?
And I wouldn't put the metric at 50/50, needs to be indistinguishable. It would be a reasonable amount where it sounds __like__, which could be identifying the chatbot 100% of the time! (e.g. what if I just had a roboticized version of a person's voice) Truth is that I can send you clips of the same person[0], tell you they're different people, and a good portion of people will be certain that these are different people (maybe __you're different__™, but that doesn't matter).
So use that as the litmus test in either way. Not if you think they are different, but rather "would a reasonable person think this is supposed to sound like ScarJo?" Not you, other people. Then, ask yourself if there was sufficient evidence that OpenAI either purposefully intended to clone her voice OR got so set in their ways (maybe after she declined, but had hyped themselves up) that they would have tricked themselves into only accepting a voice actor that ended up sounding similar. That last part is important because it shows how such a thing can happen without ever explicitly (and maybe even not recognizing themselves) stating such a requirement. Remember that us humans do a lot of subconscious processing (I have a whole other rant on people building AGI -- a field I'm in fwiw -- not spending enough time understanding their minds or the minds of animals).
Edit:
[0]I should add that there's a robustness issue here and is going to be a distinguishing factor for people determining if the voices are different. Without a doubt, those voices are "different" but the question is in what way. The same way someone's voice might change day to day? The difference similar to how someone sounds on the phone vs in person? Certainly the audio quality is different and if you're expecting a 1-to-1 match where we can plot waveforms perfectly, then no, you wouldn't ever be able to do this. But that's not a fair test
They were desperate for a non-union-only actor in their casting. But repeatedly kept hitting up a union actor.
What fears for the actress' safety have been portrayed such that not only does she needs to stay anonymous, but her agent does too?
"Altman was not involved"... yet he personally reached out to SJ to try to close the deal?
That's a pretty low bar for "produced the actual voice artist".
The article shows the timeline would make this them already licensing a similar product to your more famous one, then you saying no, and them continuing to use the existing similar one.
> But while many hear an eerie resemblance between “Sky” and Johansson’s “Her” character, an actress was hired to create the Sky voice months before Altman contacted Johansson, according to documents, recordings, casting directors and the actress’s agent.
Midler v Ford is already precedent that using a different actor isn't inherently safe legally.
Yes, but here it’s not being invoked in the sense of “would a reasonable person believe based on this evidence that the facts which would violate the actual law exist” but “would a ‘reasonable’ person believe the law is what the law, indisputably, actually is”.
It’s being invoked to question the reality of the law itself, based on its subjective undesirability to the speaker.
Yet it never becomes anywhere near the significant fulcrum you made it out to be here, filtering between the laws you think are good and the laws you think are bad. Further, you seem to mistake attorneys with legislators. I'd be surprised if a reasonable person thinks it is okay to profit off the likeness of others without their permission. But I guess you don't think that's reasonable. What a valuable conversation we're having.
Yes, this discussion is about right of publicity, not copyright.
Copyright is not the whole of the law.
That case isn't copyright law, Ford had obtained rights to use the song itself.
You can, as they say, look it up.
You seem incredibly confused. Legislators pass legislation, not lawyers. So it was never a question as to what lawyers thought reasonable laws are. State representatives determined that it was a good idea to have right of publicity laws and that is why they exist in many large states in the US.
> The "reasonable man" standard is all over case law
Yes, as I already pointed out to you, and another poster did as well, this "reasonable man" standard has nothing to do with your prior use of the word reasonable as an attempt to filter out which laws are the ones you think are okay to enforce.
>You can, as they say, look it up.
You should take your own advice!
I'm not "confused" about anything.
Yes, legislators pass laws, but how those laws are actually applied very much depends on the persuasive skills of lawyers.
If your hypothetical where you could use the printed law as passed by legislators essentially as a lookup table, lawyers would serve no purpose.
But somehow people spend tons of money on them nonetheless.
However, the fact that there is a debate at all proves there should be more of an investigation done.
- "The agent said the actress confirmed..."
- "In a statement from the actress provided by the agent..."
The WaPo hasn't spoken to or verified who the voice actor is.
In litigation, any question whether X was "reasonable" is typically determined by a jury, not a judge [0].
[0] That is, unless the trial judge decides that there's no genuine issue of fact and that reasonable people [1] could reach only one possible conclusion; when that's the case, the judge will rule on the matter "as a matter of law." But that's a dicey proposition for a trial judge, because an appeals court would reverse and remand if the appellate judges decided that reasonable people could indeed reach different conclusions [1].
[1] Yeah, I know it's turtles all the way down, or maybe it's circular, or recursive.
It probably isn’t criminal, which is what you seem to be asking, although it very well might be depending on the facts.
More importantly, under the available facts JA likely has a claim for civil damages under one of more causes of action. Her claims are so strong this will likely end up with a confidential settlement in an undisclosed sum without even needing to file a lawsuit. If she does file a lawsuit, there is still greater than 90% likelihood OpenAI settles before trial. In that less than 3% chance the case proceeds to a verdict, then you’ll have your answer without having to make bad arguments on HN.
From the HN guidelines: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
You are very confused. The reasonable person standard has absolutely nothing to do with your initial post where you quoted it.
>If your hypothetical where you could use the printed law as passed by legislators essentially as a lookup table, lawyers would serve no purpose.
What the fuck are you talking about? The stuff I see people here say about the law is INSANE. You don't need a lawyer in the US if you are an individual person, you can represent yourself. What the hell does any of it have to do with a lookup table? I've never seen something so deeply confused and misguided.
Allow me to help you correct your answers:
>Is it illegal to hire a voice actor that sounds like Darth Vader? No.
Actually, yes it can be.
>Is it illegal to hire a voice actor that sounds like Her? No.
Once again it can be.
>Does that mean it's illegal for another voice actor to (according to some) sound similar to a character from a poplar movie? No.
Yet again it can be.
As a lawyer that’s been practicing for over 10 years, IP law and contract law is far more complex and nuanced that your rhetorical questions and answers suggest.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Have a nice day, or actually don't, since you're working one of the most evil professions there is ;)
Also rest assured evil lawyers are not the source of your problem. Maybe one day if you and your IP/likeness get ripped off like OpenAI did to SJ, you’ll find lawyers aren’t so evil after all. Maybe you will come to realize for every evil lawyer there is always lawyer fighting on the other side against that evil.
Once again what do I know, I’m an evil lawyer that does pro bono legal services for children that have been abused, abandoned and neglected as well as victims of torture at the hands of foreign governments as part of my evil profession.
Good luck to you!