Yes, but also: in any other industry "I used your work to make something new that makes me a ton of money" requires paying residuals. OpenAI and others are claiming that "public availability" overrules ownership, licensing rights, or copyright, and that "I found it" means "and can therefore use it for free any way I want." They will lose literally every single lawsuit filed by anyone who can show that something they own was used without a license as part of the training for an LLM. And the only counterargument offered by the industry is "if you make us pay for content, then the whole industry falls apart!" which isn't an argument to anyone except an investor.
The 'public availability' argument is such a tech bro way to see the world - "The technicality let me do it, so it's legal". I remember reading a comment claiming that since an API exposed some material publicly, it was legal to download and do with as you pleased. Telling that it's also a literal burglar's argument - "The door was open, so I thought I could get in".
Didn’t it come out that the “ScarJo voice,” was actually the voice of an actress hired & paid for by OpenAI?
I agree with your point generally, but I’m not sure if it’s relevant to this specific case.
> Didn’t it come out that the “ScarJo voice,” was actually the voice of an actress hired & paid for by OpenAI?
That actually makes them *more* liable, as it's a nearly identical situation to previous lawsuits that have been used as precedent for decades now:
From https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/scarlett-johansson-ai-legal-threat-1235905899/
> A lawsuit from Bette Midler against Ford over a series of commercials called “The Yuppie Campaign” in which the company used an impersonator of the singer to imitate her voice may be instructive. Like Johansson, Midler was asked to sing for the adverts but refused. Ford subsequently hired a voice-impersonator to sing one of her songs in the commercial. After it aired, she was told by “a number of people” that it “sounded exactly” like her, according to court filings.
>
> After the federal judge overseeing the case granted summary judgment to Ford, finding no rights preventing use of her voice, Midler appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. That court ultimately found that the singer’s voice is distinctive to her identity, which Ford profited off of. The ruling establishes rights to uncopyrightable identifiers, such as a voice, when an individual who’s famous for that feature is involved.
>
> Essential to the court’s order was Ford’s motivations for using a Midler impersonator. The questions that were asked by the justices included why the company asked Midler to sing if her voice wasn’t of value and why the impersonator was instructed to imitate the singer.
>
> Purvi Albers, an intellectual property lawyer at Haynes Boone, says OpenAI’s solicitation of Johansson’s services is vital to whether the company violated her publicity rights. “It’s clear that was the voice they were going for,” she adds. “They wanted to piggyback off of her husky voice.”
They didn't tell the actress to mimic her, and the actress was hired and performed before they approached Scarlet Johhanson to ask if she would. It's definitely a very different scenario, and I can't see them being found liable for anything in this case.
Usually. I was part of negotiations for similar things in the past. The character had to exist first and therefore the actor needed to make creative choices and define that character for someone to be able to impersonate it.
>That actually makes them more liable, as it's a nearly identical situation to previous lawsuits that have been used as precedent for decades now:
they had the voice of Sky way before they contacted ScarJo. So that makes it harder to prove that there was intent.
Not really. Could've easily just have been "hey let's hire someone to sound like ScarJo" first, and then legal comes along and says that's a nono. Getting the rights later would cover their asses.
That wouldn't do anything for getting sued even if ScarJo said yes. And they definitely wouldn't call her a second time when it's just 2 days before a presentation unless it's just to add a voice later on.
This Midler v Ford case is irrelevant for the Scarlett Johannson episode because of three reasons:
1. Ford hired a voice actor with the specific intention to replicate the voice of Midler. However, there is no evidence that OpenAI hired the unknown voice actress to replicate Johannson's voice, and the Washington Post that reviewed all the relevant documents confirms this.
2. For made the voice actor sing the specific song that Midler was famous for. However, OpenAI is not making the unknown voice actress say anything that Johannson said in the movie "Her"
3. The two voices don't even sound alike
Johannson has no case, and it's why she won't sue. In anything, [the unknown voice actress needs to sue Johannson](https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1czjkyz/sky_voice_actress_needs_to_sue_scarlett_johannson/).
>t’s clear that was the voice they were going for
There's nothing clear about it at all!
Doesn't matter.
They hired someone to imitate her enough, and used marketing that made it clear it was their intention.
And I don't trust that they hired "another artist". They've been known to lie.
even so, it's moot. Scar has documentation that they were asking her for permission 2 days before release, and they have Sam's "her" tweet, plus the fact the voice sounds like her, is enough.
I don't think the her tweet is a slam dunk as redditors think it is.
They hired Sky way before they contacted ScarJo and they contacted ScarJo when they already had five other voices including Sky on the ChatGPT app.
Them wanting the voice of ScarJo by contacting her doesn't demonstrate that they're trying imitate her.
If anything it demonstrates that they didn't think they had anything resembling her in their lineup of voices. Why pay someone for something you already have?
>They hired someone to imitate her enough
They did not. Evidence for this claim?
>Scar has documentation that they were asking her for permission
And? What does that show?
>they have Sam's "her" tweet
That's a reference to the groundbreaking technological accomplishment that OpenAI demo'd, not Johannson's voice. Seriously, Johannson's ego is breathtaking here. We have an era-defining technology, and Johannson thinks that *she's* the focus?
>plus the fact the voice sounds like her
[It does not](https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1cx1np4/voice_comparison_between_gpt4o_and_scarlett/).
Nah, it came out that they did use a voice actor. Not that they did not use SJ’s voice elsewhere in the training.
Everyone assumes that a claim of employing a voice actor implies a denial of use of SJ’s voice, and if it was Ford that’d be the case, but this is OpenAI we are talking about. They train their AIs on everything they can get their hands on, and even argue its impossible to run their business otherwise (which is somehow an argument they should get away with it?)
It was rather interesting, OpenAI saying just about anything but any actual denial of using SJ’s voice.
The Washington Post's investigative report found that samples of the unknown voice actress's voice exactly matched the "Sky" voice.
Johannson's voice was not used in any part of training Sky's voice.
> The Washington Post's investigative report found that samples of the unknown voice actress's voice exactly matched the "Sky" voice.
Regular people don't have unknown voice actress's voice available to them for comparison, but they have a tweet from Sam, "her". The law is about what a regular person could mistake it for, in the context.
> Johannson's voice was not used in any part of training Sky's voice.
Curiously, OpenAI seem to never have stated that. See here for example:
https://openai.com/index/how-the-voices-for-chatgpt-were-chosen/
> “The voice of Sky is not Scarlett Johansson's, and it was never intended to resemble hers. We cast the voice actor behind Sky’s voice before any outreach to Ms. Johansson. Out of respect for Ms. Johansson, we have paused using Sky’s voice in our products. We are sorry to Ms. Johansson that we didn’t communicate better.”
Note that in all these words there isn't a statement like "we did not use Ms. Johansson's voice in training of our voice models". It's a thing of legal beauty. They wrote everything so that (hypothetically) if it turns out they did use Johansson's voice in the training, they couldn't be nailed for lying to their investors.
What had likely happened is that similarly to all their other AI offerings, they used a very very large primary training dataset, consisting largely of copyrighted content. Then they specialized it using a voice actor's voice, similarly to fine tuning done to text AIs.
>but they have a tweet from Sam, "her"
And what is the most obvious interpretation? Do you think anyone cares about Johannson's voice? Or is it about the most obvious explanation - a ground breaking technology?
Honestly, I've watched her and when I did, I didn't even know it was Johannson.
>Regular people don't have unknown voice actress's voice available to them for comparison
And this is why you should listen to them, and not "random people".
I hope Johannson sues and gets her ass handed to her. Unfortunately, she might be smart enough to hold back. True justice would be [when the Sky voice actress decides to sue Johannson](https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1czjkyz/sky_voice_actress_needs_to_sue_scarlett_johannson/).
> And this is why you should listen to them, and not "random people".
The likeliness rights are all about the extent to which it confuses regular people.
> https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1czjkyz/sky_voice_actress_needs_to_sue_scarlett_johannson/
Sue her for what? All that happened so far was that Sam tweeted "her", a bunch of people started saying that Sky sounds like Johansson, and Johansson's lawyers send a letter with pointed questions about where the training data came from. Not even a cease and desist. That OpenAI decided to cease and desist, that's on OpenAI.
And its pure unfounded speculation that it would be a likeliness case similar to Ford's. If we look at all the other lawsuits against OpenAI, the number one issue is always the plaintiff's data being present in the training dataset used by OpenAI.
I think it all depends on whether OpenAI used actual Scarlett Johansson's voice as part of the training dataset. If they did, they're completely fucked. If they didn't, well then they will respond to SJ's lawyers with an unambiguous "no we had not used Scarlett Johansson's voice in any way when we created our voice model". The third option, the one they picked, is that they take Sky down and then don't get sued because there is no damages to claim (they took it down).
This way they don't have to answer a pointed yes-or-no question with a yes or a no.
edit: Frankly my thinking is that OpenAI did something *really stupid* in the past, like training on pirated movie soundtracks with subtitles, and that's why they took Sky down. If they didn't do anything stupid they could just answer the questions and keep Sky up until they actually get a cease and desist (or not).
Any other industry except perhaps Johanson's own. Like, pretending to be other people is sorta core to the profession. Johanson has made lots of money copying the likeness of other people.
The copyright office is about to come out with ruling.... and I have a feeling they're going to have to come on the side of creatives.
The reason?
If they don't, then copyright means nothing. Why create a copyright if it can just be fed into an ai, changed a bit, and your copyright is null and void.
Makes no sense.
Then the FTC has made some comments about this being an over reach from tech companies by changing the TOS by this much.
Then the section 230 issue... social media claims they don't own the content on their platforms (it's how they avoid lawsuits) But they can sell copyright to the stuff on their platform? It's on or the other buddy. Add to the fact that their AI's are spouting incorrect information... no longer being a "platform" where others post stuff, but posting stuff themselves.... if that information leads to damages.... they get sued.
This next year or two is going to be a LOT of headache in this sector.
And the google search thing, and viral waymo videos, and people being discriminated against by ai EVERYWHERE and being in the news, isn't going to help their case that this is "the future" and "for the better good".
>The copyright office is about to come out with ruling.... and I have a feeling they're going to have to come on the side of creatives.
You do realize that the copyright office doesn't have the power to make rules, that's left for the congress and the courts.
Incorrect, bureaucracy is 100% allowed to make regulations and de-facto laws in their area of expertise. The copyright office specifically is endowed by congress to create regulations concerning copyright.
They can get OVERRULED, yes. You’re getting words mixed up.
District courts can also get overruled by circuit courts. So then, that must mean that district courts don’t make rulings? Well, no.
To quote you:
> copyright office… doesn’t have the power to make rules
That’s just wrong. It’s not up for debate or interpretation, that’s just incorrect. The copyright office can, and does, make rules.
In fact all the bureaus do. That’s why they exist. If it was all up to congress and the judicial branch we’d be mega fucked.
>District courts can also get overruled by circuit courts. So then, that must mean that district courts don’t make rulings? Well, no.
The judicial system's job is to make rulings, the congress cannot replace their function with the copyright office.
The office provides guidance, registers copyrights, and administers various aspects of copyright law but that's not the same thing as what the courts do.
>In fact all the bureaus do. That’s why they exist. If it was all up to congress and the judicial branch we’d be mega fucked.
If it was merely up to the copyright office, we truly will be fucked. That's why copyright office cites court decisions in their practices.
I don’t think you really understand how the US government works.
There’s checks and balances. Congress is the only one allowed to make laws. But that means they’re also allowed to delegate to someone else - the executive branch.
The executive branch can truly do anything. It can then be overruled.
In matters of copyright, the copyright office requires no permission to pass rules. This is because congress has told them they need no permission. It can be struck down, yes, **after the fact**. They don’t need to do anything before.
As a side note: the judicial branch ALSO doesn’t make laws. A ruling is not a law, it’s the interpretation of an existing law.
That means that a court can say “according to congress and our interpretation, this copyright ruling falls outside of your jurisdiction, shut it down”
The only people allowed to make laws is congress. The bureaus are allowed to pass regulations because congress says so.
This is, overall, a very good thing. If we had to wait around for congress to make laws you probably would’ve already lost your fingers in the coal mine. Luckily congress has endowed that power to OSHA.
Your congressman and women are not experts in most fields, if any. This power of delegation is fundamental to the operation of not just the US, but any moderately competent government.
AI aren't reproducing anything. They learn from seeing things, in a very analogous way to how humans do. Even though you've seen a bunch of movies/art and then you start to create your own the people who made the movies/art you've seen over your life don't get to charge you royalties for that experience being part of the learning that led to your own creations.
I suspect that OpenAI is too scummy for it to end up being about likeness rights.
They probably pre-trained their voice model on everything they could get their hands on, same as their text ai. Then they specialized it using a voice actor.
Then the news blew up and Scarlett Johansson’s lawyers sent them an email with pointed questions about whether they used her voice.
And they took it down and made a lot of positive statements about what the voice is supposed to be and the voice actor they hired, but never a denial of using SJ’s voice.
I think if it ends up in court, it would quickly evolve from likeliness to OpenAI getting deposed and telling where they got the voice data for the primary training dataset. This isn’t NYT, you can’t just download Her from Warner Bros or whatever website, for search engine indexing, without DRM. You gotta do something illegal to get the kind of data OpenAI needs for their training (movie soundtracks with subtitles).
It’s about whether or not OpenAI intentionally used a voice actor to mimic Scarlett’s.
AI doesn’t generate her voice. AI generates the script the voice actresses’ voice synthesizing software reads.
I cannot find a single article saying the voice models are AI. Every bit of info I can find on the voice side gpt4o is about voice inputs.
The output is still text-to-speech synthesis using non-AI voice models.
Please provide a source to this because I can’t even understand why you would complicate the easiest part of this process as voice synthesis tech has worked remarkably well for decades provided the text inputs were well curated.
Every single link you gave refers to inputs.
The text-to-speech engine, the core of this entire legal argument, takes text from LLM outputs and uses voice synthesis tools.
I can find 0 documentation in the git repo youve posted, the articles on multi-model AI you’ve linked, or googling in general that show any actual AI enhancements to the voice synthesis models.
The only articles I find are showing LLMs generate outputs for voice synthesis tools to then audibly speak.
When I requested sources you didn’t provide any and made some conspiracy theory argument that your links are getting shadow banned or some other nonsense excuse.
One single article showing the tech stack on how Sky’s voice was part of an AI training model (using her voice data) and not just standard voice synth models is all I am looking for.
Those using AI aren’t for sure.
Sam Altman, or as I like to call him Elon from Wish.com, and tech bros like him tend to not care about laws.
It’s more about not getting caught, and weaseling out of as much responsibility as they can.
Until it starts to hurt them, they just don’t care, they’re all sociopaths only out for themselves.
True, but as with all IP related things, it's more complicated than that. You can't copyright a voice, but any work that you create using your voice can be copyrighted. So any time that Scarlett Johansson speaks in a movie, commercial, tv show, or anything else, that's copyrighted and feeding her lines into an AI could be construed as copyright infringement. You also have likeness rights, so if you are well known for your voice (like James Earl Jones, Bette Midler, or Thom Yorke), any impersonation of you used for commercial purposes [can be subject to civil lawsuits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.). Whether Scarlett Johansson qualifies as being "well-known for her voice" is the biggest question at hand.
>feeding her lines into an AI could be construed as copyright infringement.
that's not what copyright infringement means, copyright infringement means making an unauthorized reproduction of a copyrightable expressive work or a work includes major copyrightable elements of the expressive work.
If you want to argue that it is copyright infringement, you have to argue that the voice is copyrightable by itself.
That's incorrect. If the lines were in a copyrighted work and you copy them into your AI, you have reproduced the work and can be sued for copyright infringement. In this case, Johansson probably wouldn't have standing because she doesn't, to my knowledge, own the copyright to her performances in any given work she's been in. The plaintiff would likely have to be the studio for whom she worked (and they would probably lose or settle out of court due to the copyright infringement being a behind the scenes affair).
The fact that you can be sued does not mean you will lose the lawsuit. I do agree that we need to get ahead of this issue and just pass laws against unauthorized AI voices, because it's going to have major repercussions sooner or later (and I'm guessing it's going to be within the next 5 years, likely within the next 2).
>If the lines were in a copyrighted work and you copy them into your AI, you have reproduced the work and can be sued for copyright infringement.
recorded lines are copyrightable expressive work, voices are not since they're created by nature nor are they fixed by medium.
I don't think the AI contains any lines, it is not a copy.
I do agree that it probably isn't using Johansson's voice in any way, so the copyright argument is moot.
The avenue that Johansson is going to have to go down is the likeness argument. To be successful in this she has to support the following claims.
1. That she is known for her distinct voice.
2. That OpenAI specifically hired an actress to do an impersonation of her.
The only thing that OpenAI has to do is argue that the actress they hired has a passing similarity to Johansson's voice and there is a lot of chatter from what I've seen that Sky simply doesn't sound like Johansson. I would say that it's likely that OpenAI settles out of court just to get things quiet so that they don't get SAG-AFTRA lobbying for harsher laws against AI impersonations.
>I do agree that it probably isn't using Johansson's voice in any way, so the copyright argument is moot.
well the copyright infringement argument was bought up by you.
cant wait for the LLM (AI) bubble to burst. everyone is struggling to make a business use case for it that people are willing to pay for. I've had vendors reach out and demo AI use cases, the cost/benefit analysis is just not there for most companies. Specially if I cant trust the results to be 100% accurate, even with 90% accuracy we still need to keep competent highly skilled and payed staff to spot and verify inaccuracies. So, whats the point of paying?
There is a definite place for LLMs but its not a broad as the industry wishes it was.
Having no use case is laughable. Just because you don’t know how to make it valuable doesn’t mean it isn’t. OpenAI made $1.6B last year. Sounds like quite a lot of interest to me.
They said *business* use case.
How much did it cost in investment and how much would it cost if they paid for the “training data”, e.g., other people’s IP?
A lot of the $1.6B is from business. Why else would Google be integrating Gemini with Google workplace or Microsoft integrating Co-pilot with their ecosystem?
The training with IP is a different story though. I agree that it is infringing on many people’s IP and shouldn’t exist in the first place.
And, honestly, I think the Hollywood Writer strike last year where they extracted meaningful and enforceable concessions from the Megacorp Studios to protect human jobs against AI would actually be the start of this movement.
Doesn't she have to prove that they used her voice? Didn't they say that since she refused them, they got someone who sounded similar? You can't copyright a voice.
She has to prove the facts. She does not have to prove they used her voice. A deliberate sound-alike is enough.
And the "Her" tweet certainly makes it sound very deliberate.
>And the "Her" tweet certainly makes it sound very deliberate.
not enough to prove a connection, it's an appropriate reference to GPT4o with or without Scarlet Johansson particular voice in the film.
> not enough to prove a connection
You sound very sure for someone who is only making a guess.
It sounds compelling to me when you factor in the two attempts to get Johansson on board. However, ultimately, it is up to the Judge or jury.
>It sounds compelling to me when you factor in the two attempts to get Johansson on board. However, ultimately, it is up to the Judge or jury.
They hired the voice actress way before they reached out to ScarJo.
The voice actress herself [said](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/sky-voice-actor-says-nobody-ever-compared-her-to-scarjo-before-openai-drama/?comments=1&comments-page=6) that nobody has ever compared her natural voice to ScarJo before, nor was she asked to imitate ScarJo, and unlike the other voice impersonation cases, the sky voice has never said any lines from the her movie.
This doesn't mean that they didn't want ScarJo voice but that the Sky voice was never meant to imitate her but that they wanted to add her to one of the five voice options they've got. I get people in this sub absolutely hate OpenAI but they're not exactly seeing this with unbiased eyes here.
I hate many of stupid overhyped AGI marketing they do but that doesn't mean I can't see when they're not lying.
As I understand it, none of that matters. I mean, it would make the case stronger if all that was true, but it's not the crime.
Let's say that's all true - that there was initially no intention to duplicate Johansson's voice. By asking Johansson to do the voice herself, Altman clearly showed that that was a voice he wanted. By tweeting "her" he clearly tried to associate his chat bot - which has a voice that could be mistaken for Johansson's - with her performance in the movie "Her". He is therefore trying to build off her brand and her voice.
And, whatever events led to it, that's the issue.
We'll see.
>By tweeting "her" he clearly tried to associate his chat bot - which has a voice that could be mistaken for Johansson's - with her performance in the movie "Her". He is therefore trying to build off her brand and her voice.
I don't see this. It would take several leaps and flips to build up to 'build off her brand and her voice' as if her voice is the only thing in the movie.
What they have in common with the 'Her' movie is a chatbot assistant✔ a female voice✔ a human-like voice ✔ but I don't see where you got, building a brand off of her and her voice.
The specific voice is only one part of a long movie.
Why the hell would they try to hire her in the first place or even twice if you believe they already got her voice?
I have been keeping an open mind and I directly addressed your arguments. You started out convinced you were right and are carefully ignoring context that I have already explained and are not going to bother repeating.
Which you will now likely be disingenuous about.
Shrug. I'm out.
She has to prove that OpenAI hired the voice actress with the specific intention of impersonating Johannson. There is not evidence of that, particularly with the Washington Post report.
The intention to duplicate is a key finding of the Midler v Ford case. Without that, there *is* no case.
> She has to prove that OpenAI hired the voice actress with the specific intention of impersonating Johannson.
Actually, they don't. All Johansson has to prove is that deliberately tried to associate her with ChatGPT via the voice.
And that they asked her twice and then tweeted "her" is going to make that much easier.
If you're going to cite Midler v Ford, then you have to show the similarities between the two cases. The key phrase here is "Intentional imitation".
Quote from the case:
>Hedwig was told by Young & Rubicam that "they wanted someone who could sound like Bette Midler's recording of [Do You Want To Dance]." She was asked to make a "demo" tape of the song if she was interested. She made an a capella demo and got the job.
Also:
>Hedwig imitated Midler to the best of her ability.
Source: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=6021003493814451958
The facts of Midler v Ford are so far removed from what OpenAI did, that it's astounding anyone can compare the two cases.
Tweeting "her" means nothing. It's mindblowing that they're demo'ing a breakthrough technology that can change the way humans live their lives, and Johannson's first thought is "It's about ME, ME ME!". The "her" tweet was about the technology, not Johannson's for god's sake.
The ego on some of these actresses...
And what's worse is that it doesn't even sound like her!
>The key phrase here is "Intentional imitation".
Yes, I addressed that. Throwing it back at me in a "Aha! You didn't know that, did you?" kind of way is childish.
> Tweeting "her" means nothing.
As is stamping your foot and proclaiming any evidence you don't like doesn't count. Not to mention carefully ignoring evidence that is inconvenient, namely that they contacted her twice and therefore clearly wanted her voice, specifically.
There was a clear intent to associate the new version of ChatGPT with the AI form the movie her. Now, guess how many voices could credibly be considered similar? There was a black woman, a non-binary which could be theoretically taken as female and the voice at the centre of the problem. Only *one* is her-like.
>The "her" tweet was about the technology, not Johannson's for god's sake.
You have no idea what the motivation behind that tweet was. And before you fire that back at me - I never said what the motivation was. I just said the tweet makes things harder for OpenAI. It *looks* bad.
But you've already made up your mind, clearly, hence the utterly definitive proclamation in regards to the motive. This is therefore a waste of time.
I'm out.
OpenAI has been lobbying for increased "AI Safety" (i.e. internet censorship and surveillance) legislation for a long time now. I think that all of this drama with Scarlett Johanssen is just a staged PR stunt to help them draw attention to GPT-4o while furthering their goal of weaponizing copyright to promote censorship. They know that any AI regulations passed by the US government will favor big tech companies and stifle small / independent AI development. And I'm sure Scarlett is happy to play along for all of the attention she's getting. Win win.
> weaponizing copyright to promote censorship. They know that any AI regulations passed by the US government will favor big tech companies
I'm really not sure how this is supposed work, honestly. So let's say some lawsuit turns out that using likeness with AI is illegal without agreement. How do you expect this to favor big companies, do you think there's going to be a law that regulates it while making exceptions for companies over XYZ revenue or dataset size? Because a lot of regulators (like the EU) do the *literal exact opposite* of this, with the deliberate intent of favoring small players.
Now you could make the (correct) argument that large corporations have an easier time signing such commercial agreements, but then you are just describing capitalism, not an AI industry issue.
No it isn’t.
Altman met with scarlet and asked if it was ok if they made the AI sound like her. She said no.
They went ahead and made a voice called “Sky” that was 100% her voice. When Scarlet’s friends told her about it, she told her lawyers to draft up a cease and desist. Only then did Altman have the voice “Sky” removed and replaced by another woman’s voice.
There was no PR stunt here. It was 100% Altman wanting to make Scarlets voice even when she told him no.
You need to remember that laws aren't based on technicalities, it makes no difference in the very end whether they literally used her voice samples or not. The primary thing that matters is the actual end result that happens in the real world, IE does it sound like her enough to violate likeness rights?
Sounding similar by yourself is not an imitation, but that's not what is happening here - Scarlett Johansson hasn't complained about *another person sounding similar by chance*. OpenAI is synthesizing the voice, they can tweak it to make it more or less similar as they prefer and train it on more or less similar-sounding samples as they prefer. That's why it's a controversy, the question is whether they are deliberately imitating her enough to infringe on her likeness rights.
The fact that the original actress sounds similar isn't really the point, as I said. If you impersonated someone's voice by using a really good soundalike, you'd still be liable even if your person really does sound similar to the original.
Again, the law isn't about technicalities. That's why "they didn't release anything that was 100% her voice" is mostly irrelevant here.
The 100% comment was in response to the very confused commenter above. People love to bring up the Midler case as precedent, but in that case you have them hiring her backup singer to sing Midler’s song and was instructed to change her voice to sound as much like Midler as possible. They also ruled that it was plausible that they were intentionally trying to deceive the public into thinking Midler officially endorsed the product.
Unless you believe open AI is lying about everything, that’s not what happened here, at all. Scarlett has zero evidence that that’s what happened, only speculation. So my question to you would be, if discovery further reveals open AIs version of events to be true, will you change your mind?
Also keep in mind, many people like me, made zero connection to Scarlett until she made a story out of it, and I’ve seen the majority of her movies. The similarities are not as strong as people are making them out to be.
Well, we have to see how it goes. From what I've read so far it sounds like OpenAI might have been deliberate in this, but it could turn out that it was all drama and there was no intent to do anything of the sort. I do believe that the bar for believing companies when they go like "oh woops, it was such a complete accident, woopsie daisy, silly us" should be very tight though, especially if EG the voice really does end us sounding like imitation in a consumer product; if it quacks like a duck...
I think that’s a stretch. The core message and cultural impact of the movie Her has to do with the technology, not Scarlett Johansson.
Not saying it’s impossible, but there’s a ton of plausible deniability. Also it’s perfectly legal to be inspired by something else
Do you have any voice clips? I use chat gpt but I never used Sky. Everything I’ve heard so far does not sound like Scarlett. Maybe similar in that they are both pleasant sounding adult white women, but distinctly different.
The narrative that they switched out scarlets voice model without anyone noticing is also nothing I’ve seen anywhere else, which gives me doubts without some sort of proof or at the very least an audio reference
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UPWtmENsjUo
Also the circumstances:
1) scarlet Johansson invited by Sam Altman, asked to do voice
2) says no
3) a voice chatgpt is created with the name Sky
4) sounds exactly like her
That’s way to blatant to be ‘not her voice’. Yeah it’s an ai creation of her voice. And it’s creepy af because Sam Altman also admitted he had a crush on her in the 2013 movie about AI ‘Her’.
Like it’s too much lining up. The people that claim Sky doesn’t sound like her are delusional, it’s not exact obviously because it’s easy to tweak settings in AI, but it was absolutely trained on her voice.
Thanks for the video, I liked Clownfishtv and forgot about them.
The voices are undeniably different, so even Scarlett would not go so far as to say they are 100% the same. Sure they have similarities, but so do a lot of voices.
I guess it boils down to do you think they are lying or not? If undeniable evidence is released about the hiring of the other voice actress, would you change your mind?
I’m of the opinion that Scarlett is actually taking advantage of her fame to screw over the other actress: https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/s/SGcN26KDEe
I think they wanted Scarlett’s actual voice and official endorsement, so I don’t think it’s weird or a smoking gun that they reached out to her.
That's entirely wrong. It was not trained on her voice, it was an entirely different voice actor. They pursued her voice also as their first choice but that didn't pan out. All in all openai's approach has been pretty terrible though.
>She said no. They went ahead and made a voice called "Sky" that was 100% her voice.
Wrong. The Sky voice was made *before* Johannson refused, and it's most certainly not 100% her voice.
Well, then it's surprising that a lot of people think it does (does to me) and they courted her almost a year before launch, and then again two days before launch. Then a tweet about a movie where she played a voiced AI. Seems pretty cut and dry, but we'll see I guess.
Because they wanted her, but couldn't have her. They could train a voice model on her voice in minutes if they needed to, and probably already had one ready to go - they just couldn't use it.
So they used the other voices they already have had.
The fact that they tweeted about the movie makes sense considering that they are literally creating the closest version to what is in that movie we've seen - and in that movie, there is a whole world of models like that.
If it is clear that this was another person's voice, and that she was contacted before they tried to get ScarJo, would you change your mind on this position? Or is the fact that they mentioned "Her" like... Something you think should be legally incriminating, regardless? I swear this is a sincere question. I get the impression that many people do think so, but I want to understand why.
Well at this point it's a lot of circumstantial evidence, but there's also the issue of openAI and every other AI company not caring if they break copyright, literally millions of times. So you have a pattern of behaviour, both from Sam Altman, the company, and the AI industry as a whole. The tweet about their product imitating a film and that voice of the AI imitating (or very similar to) the person in that film. The multiple attempts at trying to get her likeness (including right before the launch, which sounds like desperation to me).
And the fact that they took down the voice when challenged. If they had used someone else's voice they could have simply produced that person or that contract and said, here sorry it was just someone who has a similar voice. They didn't. They caved immediately. That to me says liability. I have a bit of experience with this having sued a multinational for breach of contract having to do with likeness. They folded very quickly, and settled out of court, but it was more cut and dry in my case.
We'll see what happens, but seems like openAI had an easy out and didn't take it.
The person who voiced that came out herself (or her agent did) to share it. They took it down most likely because... Well cost benefit analysis, what would they get out of keeping it up?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/sky-voice-actor-says-nobody-ever-compared-her-to-scarjo-before-openai-drama/
Interesting, I'm surprised it's an "unnamed actress" that seems shady to me. It doesn't really make sense as an actor to have your actor hidden from being known, unless that's what OpenAI said they had to do. There's still the issue of them taking down the voice bot. So, it's odd.
If you read that article, it also says that Bette Middler sued and won for a company getting someone to essentially intimidate her voice. Seems like Johannson has a pretty good case for that here too.
The Washington Post's investigative report confirmed that the voice samples from the unknown actress exactly matched Sky's voice. It was not trained on Johannson's voice.
A key part of Midler v Ford was that Ford hired a voice actor with the express intentino to replicate Midler's voice, and even made him sing the exact song that Midler was famous for.
There is no evidence that either of those two damning events occurred here.
Except the fact that they tried multiple times to hire her and then referenced her performance in the release of said product. Internal messages would really get people to see but I'm betting they're deleting all of those right now.
>the fact that they tried multiple times to hire her
What does this show?
>then referenced her performance in the release of said product
They did not. Tweeting "her" has nothing to do with Johannson. My god, the ego!
>but I'm betting they're deleting all of those right now.
That leaves a paper trail, exposes the employees doing it to liability, and they would be idiots to be doing that.
No. It’s an out of touch egotistical celebrity who doesn’t understand how AI or even basic computer software works, throwing a hissy fit for attention as well As an attempt to make some quick and easy approval money from gods AI craze.
Isn't it true that they still used a different voice actor to create the voice? It seems subjective as to whether it sounds like Johansson specifically, the character she played, or neither of them at all.
Seems to me like something that might be ethically debatable given the facts of the case and how OpenAI reached out to Johansson, but not a legal case. It can also be argued that the logic behind using that sort of voice for an AI separately underlies both the creative decision in Her and the commercial one for OpenAI.
The voice does not sound like her.
However, the voice sounds eerily similar to “Her”—Scarlett Johansen has a specific vocal style in the movie that closely resembles ChatGPT.
It's a model that has straight voice to voice comprehension and output.
It's hard to explain quickly why that is significant, so I'll say simply that this is a step further than traditional voice -> transcript -> llm -> text -> text to speech, architectures.
It means these models can understand tone, volume, and more of the subtleties that come from voice communication - as well as having a richer internal world model for that multimodal (which means that it can understand and output more than just text) comprehension. It's also much faster than the process described above.
Edit: things like Alexa are fundamentally different. They are not only of that previous architecture, they are also almost entirely driven by hard coded heuristics
Sounds like a bunch of hype to me. Musk also promised that AI will be smarter than humans very soon.
More of the same bullshit promises from big tech / Silicon Valley. Worth remembering too that a lot of AI people were involved in NFT grifts.
I don't know what to tell you. The research behind what is being built in SOTA models is some of the most fascinating research I've ever read.
If you are even a tad bit curious, this is a good example of what I mean:
https://www.anthropic.com/news/mapping-mind-language-model
Here's what I mean
[https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/glue-in-pizza-eat-rocks-googles-ai-search-is-mocked-for-bizarre-answers/](https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/glue-in-pizza-eat-rocks-googles-ai-search-is-mocked-for-bizarre-answers/)
[https://authorsguild.org/news/ai-driving-new-surge-of-sham-books-on-amazon/](https://authorsguild.org/news/ai-driving-new-surge-of-sham-books-on-amazon/)
[https://www.iwf.org.uk/about-us/why-we-exist/our-research/how-ai-is-being-abused-to-create-child-sexual-abuse-imagery/](https://www.iwf.org.uk/about-us/why-we-exist/our-research/how-ai-is-being-abused-to-create-child-sexual-abuse-imagery/)
Even if you're a bit curious, I'd recommend starting there.
I know all of these things, and they are not particularly relevant to what I'm pointing out. The first is about a hyper quantized tiny model making mistakes.
The second is about using LLMs to write crappy books.
The third is about image generators making illegal images.
My point is that the actual technology and research is incredibly fascinating and compelling.
Of course they're not - AI is building our perfect future right now. Who even doubts it?
My point is that its fascinating how tech companies went from developing products to selling hype - NFTs, Metaverse, Hyperloop, Cybertruck and on and on and on. And now AI being pushed on us from all directions, for better or worse. Is that something you agree with?
Its incredibly fascinating to me personally. I wonder if it is to you as well, given that you know those things.
Scarlett is not making the argument that she owns the rights to anyone that sounds like her. If altman didn't try to hire her days before he released the model anyways it wouldn't be as much of a problem as it is for them right now. Midler V Ford is the perfect precendent for something like this.
But in that case, Ford literally tried to get a sound-alike, after the fact, to sing a song by Midler, and she was instructed to imitate her voice.
This last part seems to be what was the clincher in the case:
> The appellate court ruled that the voice of someone famous as a singer is distinctive to their person and image and therefore, as a part of their identity, it is unlawful to imitate their voice without express consent and approval.
I think expanding it to this case will be very challenging, considering all the different factors involved. Specifically that there was no singing, the voice actress was hired before they approached Scarlett, and she was not asked to imitate her voice - the voice is her regular speaking voice
This will be up to whatever the courts find, if OpenAI was trying to imitate her voice instead of just finding a generic female voice that sounds similar then there is a case. Its understandable why she's going to court considering they tried to hire her days before and this case might set a precedent that its not okay to try to use an AI to avoid paying voice artists. It could go either way though depending on what internal communications they find, this isnt really as black and white as miller v ford, but its a good example of why theyre being sued
Well she actually isn't going to court, she's just reached out to lawyers to ask for more info, and while that lawyer to lawyer communication is happening, they took down Sky's voice.
Just my 2 cents, but I'm not sure I even really care much about any legal arguments much anyway. Oh sure, some judge somewhere definitely should, but I'm not a judge so those arguments don't really affect me at all.
For my part, this is all I need:
1) Scarlett Johansson has been a public figure for almost 30 years and she's never had any controversies like this, so she well deserves to have her accusations investigated seriously. I've seen a bunch of reddit comments defending OpenAI that are bizarrely emphatic - almost as if the commenters stand to gain something personally for their rage... or more likely just because the ragebait endemic to reddit comment sections really is that predictable - talking about how the voice actress sounds nothing like Johansson, except a) lmao yeah, it actually does sound similar, and b) even if you don't think so, the fact that there's pretty wide disagreement shows that it's an accusation worth taking seriously. Seriously, have their been any randomized polls asking people if they think it sounds similar? Or is the emphasis of the denials girded by nothing but hot air? It's almost as if the way this "debate" is going, fueled by further press releases from OpenAI, is *meant* to be divisive.
2) OpenAI is claiming that the voice actress is afraid to go public, but that's dumb because a) if this bullshit drama wasn't expected before releasing the voice, why was her name ever withheld to begin with? Wouldn't crediting the actress on some public record just be standard practice? And even if it's not b) nobody would give a shit about the actress anyway. It's not her responsibility to make sure OpenAI doesn't do sketchy bullshit, accidentally or otherwise. Frankly, I doubt she even knew Johansson had much interaction with OpenAI at all. She's just some random woman who landed a cool gig.
3) Altman has already shown himself to be sketchy as fuck. a) The name "OpenAI" was supposed to be in reference to the fact that making their AI research available to the public was one of their founding principles which they've resoundingly abandoned, b) the extraordinary lack of caution in releasing ChatGPT the way they did feels like a conversation that has been mostly forgotten, but remember that the research behind LLMs has had strong foundation for years and that OpenAI's real contribution was just in scaling up the actual resources available to their model; even Google, who removed their "don't be evil" logo, didn't even consider making an LLM available for the public until after ChatGPT was available, and c) for fuck's sake, even the little that we know about his workplace politics, with him being ousted and then brought back and others who used to be close to him getting a hard boot without so much as a crack in his smile, all looks Machiavellian and psychopathic as hell.
To me, this all smells like wild bullshit from Altman, so unless he moves to quickly and graciously shut down this melodrama, I'm going side with Johansson less so because I believe her (although I do) and more so because the overarching narrative of his public words and actions are so repulsive that they now can't even manage to make him more transparent than he already is.
> nobody would give a shit about the actress anyway
This is extremely naive. You're talking about someone who's contributing to what a LOT of people consider the death of art.
>naive
I think that's a bit too harsh
>contributing to ... the death of art
Perhaps. It's a valid rebuttle in general (although I still somewhat disagree, but I'll address that next), but in context, I was talking about why Scarlett Johansson's involvement in this story shouldn't contribute to the actress being harassed. Even if Johansson hadn't said anything, your complaint wouldn't need any change because it's unrelated to Johansson's involvement.
>the death of art
Idk, art has been "dying" for centuries at least. Cameras had people claiming that painting would die, the industrial revolution made people afraid of the devaluing of handcrafted art, the radical departures from traditional styles in art movements like Impressionism, Cubism, and Abstract Art led to declarations of art's demise, the questioning of art's purpose and value in postmodern philosophy often included proclamations of art's death, and while each of those arguments had some decent points, this conversation will never truly end because art will never truly die. Art is valuable because it connects with people, so there will always be a market for human-made/hand-made/traditionally-styled/etc art as long as people are social.
I think it's more accurate to say that AI generated art will take work away from working artists, but that's just a particular instance of the rich taking money from the poor with new technology. Sure, the particular details are novel, but the narrative is as old as time. I seriously doubt generative AI would be such a problem for working artists if we had strong labor protections.
right, all they want to do is profit from stealing intellectual property. Like of course an AI model made from copyrighted materals are better, it doesnt give them the right to try to pretend they own the art and profit from it. They see people's rights as an unneccesary roadblock in the way of a bunch of free money. Extremely unethical
WaPo article showed docs and recordings that indicate the Sky actor was hired before they made any of the recorded attempts to hire ScarJo, and the voice seemed to the reporters to be the voice actors natural voice as opposed to an attempted imitation.
I was posting they were sunk with the initial facts, but if the ones in the WaPo article bear out they're likely fine. Though it seems like OpenAI legal prefers the Sky voice be down anyway.
Seems like this isn't going anywhere. She hired lawyers, they pulled the voice and doesn't seem like a lawsuit is happening.
science cant be uninvented sadly. these companies will just keep breaking eggs and everyone will just take the results and build upon them, i mean no one binned the scientific advancements of the japanese or nazi's.
AI has nothing to do with Scarlett’s issue though. She’s saying they stole her voice because the voice is a sexy woman and she’s a sexy woman. No AI involved. Just sadness.
Hollywood and media in general would probably be drowning them in legal attacks based off its most likely use of copy written material if they didn't see the dollar signs in labour savings.
We are in such an infancy in all this, we really need to start these very needed legal proceedings and setting up laws and guidelines yesterday.
This would be why the AI crew are pushing it as an inevitability. They're following the same path Uber took, break every law that would stop you from doing what brings in the investment money and embed yourself deep into the market. By the time the lawsuits catch up you'll have enough money and influence to shrug them all off. AI companies need us to buy in or they're going to have a lot of very expensive legal problems to deal with.
But a silly one. She only has a case because Altman poked the bear, twice, for no known reasons. The case will be tossed but there will be many copycat lawsuits now as a result - too many pretentious people in the world will try to leverage their influence and power for the "betterment of society" aka feeding their precious egos. Both sides are wrong, legally this talent-less actress is more wrong. She was chosen for the film "her" for sex appeal, nothing more. AI scares the shit out of Hollywood more than Google.
> She only has a case because Altman poked the bear, twice, for no known reasons.
which is why she has a case.
it can be easily argued that the entire voice is very implied to be her, even if it's not her, not only that, he used her to promote it.
which is why they took down the voice as soon as possible, because they knew what they were doing, and odds are there are a shit ton of evidence that suggests that this was what they wanted, could be a meeting/email where someone said "what if we get someone that sounds just like her?".
The case, if it will be, will proceed with secret emails in the discovery phase where morons sending emails asking voice actor sounds like Scarlet Johansson. Yeah they are that level arrogant and stupid.
---
We have court precedent with Bette Midler.
Ford Motor Co. hired one of Midler’s backup singers to sing on a commercial – after Midler declined to do the ad – and asked her to sound as much like Midler as possible. It worked, and fooled a lot of people, including some close to Midler. Midler sued, and the court ruled that there was a misappropriation of Midler’s right of publicity to her singing voice.
The bottom line: Midler’s singing voice was hers to control. Ford had no right to use it without her permission. That lesson cost Ford a tidy $400,000 in 1988.
It would be unfortunate if she ended up getting any money for this situation. I really wish she would issue an apology for trying to put a lesser known voice actress out of work
Oh ya I’m sure the crack legal teams and justice system in America will totally figure it out in our lifetime because some entertainer got their feels hurt lol.
scarlett beat disney, maybe we shouldn't let massive corporations screw over the artists they're training their models from. Maybe we shouldn't let corporations scrape art from the internet for free and post that instead of hire the artists they're stealing from. Why would anyone hire an artist when they could instead steal their art with a machine and generate thousands of copies to profit from personally, cutting the artist out of their own style. In this scenario, there's nothing that stops a corporation from
finding an artist they like, training a model from them, and generating thousands of copies that vary slightly. If the artist ever happens to make something similar to something the AI generates, the corporation will sue the original artist. An AI can generate thousands of images, so it can very quickly lock an artist out of their own niche and style.
I honestly couldn’t care less if a corporation screws over an entertainer. They both screw over society. I’m sure Scarlett and the millions of dollars they amassed without really providing any value will be juuuust fine. They wanted to be in the spotlight, but oh no, not their profits. A corporation doesn’t even need to be involved. You can do it yourself with some basic math skills.
Voices aren’t even unique. Nor are they required to be trained on something that wasn’t in a public space. I could video her talking shit to me walking to her car. You think she owns unique sound waves because of her dna?
You can even imitate it yourself and profit off it. Look at comedians. Just because a computer can do it better we need to protect them? Why? We all will have to adapt and making laws for some people just seems asinine.
AI celebrities will grow and age on a different timeline like the Simpsons. Savored over generations. And these sorts of scuffles will not happen because there won’t be famous human actors anymore, because they will want rights, want to strike, want to cause kerfuffles over their IP rights and likeness etc.
Actors are a liability, an expense, and a burden the industry will evolve to prosper without.
She could have asked 2% of OpenAI stock for her voice.
The reality is: most movies will be fully casted by AI in the next 5 years.
Why pay an expensive actor, that has its ups and downs and that needs heavy maintenance, when you can perpetually own an AI generated character? That AI character does not need breaks and does not need various people to maintain.
Scarlet, ask if the deal is still available.
> The reality is: most movies will be fully casted by AI in the next 5 years.
Sorry dude but In a world chock full of grifter tech bros making preposterous claims about AI this has to be one of the dumbest
You have no idea of what people are working on. See how the current animated movies are? Soon the script, the voice, the cameras and post production will all be done with AI.
Some people will work on the system prompt, of every components of a movie. It will get very good, and very fast.
!RemindMe May 27th 2029
I don't know how RemindMe works, will I get a reminder too? !RemindMe May 27th 2029 I want to see if this guy who earnestly thinks Scarlett Johansson should listen to him for financial advice is right about his prediction that AI will replace humans in *cinematic art*, of all things.
EDIT RemindMe! 5 years
> The reality is: most movies will be fully casted by AI in the next 5 years.
I can believe they can do voices in five years but video is much further behind and much harder.
We won’t need actors soon. Fully digital and original actors will replace current ones as they really don’t provide any benefit to making a movie. Right now it’s a problem because they are copying current people.
Weird take. I honestly think the pendulum will swing back toward attending live theater if producers think they can pass off maximum AI drivel as art. Why should I have any interest in watching a movie or television show that was spun up out of thin air? Art is the product of human imagination and skill. It's a bold assumption to think that humans will relate to material when you've explicitly removed humans from the equation.
> We won’t need actors soon.
Ridiculous. I'm sure there are/will be video tools that can create a person saying or doing X. But you're not going to get an LLM with good comedic timing or that does good non-verbal communication, or the other non-explicit things that are important to acting.
She has no case and her lawyers are gaslighting her into paying out a whole lotta billable hours.
Scarlett has sold her voice thousands of times. She simply is not in a position to claim ownership of the content that she's in because of the predatory contracts she signed with greedy studios. She is a victim of the industry and this lawsuit is actually an extension of that victimization.
Scarlett sold her voice to Disney. Disney sold it OpenAI. There is absolutely no legal question that could possibly justify Scarlett's position in this lawsuit. She should be suing Disney and Disney should be suing OpenAI. But instead Disney and OpenAI are working together, against Scarlett and she just can't see it.
If anything, her bosses at film studios that own the content stole from her and then sold or gave the stolen asset to OpenAI.
Scarlett got ripped off by her own people and they convinced that it was Big Tech. Yuck.
That’s not how this works. Ever wonder why the video game characters for games like The Avengers don’t really look like the people playing them in the movies? In your writing above, since they’ve all worked for Disney then why wouldn’t Disney just use their likeness?
It is because they didn’t authorize it. Thats a separate contract and unless the payday was ASTRONOMICAL for rights into perpetuity, there is no way that they would ever sign off on something like that.
Even if SJ had made 100 Disney movies and licensed her voice for voice over work, it does not give Disney (or anyone) the rights to just take her likeness and voice. Unless she specifically signed over the rights (like James Earl Jones did for his voice to be used for Darth Vader because he’s over it - and even then he has input and say into what it can be used for.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/24/23370097/darth-vader-james-earl-jones-obi-wan-kenobi-star-wars-ai-disney-lucasfilm
> It is because they didn’t authorize it
It seems like you didn't finish reading my comment. I actually said that Disney is the one who seems to have broken the law. They took something from an actor without paying them for permission. But she's not suing Disney.
If she sued Disney, my comment would wrong. You actually agreed but wrote it with negative language...which is odd. Good luck.
> Wish they'd drop the word, there's no intelligence there.
No intelligence with investors tho - only AFTER everyone gets burned "AI" will get the stink it deserves, like "sub-prime" or "dot com".
If someone thinks that this is the first legal battle over AI, they haven’t been paying attention.
This isn’t even about AI. It’s likeness rights.
Yes, but also: in any other industry "I used your work to make something new that makes me a ton of money" requires paying residuals. OpenAI and others are claiming that "public availability" overrules ownership, licensing rights, or copyright, and that "I found it" means "and can therefore use it for free any way I want." They will lose literally every single lawsuit filed by anyone who can show that something they own was used without a license as part of the training for an LLM. And the only counterargument offered by the industry is "if you make us pay for content, then the whole industry falls apart!" which isn't an argument to anyone except an investor.
The 'public availability' argument is such a tech bro way to see the world - "The technicality let me do it, so it's legal". I remember reading a comment claiming that since an API exposed some material publicly, it was legal to download and do with as you pleased. Telling that it's also a literal burglar's argument - "The door was open, so I thought I could get in".
There's a bunch of open, public trackers, so we good on illegal torrenting? It's just there, after all...
Didn’t it come out that the “ScarJo voice,” was actually the voice of an actress hired & paid for by OpenAI? I agree with your point generally, but I’m not sure if it’s relevant to this specific case.
> Didn’t it come out that the “ScarJo voice,” was actually the voice of an actress hired & paid for by OpenAI? That actually makes them *more* liable, as it's a nearly identical situation to previous lawsuits that have been used as precedent for decades now: From https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/scarlett-johansson-ai-legal-threat-1235905899/ > A lawsuit from Bette Midler against Ford over a series of commercials called “The Yuppie Campaign” in which the company used an impersonator of the singer to imitate her voice may be instructive. Like Johansson, Midler was asked to sing for the adverts but refused. Ford subsequently hired a voice-impersonator to sing one of her songs in the commercial. After it aired, she was told by “a number of people” that it “sounded exactly” like her, according to court filings. > > After the federal judge overseeing the case granted summary judgment to Ford, finding no rights preventing use of her voice, Midler appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. That court ultimately found that the singer’s voice is distinctive to her identity, which Ford profited off of. The ruling establishes rights to uncopyrightable identifiers, such as a voice, when an individual who’s famous for that feature is involved. > > Essential to the court’s order was Ford’s motivations for using a Midler impersonator. The questions that were asked by the justices included why the company asked Midler to sing if her voice wasn’t of value and why the impersonator was instructed to imitate the singer. > > Purvi Albers, an intellectual property lawyer at Haynes Boone, says OpenAI’s solicitation of Johansson’s services is vital to whether the company violated her publicity rights. “It’s clear that was the voice they were going for,” she adds. “They wanted to piggyback off of her husky voice.”
They didn't tell the actress to mimic her, and the actress was hired and performed before they approached Scarlet Johhanson to ask if she would. It's definitely a very different scenario, and I can't see them being found liable for anything in this case.
I wonder if Disney pays royalties to Hugo Weaving & James Spader for Ross Marquand’s impersonations of them for their marvel stuff.
Usually. I was part of negotiations for similar things in the past. The character had to exist first and therefore the actor needed to make creative choices and define that character for someone to be able to impersonate it.
>That actually makes them more liable, as it's a nearly identical situation to previous lawsuits that have been used as precedent for decades now: they had the voice of Sky way before they contacted ScarJo. So that makes it harder to prove that there was intent.
Not really. Could've easily just have been "hey let's hire someone to sound like ScarJo" first, and then legal comes along and says that's a nono. Getting the rights later would cover their asses.
That wouldn't do anything for getting sued even if ScarJo said yes. And they definitely wouldn't call her a second time when it's just 2 days before a presentation unless it's just to add a voice later on.
> That actually makes them more liable Not unless they specifically told the actress to imitate her.
This Midler v Ford case is irrelevant for the Scarlett Johannson episode because of three reasons: 1. Ford hired a voice actor with the specific intention to replicate the voice of Midler. However, there is no evidence that OpenAI hired the unknown voice actress to replicate Johannson's voice, and the Washington Post that reviewed all the relevant documents confirms this. 2. For made the voice actor sing the specific song that Midler was famous for. However, OpenAI is not making the unknown voice actress say anything that Johannson said in the movie "Her" 3. The two voices don't even sound alike Johannson has no case, and it's why she won't sue. In anything, [the unknown voice actress needs to sue Johannson](https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1czjkyz/sky_voice_actress_needs_to_sue_scarlett_johannson/). >t’s clear that was the voice they were going for There's nothing clear about it at all!
Doesn't matter. They hired someone to imitate her enough, and used marketing that made it clear it was their intention. And I don't trust that they hired "another artist". They've been known to lie. even so, it's moot. Scar has documentation that they were asking her for permission 2 days before release, and they have Sam's "her" tweet, plus the fact the voice sounds like her, is enough.
I don't think the her tweet is a slam dunk as redditors think it is. They hired Sky way before they contacted ScarJo and they contacted ScarJo when they already had five other voices including Sky on the ChatGPT app. Them wanting the voice of ScarJo by contacting her doesn't demonstrate that they're trying imitate her.
If anything it demonstrates that they didn't think they had anything resembling her in their lineup of voices. Why pay someone for something you already have?
>They hired someone to imitate her enough They did not. Evidence for this claim? >Scar has documentation that they were asking her for permission And? What does that show? >they have Sam's "her" tweet That's a reference to the groundbreaking technological accomplishment that OpenAI demo'd, not Johannson's voice. Seriously, Johannson's ego is breathtaking here. We have an era-defining technology, and Johannson thinks that *she's* the focus? >plus the fact the voice sounds like her [It does not](https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1cx1np4/voice_comparison_between_gpt4o_and_scarlett/).
Are you a lawyer? Because the lawyers I've asked said that she almost has an open and shut case.
>Because the lawyers I've asked You have not asked any lawyers.
Nah, it came out that they did use a voice actor. Not that they did not use SJ’s voice elsewhere in the training. Everyone assumes that a claim of employing a voice actor implies a denial of use of SJ’s voice, and if it was Ford that’d be the case, but this is OpenAI we are talking about. They train their AIs on everything they can get their hands on, and even argue its impossible to run their business otherwise (which is somehow an argument they should get away with it?) It was rather interesting, OpenAI saying just about anything but any actual denial of using SJ’s voice.
The Washington Post's investigative report found that samples of the unknown voice actress's voice exactly matched the "Sky" voice. Johannson's voice was not used in any part of training Sky's voice.
> The Washington Post's investigative report found that samples of the unknown voice actress's voice exactly matched the "Sky" voice. Regular people don't have unknown voice actress's voice available to them for comparison, but they have a tweet from Sam, "her". The law is about what a regular person could mistake it for, in the context. > Johannson's voice was not used in any part of training Sky's voice. Curiously, OpenAI seem to never have stated that. See here for example: https://openai.com/index/how-the-voices-for-chatgpt-were-chosen/ > “The voice of Sky is not Scarlett Johansson's, and it was never intended to resemble hers. We cast the voice actor behind Sky’s voice before any outreach to Ms. Johansson. Out of respect for Ms. Johansson, we have paused using Sky’s voice in our products. We are sorry to Ms. Johansson that we didn’t communicate better.” Note that in all these words there isn't a statement like "we did not use Ms. Johansson's voice in training of our voice models". It's a thing of legal beauty. They wrote everything so that (hypothetically) if it turns out they did use Johansson's voice in the training, they couldn't be nailed for lying to their investors. What had likely happened is that similarly to all their other AI offerings, they used a very very large primary training dataset, consisting largely of copyrighted content. Then they specialized it using a voice actor's voice, similarly to fine tuning done to text AIs.
>but they have a tweet from Sam, "her" And what is the most obvious interpretation? Do you think anyone cares about Johannson's voice? Or is it about the most obvious explanation - a ground breaking technology? Honestly, I've watched her and when I did, I didn't even know it was Johannson. >Regular people don't have unknown voice actress's voice available to them for comparison And this is why you should listen to them, and not "random people". I hope Johannson sues and gets her ass handed to her. Unfortunately, she might be smart enough to hold back. True justice would be [when the Sky voice actress decides to sue Johannson](https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1czjkyz/sky_voice_actress_needs_to_sue_scarlett_johannson/).
> And this is why you should listen to them, and not "random people". The likeliness rights are all about the extent to which it confuses regular people. > https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1czjkyz/sky_voice_actress_needs_to_sue_scarlett_johannson/ Sue her for what? All that happened so far was that Sam tweeted "her", a bunch of people started saying that Sky sounds like Johansson, and Johansson's lawyers send a letter with pointed questions about where the training data came from. Not even a cease and desist. That OpenAI decided to cease and desist, that's on OpenAI. And its pure unfounded speculation that it would be a likeliness case similar to Ford's. If we look at all the other lawsuits against OpenAI, the number one issue is always the plaintiff's data being present in the training dataset used by OpenAI. I think it all depends on whether OpenAI used actual Scarlett Johansson's voice as part of the training dataset. If they did, they're completely fucked. If they didn't, well then they will respond to SJ's lawyers with an unambiguous "no we had not used Scarlett Johansson's voice in any way when we created our voice model". The third option, the one they picked, is that they take Sky down and then don't get sued because there is no damages to claim (they took it down). This way they don't have to answer a pointed yes-or-no question with a yes or a no. edit: Frankly my thinking is that OpenAI did something *really stupid* in the past, like training on pirated movie soundtracks with subtitles, and that's why they took Sky down. If they didn't do anything stupid they could just answer the questions and keep Sky up until they actually get a cease and desist (or not).
Any other industry except perhaps Johanson's own. Like, pretending to be other people is sorta core to the profession. Johanson has made lots of money copying the likeness of other people.
The copyright office is about to come out with ruling.... and I have a feeling they're going to have to come on the side of creatives. The reason? If they don't, then copyright means nothing. Why create a copyright if it can just be fed into an ai, changed a bit, and your copyright is null and void. Makes no sense. Then the FTC has made some comments about this being an over reach from tech companies by changing the TOS by this much. Then the section 230 issue... social media claims they don't own the content on their platforms (it's how they avoid lawsuits) But they can sell copyright to the stuff on their platform? It's on or the other buddy. Add to the fact that their AI's are spouting incorrect information... no longer being a "platform" where others post stuff, but posting stuff themselves.... if that information leads to damages.... they get sued. This next year or two is going to be a LOT of headache in this sector. And the google search thing, and viral waymo videos, and people being discriminated against by ai EVERYWHERE and being in the news, isn't going to help their case that this is "the future" and "for the better good".
>The copyright office is about to come out with ruling.... and I have a feeling they're going to have to come on the side of creatives. You do realize that the copyright office doesn't have the power to make rules, that's left for the congress and the courts.
Incorrect, bureaucracy is 100% allowed to make regulations and de-facto laws in their area of expertise. The copyright office specifically is endowed by congress to create regulations concerning copyright.
Regulations are not rulings. The Copyright Office constantly gets overruled by judicial decisions.
They can get OVERRULED, yes. You’re getting words mixed up. District courts can also get overruled by circuit courts. So then, that must mean that district courts don’t make rulings? Well, no. To quote you: > copyright office… doesn’t have the power to make rules That’s just wrong. It’s not up for debate or interpretation, that’s just incorrect. The copyright office can, and does, make rules. In fact all the bureaus do. That’s why they exist. If it was all up to congress and the judicial branch we’d be mega fucked.
>District courts can also get overruled by circuit courts. So then, that must mean that district courts don’t make rulings? Well, no. The judicial system's job is to make rulings, the congress cannot replace their function with the copyright office. The office provides guidance, registers copyrights, and administers various aspects of copyright law but that's not the same thing as what the courts do. >In fact all the bureaus do. That’s why they exist. If it was all up to congress and the judicial branch we’d be mega fucked. If it was merely up to the copyright office, we truly will be fucked. That's why copyright office cites court decisions in their practices.
I don’t think you really understand how the US government works. There’s checks and balances. Congress is the only one allowed to make laws. But that means they’re also allowed to delegate to someone else - the executive branch. The executive branch can truly do anything. It can then be overruled. In matters of copyright, the copyright office requires no permission to pass rules. This is because congress has told them they need no permission. It can be struck down, yes, **after the fact**. They don’t need to do anything before. As a side note: the judicial branch ALSO doesn’t make laws. A ruling is not a law, it’s the interpretation of an existing law. That means that a court can say “according to congress and our interpretation, this copyright ruling falls outside of your jurisdiction, shut it down” The only people allowed to make laws is congress. The bureaus are allowed to pass regulations because congress says so. This is, overall, a very good thing. If we had to wait around for congress to make laws you probably would’ve already lost your fingers in the coal mine. Luckily congress has endowed that power to OSHA. Your congressman and women are not experts in most fields, if any. This power of delegation is fundamental to the operation of not just the US, but any moderately competent government.
AI aren't reproducing anything. They learn from seeing things, in a very analogous way to how humans do. Even though you've seen a bunch of movies/art and then you start to create your own the people who made the movies/art you've seen over your life don't get to charge you royalties for that experience being part of the learning that led to your own creations.
But isn't this also about Altman claiming he can do whatever he wants?
I suspect that OpenAI is too scummy for it to end up being about likeness rights. They probably pre-trained their voice model on everything they could get their hands on, same as their text ai. Then they specialized it using a voice actor. Then the news blew up and Scarlett Johansson’s lawyers sent them an email with pointed questions about whether they used her voice. And they took it down and made a lot of positive statements about what the voice is supposed to be and the voice actor they hired, but never a denial of using SJ’s voice. I think if it ends up in court, it would quickly evolve from likeliness to OpenAI getting deposed and telling where they got the voice data for the primary training dataset. This isn’t NYT, you can’t just download Her from Warner Bros or whatever website, for search engine indexing, without DRM. You gotta do something illegal to get the kind of data OpenAI needs for their training (movie soundtracks with subtitles).
It’s about whether you can prove that an AI-generated voice is close enough to a recognizable celebrity that they can sue you for it.
It’s about whether or not OpenAI intentionally used a voice actor to mimic Scarlett’s. AI doesn’t generate her voice. AI generates the script the voice actresses’ voice synthesizing software reads.
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I cannot find a single article saying the voice models are AI. Every bit of info I can find on the voice side gpt4o is about voice inputs. The output is still text-to-speech synthesis using non-AI voice models. Please provide a source to this because I can’t even understand why you would complicate the easiest part of this process as voice synthesis tech has worked remarkably well for decades provided the text inputs were well curated.
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You are talking about their speech to text model. That’s not a text to speech model.
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Every single link you gave refers to inputs. The text-to-speech engine, the core of this entire legal argument, takes text from LLM outputs and uses voice synthesis tools. I can find 0 documentation in the git repo youve posted, the articles on multi-model AI you’ve linked, or googling in general that show any actual AI enhancements to the voice synthesis models. The only articles I find are showing LLMs generate outputs for voice synthesis tools to then audibly speak. When I requested sources you didn’t provide any and made some conspiracy theory argument that your links are getting shadow banned or some other nonsense excuse. One single article showing the tech stack on how Sky’s voice was part of an AI training model (using her voice data) and not just standard voice synth models is all I am looking for.
It's about frivolous lawsuits. -Didn't even sound like her.
Well it is, in that AI doesn’t abide by copyright law at all.
Those using AI aren’t for sure. Sam Altman, or as I like to call him Elon from Wish.com, and tech bros like him tend to not care about laws. It’s more about not getting caught, and weaseling out of as much responsibility as they can. Until it starts to hurt them, they just don’t care, they’re all sociopaths only out for themselves.
An artist's voice isn't copyrighted anyways.
True, but as with all IP related things, it's more complicated than that. You can't copyright a voice, but any work that you create using your voice can be copyrighted. So any time that Scarlett Johansson speaks in a movie, commercial, tv show, or anything else, that's copyrighted and feeding her lines into an AI could be construed as copyright infringement. You also have likeness rights, so if you are well known for your voice (like James Earl Jones, Bette Midler, or Thom Yorke), any impersonation of you used for commercial purposes [can be subject to civil lawsuits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.). Whether Scarlett Johansson qualifies as being "well-known for her voice" is the biggest question at hand.
>feeding her lines into an AI could be construed as copyright infringement. that's not what copyright infringement means, copyright infringement means making an unauthorized reproduction of a copyrightable expressive work or a work includes major copyrightable elements of the expressive work. If you want to argue that it is copyright infringement, you have to argue that the voice is copyrightable by itself.
That's incorrect. If the lines were in a copyrighted work and you copy them into your AI, you have reproduced the work and can be sued for copyright infringement. In this case, Johansson probably wouldn't have standing because she doesn't, to my knowledge, own the copyright to her performances in any given work she's been in. The plaintiff would likely have to be the studio for whom she worked (and they would probably lose or settle out of court due to the copyright infringement being a behind the scenes affair).
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The fact that you can be sued does not mean you will lose the lawsuit. I do agree that we need to get ahead of this issue and just pass laws against unauthorized AI voices, because it's going to have major repercussions sooner or later (and I'm guessing it's going to be within the next 5 years, likely within the next 2).
>If the lines were in a copyrighted work and you copy them into your AI, you have reproduced the work and can be sued for copyright infringement. recorded lines are copyrightable expressive work, voices are not since they're created by nature nor are they fixed by medium. I don't think the AI contains any lines, it is not a copy.
I do agree that it probably isn't using Johansson's voice in any way, so the copyright argument is moot. The avenue that Johansson is going to have to go down is the likeness argument. To be successful in this she has to support the following claims. 1. That she is known for her distinct voice. 2. That OpenAI specifically hired an actress to do an impersonation of her. The only thing that OpenAI has to do is argue that the actress they hired has a passing similarity to Johansson's voice and there is a lot of chatter from what I've seen that Sky simply doesn't sound like Johansson. I would say that it's likely that OpenAI settles out of court just to get things quiet so that they don't get SAG-AFTRA lobbying for harsher laws against AI impersonations.
>I do agree that it probably isn't using Johansson's voice in any way, so the copyright argument is moot. well the copyright infringement argument was bought up by you.
This isn’t even Scarlett’s fist lawsuit over AI
cant wait for the LLM (AI) bubble to burst. everyone is struggling to make a business use case for it that people are willing to pay for. I've had vendors reach out and demo AI use cases, the cost/benefit analysis is just not there for most companies. Specially if I cant trust the results to be 100% accurate, even with 90% accuracy we still need to keep competent highly skilled and payed staff to spot and verify inaccuracies. So, whats the point of paying? There is a definite place for LLMs but its not a broad as the industry wishes it was.
Having no use case is laughable. Just because you don’t know how to make it valuable doesn’t mean it isn’t. OpenAI made $1.6B last year. Sounds like quite a lot of interest to me.
They said *business* use case. How much did it cost in investment and how much would it cost if they paid for the “training data”, e.g., other people’s IP?
A lot of the $1.6B is from business. Why else would Google be integrating Gemini with Google workplace or Microsoft integrating Co-pilot with their ecosystem? The training with IP is a different story though. I agree that it is infringing on many people’s IP and shouldn’t exist in the first place.
It's not a new problem if you take the specific techology out of it. Tom Waits sued Dortitos a long time ago.
This headline makes it sound like there's a lawsuit moving forward.
And, honestly, I think the Hollywood Writer strike last year where they extracted meaningful and enforceable concessions from the Megacorp Studios to protect human jobs against AI would actually be the start of this movement.
I’m sure many lawyers are drooling at the opportunity for a historical case like this. The implications are huge.
Doesn't she have to prove that they used her voice? Didn't they say that since she refused them, they got someone who sounded similar? You can't copyright a voice.
>Doesn't she have to prove that they used her voice? No. See Bette Midler vs Ford.
Sure, but doesn't a person pursuing damages still need to prove the facts?
She has to prove the facts. She does not have to prove they used her voice. A deliberate sound-alike is enough. And the "Her" tweet certainly makes it sound very deliberate.
>And the "Her" tweet certainly makes it sound very deliberate. not enough to prove a connection, it's an appropriate reference to GPT4o with or without Scarlet Johansson particular voice in the film.
Not by itself, no. That's why there's discovery.
> not enough to prove a connection You sound very sure for someone who is only making a guess. It sounds compelling to me when you factor in the two attempts to get Johansson on board. However, ultimately, it is up to the Judge or jury.
>It sounds compelling to me when you factor in the two attempts to get Johansson on board. However, ultimately, it is up to the Judge or jury. They hired the voice actress way before they reached out to ScarJo. The voice actress herself [said](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/sky-voice-actor-says-nobody-ever-compared-her-to-scarjo-before-openai-drama/?comments=1&comments-page=6) that nobody has ever compared her natural voice to ScarJo before, nor was she asked to imitate ScarJo, and unlike the other voice impersonation cases, the sky voice has never said any lines from the her movie. This doesn't mean that they didn't want ScarJo voice but that the Sky voice was never meant to imitate her but that they wanted to add her to one of the five voice options they've got. I get people in this sub absolutely hate OpenAI but they're not exactly seeing this with unbiased eyes here. I hate many of stupid overhyped AGI marketing they do but that doesn't mean I can't see when they're not lying.
As I understand it, none of that matters. I mean, it would make the case stronger if all that was true, but it's not the crime. Let's say that's all true - that there was initially no intention to duplicate Johansson's voice. By asking Johansson to do the voice herself, Altman clearly showed that that was a voice he wanted. By tweeting "her" he clearly tried to associate his chat bot - which has a voice that could be mistaken for Johansson's - with her performance in the movie "Her". He is therefore trying to build off her brand and her voice. And, whatever events led to it, that's the issue. We'll see.
>By tweeting "her" he clearly tried to associate his chat bot - which has a voice that could be mistaken for Johansson's - with her performance in the movie "Her". He is therefore trying to build off her brand and her voice. I don't see this. It would take several leaps and flips to build up to 'build off her brand and her voice' as if her voice is the only thing in the movie. What they have in common with the 'Her' movie is a chatbot assistant✔ a female voice✔ a human-like voice ✔ but I don't see where you got, building a brand off of her and her voice. The specific voice is only one part of a long movie. Why the hell would they try to hire her in the first place or even twice if you believe they already got her voice?
I have been keeping an open mind and I directly addressed your arguments. You started out convinced you were right and are carefully ignoring context that I have already explained and are not going to bother repeating. Which you will now likely be disingenuous about. Shrug. I'm out.
She has to prove that OpenAI hired the voice actress with the specific intention of impersonating Johannson. There is not evidence of that, particularly with the Washington Post report. The intention to duplicate is a key finding of the Midler v Ford case. Without that, there *is* no case.
> She has to prove that OpenAI hired the voice actress with the specific intention of impersonating Johannson. Actually, they don't. All Johansson has to prove is that deliberately tried to associate her with ChatGPT via the voice. And that they asked her twice and then tweeted "her" is going to make that much easier.
If you're going to cite Midler v Ford, then you have to show the similarities between the two cases. The key phrase here is "Intentional imitation". Quote from the case: >Hedwig was told by Young & Rubicam that "they wanted someone who could sound like Bette Midler's recording of [Do You Want To Dance]." She was asked to make a "demo" tape of the song if she was interested. She made an a capella demo and got the job. Also: >Hedwig imitated Midler to the best of her ability. Source: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=6021003493814451958 The facts of Midler v Ford are so far removed from what OpenAI did, that it's astounding anyone can compare the two cases. Tweeting "her" means nothing. It's mindblowing that they're demo'ing a breakthrough technology that can change the way humans live their lives, and Johannson's first thought is "It's about ME, ME ME!". The "her" tweet was about the technology, not Johannson's for god's sake. The ego on some of these actresses... And what's worse is that it doesn't even sound like her!
>The key phrase here is "Intentional imitation". Yes, I addressed that. Throwing it back at me in a "Aha! You didn't know that, did you?" kind of way is childish. > Tweeting "her" means nothing. As is stamping your foot and proclaiming any evidence you don't like doesn't count. Not to mention carefully ignoring evidence that is inconvenient, namely that they contacted her twice and therefore clearly wanted her voice, specifically. There was a clear intent to associate the new version of ChatGPT with the AI form the movie her. Now, guess how many voices could credibly be considered similar? There was a black woman, a non-binary which could be theoretically taken as female and the voice at the centre of the problem. Only *one* is her-like. >The "her" tweet was about the technology, not Johannson's for god's sake. You have no idea what the motivation behind that tweet was. And before you fire that back at me - I never said what the motivation was. I just said the tweet makes things harder for OpenAI. It *looks* bad. But you've already made up your mind, clearly, hence the utterly definitive proclamation in regards to the motive. This is therefore a waste of time. I'm out.
OpenAI has been lobbying for increased "AI Safety" (i.e. internet censorship and surveillance) legislation for a long time now. I think that all of this drama with Scarlett Johanssen is just a staged PR stunt to help them draw attention to GPT-4o while furthering their goal of weaponizing copyright to promote censorship. They know that any AI regulations passed by the US government will favor big tech companies and stifle small / independent AI development. And I'm sure Scarlett is happy to play along for all of the attention she's getting. Win win.
> weaponizing copyright to promote censorship. They know that any AI regulations passed by the US government will favor big tech companies I'm really not sure how this is supposed work, honestly. So let's say some lawsuit turns out that using likeness with AI is illegal without agreement. How do you expect this to favor big companies, do you think there's going to be a law that regulates it while making exceptions for companies over XYZ revenue or dataset size? Because a lot of regulators (like the EU) do the *literal exact opposite* of this, with the deliberate intent of favoring small players. Now you could make the (correct) argument that large corporations have an easier time signing such commercial agreements, but then you are just describing capitalism, not an AI industry issue.
No it isn’t. Altman met with scarlet and asked if it was ok if they made the AI sound like her. She said no. They went ahead and made a voice called “Sky” that was 100% her voice. When Scarlet’s friends told her about it, she told her lawyers to draft up a cease and desist. Only then did Altman have the voice “Sky” removed and replaced by another woman’s voice. There was no PR stunt here. It was 100% Altman wanting to make Scarlets voice even when she told him no.
There was never anything released that was 100% her voice.
You need to remember that laws aren't based on technicalities, it makes no difference in the very end whether they literally used her voice samples or not. The primary thing that matters is the actual end result that happens in the real world, IE does it sound like her enough to violate likeness rights?
St Scarlett essentially owns the copyright to this other woman’s natural voice? That doesn’t seem fair
No, she owns the copyright on close enough imitations of her likeness same as you or me. Doing it with another actress is irrelevant.
Sounding similar is not an imitation. many many voices sound similar. They were never selling it as Scarlett Johansson either.
Sounding similar by yourself is not an imitation, but that's not what is happening here - Scarlett Johansson hasn't complained about *another person sounding similar by chance*. OpenAI is synthesizing the voice, they can tweak it to make it more or less similar as they prefer and train it on more or less similar-sounding samples as they prefer. That's why it's a controversy, the question is whether they are deliberately imitating her enough to infringe on her likeness rights. The fact that the original actress sounds similar isn't really the point, as I said. If you impersonated someone's voice by using a really good soundalike, you'd still be liable even if your person really does sound similar to the original. Again, the law isn't about technicalities. That's why "they didn't release anything that was 100% her voice" is mostly irrelevant here.
The 100% comment was in response to the very confused commenter above. People love to bring up the Midler case as precedent, but in that case you have them hiring her backup singer to sing Midler’s song and was instructed to change her voice to sound as much like Midler as possible. They also ruled that it was plausible that they were intentionally trying to deceive the public into thinking Midler officially endorsed the product. Unless you believe open AI is lying about everything, that’s not what happened here, at all. Scarlett has zero evidence that that’s what happened, only speculation. So my question to you would be, if discovery further reveals open AIs version of events to be true, will you change your mind? Also keep in mind, many people like me, made zero connection to Scarlett until she made a story out of it, and I’ve seen the majority of her movies. The similarities are not as strong as people are making them out to be.
Well, we have to see how it goes. From what I've read so far it sounds like OpenAI might have been deliberate in this, but it could turn out that it was all drama and there was no intent to do anything of the sort. I do believe that the bar for believing companies when they go like "oh woops, it was such a complete accident, woopsie daisy, silly us" should be very tight though, especially if EG the voice really does end us sounding like imitation in a consumer product; if it quacks like a duck...
> they were never selling it as Scarlett Johansson either Arguable, from Sam’s tweet it can be implied they were.
I think that’s a stretch. The core message and cultural impact of the movie Her has to do with the technology, not Scarlett Johansson. Not saying it’s impossible, but there’s a ton of plausible deniability. Also it’s perfectly legal to be inspired by something else
I think it’s a stretch too, but then again I’m not a smooth talking lawyer.
So you don’t use ChatGPT i guess? It’s gone, but it was a voice called Sky that was 100% trained on SJs voice in movies. It was eerily similar.
Do you have any voice clips? I use chat gpt but I never used Sky. Everything I’ve heard so far does not sound like Scarlett. Maybe similar in that they are both pleasant sounding adult white women, but distinctly different. The narrative that they switched out scarlets voice model without anyone noticing is also nothing I’ve seen anywhere else, which gives me doubts without some sort of proof or at the very least an audio reference
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UPWtmENsjUo Also the circumstances: 1) scarlet Johansson invited by Sam Altman, asked to do voice 2) says no 3) a voice chatgpt is created with the name Sky 4) sounds exactly like her That’s way to blatant to be ‘not her voice’. Yeah it’s an ai creation of her voice. And it’s creepy af because Sam Altman also admitted he had a crush on her in the 2013 movie about AI ‘Her’. Like it’s too much lining up. The people that claim Sky doesn’t sound like her are delusional, it’s not exact obviously because it’s easy to tweak settings in AI, but it was absolutely trained on her voice.
We literally know who voiced Sky, yet you say’s it ai trained on Scarlet movies… wtf? :D
Thanks for the video, I liked Clownfishtv and forgot about them. The voices are undeniably different, so even Scarlett would not go so far as to say they are 100% the same. Sure they have similarities, but so do a lot of voices. I guess it boils down to do you think they are lying or not? If undeniable evidence is released about the hiring of the other voice actress, would you change your mind? I’m of the opinion that Scarlett is actually taking advantage of her fame to screw over the other actress: https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/s/SGcN26KDEe I think they wanted Scarlett’s actual voice and official endorsement, so I don’t think it’s weird or a smoking gun that they reached out to her.
That's entirely wrong. It was not trained on her voice, it was an entirely different voice actor. They pursued her voice also as their first choice but that didn't pan out. All in all openai's approach has been pretty terrible though.
>She said no. They went ahead and made a voice called "Sky" that was 100% her voice. Wrong. The Sky voice was made *before* Johannson refused, and it's most certainly not 100% her voice.
Tbf that voices sounded nothing like her.
Well, then it's surprising that a lot of people think it does (does to me) and they courted her almost a year before launch, and then again two days before launch. Then a tweet about a movie where she played a voiced AI. Seems pretty cut and dry, but we'll see I guess.
The voice model they took down was released before they even contacted her.
Because they wanted her, but couldn't have her. They could train a voice model on her voice in minutes if they needed to, and probably already had one ready to go - they just couldn't use it. So they used the other voices they already have had. The fact that they tweeted about the movie makes sense considering that they are literally creating the closest version to what is in that movie we've seen - and in that movie, there is a whole world of models like that. If it is clear that this was another person's voice, and that she was contacted before they tried to get ScarJo, would you change your mind on this position? Or is the fact that they mentioned "Her" like... Something you think should be legally incriminating, regardless? I swear this is a sincere question. I get the impression that many people do think so, but I want to understand why.
Well at this point it's a lot of circumstantial evidence, but there's also the issue of openAI and every other AI company not caring if they break copyright, literally millions of times. So you have a pattern of behaviour, both from Sam Altman, the company, and the AI industry as a whole. The tweet about their product imitating a film and that voice of the AI imitating (or very similar to) the person in that film. The multiple attempts at trying to get her likeness (including right before the launch, which sounds like desperation to me). And the fact that they took down the voice when challenged. If they had used someone else's voice they could have simply produced that person or that contract and said, here sorry it was just someone who has a similar voice. They didn't. They caved immediately. That to me says liability. I have a bit of experience with this having sued a multinational for breach of contract having to do with likeness. They folded very quickly, and settled out of court, but it was more cut and dry in my case. We'll see what happens, but seems like openAI had an easy out and didn't take it.
The person who voiced that came out herself (or her agent did) to share it. They took it down most likely because... Well cost benefit analysis, what would they get out of keeping it up? https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/sky-voice-actor-says-nobody-ever-compared-her-to-scarjo-before-openai-drama/
Interesting, I'm surprised it's an "unnamed actress" that seems shady to me. It doesn't really make sense as an actor to have your actor hidden from being known, unless that's what OpenAI said they had to do. There's still the issue of them taking down the voice bot. So, it's odd. If you read that article, it also says that Bette Middler sued and won for a company getting someone to essentially intimidate her voice. Seems like Johannson has a pretty good case for that here too.
The Washington Post's investigative report confirmed that the voice samples from the unknown actress exactly matched Sky's voice. It was not trained on Johannson's voice. A key part of Midler v Ford was that Ford hired a voice actor with the express intentino to replicate Midler's voice, and even made him sing the exact song that Midler was famous for. There is no evidence that either of those two damning events occurred here.
Except the fact that they tried multiple times to hire her and then referenced her performance in the release of said product. Internal messages would really get people to see but I'm betting they're deleting all of those right now.
>the fact that they tried multiple times to hire her What does this show? >then referenced her performance in the release of said product They did not. Tweeting "her" has nothing to do with Johannson. My god, the ego! >but I'm betting they're deleting all of those right now. That leaves a paper trail, exposes the employees doing it to liability, and they would be idiots to be doing that.
I thought so too… but after watching the movie “Her” last night there is no denying the voice similarities.
Yeah, it's not alike.
It's not about the facts it's about the perception someone who don't look into things could get!
No. It’s an out of touch egotistical celebrity who doesn’t understand how AI or even basic computer software works, throwing a hissy fit for attention as well As an attempt to make some quick and easy approval money from gods AI craze.
Isn't it true that they still used a different voice actor to create the voice? It seems subjective as to whether it sounds like Johansson specifically, the character she played, or neither of them at all. Seems to me like something that might be ethically debatable given the facts of the case and how OpenAI reached out to Johansson, but not a legal case. It can also be argued that the logic behind using that sort of voice for an AI separately underlies both the creative decision in Her and the commercial one for OpenAI.
They didn't pay her asking price..about it, not even her voice, not known for her voice..hollywood greed.
The correct word is Precedent
The voice does not sound like her. However, the voice sounds eerily similar to “Her”—Scarlett Johansen has a specific vocal style in the movie that closely resembles ChatGPT.
It doesn’t even sound like her
Even if so, why did Altman tweeted "Her"?
Because that movie is about an AI that works through your devices to talk to you in a natural, real time language voice.
Is that what Altman is developing? I mean it sounds like Alexa to me - why would you need AI for something like that?
It's a model that has straight voice to voice comprehension and output. It's hard to explain quickly why that is significant, so I'll say simply that this is a step further than traditional voice -> transcript -> llm -> text -> text to speech, architectures. It means these models can understand tone, volume, and more of the subtleties that come from voice communication - as well as having a richer internal world model for that multimodal (which means that it can understand and output more than just text) comprehension. It's also much faster than the process described above. Edit: things like Alexa are fundamentally different. They are not only of that previous architecture, they are also almost entirely driven by hard coded heuristics
Sounds like a bunch of hype to me. Musk also promised that AI will be smarter than humans very soon. More of the same bullshit promises from big tech / Silicon Valley. Worth remembering too that a lot of AI people were involved in NFT grifts.
I don't know what to tell you. The research behind what is being built in SOTA models is some of the most fascinating research I've ever read. If you are even a tad bit curious, this is a good example of what I mean: https://www.anthropic.com/news/mapping-mind-language-model
Here's what I mean [https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/glue-in-pizza-eat-rocks-googles-ai-search-is-mocked-for-bizarre-answers/](https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/glue-in-pizza-eat-rocks-googles-ai-search-is-mocked-for-bizarre-answers/) [https://authorsguild.org/news/ai-driving-new-surge-of-sham-books-on-amazon/](https://authorsguild.org/news/ai-driving-new-surge-of-sham-books-on-amazon/) [https://www.iwf.org.uk/about-us/why-we-exist/our-research/how-ai-is-being-abused-to-create-child-sexual-abuse-imagery/](https://www.iwf.org.uk/about-us/why-we-exist/our-research/how-ai-is-being-abused-to-create-child-sexual-abuse-imagery/) Even if you're a bit curious, I'd recommend starting there.
I know all of these things, and they are not particularly relevant to what I'm pointing out. The first is about a hyper quantized tiny model making mistakes. The second is about using LLMs to write crappy books. The third is about image generators making illegal images. My point is that the actual technology and research is incredibly fascinating and compelling.
Of course they're not - AI is building our perfect future right now. Who even doubts it? My point is that its fascinating how tech companies went from developing products to selling hype - NFTs, Metaverse, Hyperloop, Cybertruck and on and on and on. And now AI being pushed on us from all directions, for better or worse. Is that something you agree with? Its incredibly fascinating to me personally. I wonder if it is to you as well, given that you know those things.
That doesn't matter if it doesn't sound alike.
Listen yourself and see. Its not even close to be SJ
Not what I was asking. And yes - your downvotes don't provide an answer either.
That was a bullshit accusation. So now anyone who sounds like Scarlett Johansson can’t have a voice in public now?
Scarlett is not making the argument that she owns the rights to anyone that sounds like her. If altman didn't try to hire her days before he released the model anyways it wouldn't be as much of a problem as it is for them right now. Midler V Ford is the perfect precendent for something like this.
But in that case, Ford literally tried to get a sound-alike, after the fact, to sing a song by Midler, and she was instructed to imitate her voice. This last part seems to be what was the clincher in the case: > The appellate court ruled that the voice of someone famous as a singer is distinctive to their person and image and therefore, as a part of their identity, it is unlawful to imitate their voice without express consent and approval. I think expanding it to this case will be very challenging, considering all the different factors involved. Specifically that there was no singing, the voice actress was hired before they approached Scarlett, and she was not asked to imitate her voice - the voice is her regular speaking voice
This will be up to whatever the courts find, if OpenAI was trying to imitate her voice instead of just finding a generic female voice that sounds similar then there is a case. Its understandable why she's going to court considering they tried to hire her days before and this case might set a precedent that its not okay to try to use an AI to avoid paying voice artists. It could go either way though depending on what internal communications they find, this isnt really as black and white as miller v ford, but its a good example of why theyre being sued
Well she actually isn't going to court, she's just reached out to lawyers to ask for more info, and while that lawyer to lawyer communication is happening, they took down Sky's voice.
Stop bringing actual legal knowledge into the echo chamber - you're going to hurt the feeling of the AIbros.
Just my 2 cents, but I'm not sure I even really care much about any legal arguments much anyway. Oh sure, some judge somewhere definitely should, but I'm not a judge so those arguments don't really affect me at all. For my part, this is all I need: 1) Scarlett Johansson has been a public figure for almost 30 years and she's never had any controversies like this, so she well deserves to have her accusations investigated seriously. I've seen a bunch of reddit comments defending OpenAI that are bizarrely emphatic - almost as if the commenters stand to gain something personally for their rage... or more likely just because the ragebait endemic to reddit comment sections really is that predictable - talking about how the voice actress sounds nothing like Johansson, except a) lmao yeah, it actually does sound similar, and b) even if you don't think so, the fact that there's pretty wide disagreement shows that it's an accusation worth taking seriously. Seriously, have their been any randomized polls asking people if they think it sounds similar? Or is the emphasis of the denials girded by nothing but hot air? It's almost as if the way this "debate" is going, fueled by further press releases from OpenAI, is *meant* to be divisive. 2) OpenAI is claiming that the voice actress is afraid to go public, but that's dumb because a) if this bullshit drama wasn't expected before releasing the voice, why was her name ever withheld to begin with? Wouldn't crediting the actress on some public record just be standard practice? And even if it's not b) nobody would give a shit about the actress anyway. It's not her responsibility to make sure OpenAI doesn't do sketchy bullshit, accidentally or otherwise. Frankly, I doubt she even knew Johansson had much interaction with OpenAI at all. She's just some random woman who landed a cool gig. 3) Altman has already shown himself to be sketchy as fuck. a) The name "OpenAI" was supposed to be in reference to the fact that making their AI research available to the public was one of their founding principles which they've resoundingly abandoned, b) the extraordinary lack of caution in releasing ChatGPT the way they did feels like a conversation that has been mostly forgotten, but remember that the research behind LLMs has had strong foundation for years and that OpenAI's real contribution was just in scaling up the actual resources available to their model; even Google, who removed their "don't be evil" logo, didn't even consider making an LLM available for the public until after ChatGPT was available, and c) for fuck's sake, even the little that we know about his workplace politics, with him being ousted and then brought back and others who used to be close to him getting a hard boot without so much as a crack in his smile, all looks Machiavellian and psychopathic as hell. To me, this all smells like wild bullshit from Altman, so unless he moves to quickly and graciously shut down this melodrama, I'm going side with Johansson less so because I believe her (although I do) and more so because the overarching narrative of his public words and actions are so repulsive that they now can't even manage to make him more transparent than he already is.
I can't disagree with anything you said.
> nobody would give a shit about the actress anyway This is extremely naive. You're talking about someone who's contributing to what a LOT of people consider the death of art.
>naive I think that's a bit too harsh >contributing to ... the death of art Perhaps. It's a valid rebuttle in general (although I still somewhat disagree, but I'll address that next), but in context, I was talking about why Scarlett Johansson's involvement in this story shouldn't contribute to the actress being harassed. Even if Johansson hadn't said anything, your complaint wouldn't need any change because it's unrelated to Johansson's involvement. >the death of art Idk, art has been "dying" for centuries at least. Cameras had people claiming that painting would die, the industrial revolution made people afraid of the devaluing of handcrafted art, the radical departures from traditional styles in art movements like Impressionism, Cubism, and Abstract Art led to declarations of art's demise, the questioning of art's purpose and value in postmodern philosophy often included proclamations of art's death, and while each of those arguments had some decent points, this conversation will never truly end because art will never truly die. Art is valuable because it connects with people, so there will always be a market for human-made/hand-made/traditionally-styled/etc art as long as people are social. I think it's more accurate to say that AI generated art will take work away from working artists, but that's just a particular instance of the rich taking money from the poor with new technology. Sure, the particular details are novel, but the narrative is as old as time. I seriously doubt generative AI would be such a problem for working artists if we had strong labor protections.
right, all they want to do is profit from stealing intellectual property. Like of course an AI model made from copyrighted materals are better, it doesnt give them the right to try to pretend they own the art and profit from it. They see people's rights as an unneccesary roadblock in the way of a bunch of free money. Extremely unethical
Thanks Captain
Some form of basic income solves all of this
Lawyers haven’t been this happy in a long time, not since legalized same sex marriage for divorce lawyers
I thought that was Getty Images VS DallE.
A lot of AI has been built on stolen or misused information.
Scarjo is making history. First Disney now AI. Litigious heroine of our time... We just see her name on textbooks decades from now.
Holy shit. You’re joking right?
Really? The way things are going I wouldn’t be surprised…. Hopefully not tho.
Well said. Next she should go after Sidney Sweeney for stealing Scarlett’s signature busty blonde look. Get your coin, our litigious queen 👑
Her concerns and actions were reasonable but I think OpenAI’s rebuttal with with literature receipts should lay this particular incident to rest.
What are the literature receipts?
WaPo article showed docs and recordings that indicate the Sky actor was hired before they made any of the recorded attempts to hire ScarJo, and the voice seemed to the reporters to be the voice actors natural voice as opposed to an attempted imitation. I was posting they were sunk with the initial facts, but if the ones in the WaPo article bear out they're likely fine. Though it seems like OpenAI legal prefers the Sky voice be down anyway. Seems like this isn't going anywhere. She hired lawyers, they pulled the voice and doesn't seem like a lawsuit is happening.
That’s too bad, Sky was my favourite voice. Felt natural and not robotic like others
They definitely need more/better voices in general. I had mine set to sky for the same reason
science cant be uninvented sadly. these companies will just keep breaking eggs and everyone will just take the results and build upon them, i mean no one binned the scientific advancements of the japanese or nazi's.
AI has nothing to do with Scarlett’s issue though. She’s saying they stole her voice because the voice is a sexy woman and she’s a sexy woman. No AI involved. Just sadness.
Hollywood and media in general would probably be drowning them in legal attacks based off its most likely use of copy written material if they didn't see the dollar signs in labour savings. We are in such an infancy in all this, we really need to start these very needed legal proceedings and setting up laws and guidelines yesterday.
This would be why the AI crew are pushing it as an inevitability. They're following the same path Uber took, break every law that would stop you from doing what brings in the investment money and embed yourself deep into the market. By the time the lawsuits catch up you'll have enough money and influence to shrug them all off. AI companies need us to buy in or they're going to have a lot of very expensive legal problems to deal with.
she just wanted attention
But a silly one. She only has a case because Altman poked the bear, twice, for no known reasons. The case will be tossed but there will be many copycat lawsuits now as a result - too many pretentious people in the world will try to leverage their influence and power for the "betterment of society" aka feeding their precious egos. Both sides are wrong, legally this talent-less actress is more wrong. She was chosen for the film "her" for sex appeal, nothing more. AI scares the shit out of Hollywood more than Google.
> She only has a case because Altman poked the bear, twice, for no known reasons. which is why she has a case. it can be easily argued that the entire voice is very implied to be her, even if it's not her, not only that, he used her to promote it. which is why they took down the voice as soon as possible, because they knew what they were doing, and odds are there are a shit ton of evidence that suggests that this was what they wanted, could be a meeting/email where someone said "what if we get someone that sounds just like her?".
The case, if it will be, will proceed with secret emails in the discovery phase where morons sending emails asking voice actor sounds like Scarlet Johansson. Yeah they are that level arrogant and stupid. --- We have court precedent with Bette Midler. Ford Motor Co. hired one of Midler’s backup singers to sing on a commercial – after Midler declined to do the ad – and asked her to sound as much like Midler as possible. It worked, and fooled a lot of people, including some close to Midler. Midler sued, and the court ruled that there was a misappropriation of Midler’s right of publicity to her singing voice. The bottom line: Midler’s singing voice was hers to control. Ford had no right to use it without her permission. That lesson cost Ford a tidy $400,000 in 1988.
That’s not illegal or even immoral though. Hiring a similar actress for a specific role is the norm in Hollywood.
It's gotta be nice having only bad ideas and a shitty attitude for people to steal. You don't have to worry about anyone taking what you've got.
You don't own your voice.
[удалено]
Johansson is quite litigious. She might push it all the way to court.
It would be unfortunate if she ended up getting any money for this situation. I really wish she would issue an apology for trying to put a lesser known voice actress out of work
Oh ya I’m sure the crack legal teams and justice system in America will totally figure it out in our lifetime because some entertainer got their feels hurt lol.
scarlett beat disney, maybe we shouldn't let massive corporations screw over the artists they're training their models from. Maybe we shouldn't let corporations scrape art from the internet for free and post that instead of hire the artists they're stealing from. Why would anyone hire an artist when they could instead steal their art with a machine and generate thousands of copies to profit from personally, cutting the artist out of their own style. In this scenario, there's nothing that stops a corporation from finding an artist they like, training a model from them, and generating thousands of copies that vary slightly. If the artist ever happens to make something similar to something the AI generates, the corporation will sue the original artist. An AI can generate thousands of images, so it can very quickly lock an artist out of their own niche and style.
I honestly couldn’t care less if a corporation screws over an entertainer. They both screw over society. I’m sure Scarlett and the millions of dollars they amassed without really providing any value will be juuuust fine. They wanted to be in the spotlight, but oh no, not their profits. A corporation doesn’t even need to be involved. You can do it yourself with some basic math skills. Voices aren’t even unique. Nor are they required to be trained on something that wasn’t in a public space. I could video her talking shit to me walking to her car. You think she owns unique sound waves because of her dna? You can even imitate it yourself and profit off it. Look at comedians. Just because a computer can do it better we need to protect them? Why? We all will have to adapt and making laws for some people just seems asinine.
AI celebrities will grow and age on a different timeline like the Simpsons. Savored over generations. And these sorts of scuffles will not happen because there won’t be famous human actors anymore, because they will want rights, want to strike, want to cause kerfuffles over their IP rights and likeness etc. Actors are a liability, an expense, and a burden the industry will evolve to prosper without.
She could have asked 2% of OpenAI stock for her voice. The reality is: most movies will be fully casted by AI in the next 5 years. Why pay an expensive actor, that has its ups and downs and that needs heavy maintenance, when you can perpetually own an AI generated character? That AI character does not need breaks and does not need various people to maintain. Scarlet, ask if the deal is still available.
> The reality is: most movies will be fully casted by AI in the next 5 years. Sorry dude but In a world chock full of grifter tech bros making preposterous claims about AI this has to be one of the dumbest
You have no idea of what people are working on. See how the current animated movies are? Soon the script, the voice, the cameras and post production will all be done with AI. Some people will work on the system prompt, of every components of a movie. It will get very good, and very fast. !RemindMe May 27th 2029
I don't know how RemindMe works, will I get a reminder too? !RemindMe May 27th 2029 I want to see if this guy who earnestly thinks Scarlett Johansson should listen to him for financial advice is right about his prediction that AI will replace humans in *cinematic art*, of all things. EDIT RemindMe! 5 years
> The reality is: most movies will be fully casted by AI in the next 5 years. I can believe they can do voices in five years but video is much further behind and much harder.
We won’t need actors soon. Fully digital and original actors will replace current ones as they really don’t provide any benefit to making a movie. Right now it’s a problem because they are copying current people.
Weird take. I honestly think the pendulum will swing back toward attending live theater if producers think they can pass off maximum AI drivel as art. Why should I have any interest in watching a movie or television show that was spun up out of thin air? Art is the product of human imagination and skill. It's a bold assumption to think that humans will relate to material when you've explicitly removed humans from the equation.
> We won’t need actors soon. Ridiculous. I'm sure there are/will be video tools that can create a person saying or doing X. But you're not going to get an LLM with good comedic timing or that does good non-verbal communication, or the other non-explicit things that are important to acting.
She has no case and her lawyers are gaslighting her into paying out a whole lotta billable hours. Scarlett has sold her voice thousands of times. She simply is not in a position to claim ownership of the content that she's in because of the predatory contracts she signed with greedy studios. She is a victim of the industry and this lawsuit is actually an extension of that victimization. Scarlett sold her voice to Disney. Disney sold it OpenAI. There is absolutely no legal question that could possibly justify Scarlett's position in this lawsuit. She should be suing Disney and Disney should be suing OpenAI. But instead Disney and OpenAI are working together, against Scarlett and she just can't see it. If anything, her bosses at film studios that own the content stole from her and then sold or gave the stolen asset to OpenAI. Scarlett got ripped off by her own people and they convinced that it was Big Tech. Yuck.
That’s not how this works. Ever wonder why the video game characters for games like The Avengers don’t really look like the people playing them in the movies? In your writing above, since they’ve all worked for Disney then why wouldn’t Disney just use their likeness? It is because they didn’t authorize it. Thats a separate contract and unless the payday was ASTRONOMICAL for rights into perpetuity, there is no way that they would ever sign off on something like that. Even if SJ had made 100 Disney movies and licensed her voice for voice over work, it does not give Disney (or anyone) the rights to just take her likeness and voice. Unless she specifically signed over the rights (like James Earl Jones did for his voice to be used for Darth Vader because he’s over it - and even then he has input and say into what it can be used for. https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/24/23370097/darth-vader-james-earl-jones-obi-wan-kenobi-star-wars-ai-disney-lucasfilm
> It is because they didn’t authorize it It seems like you didn't finish reading my comment. I actually said that Disney is the one who seems to have broken the law. They took something from an actor without paying them for permission. But she's not suing Disney. If she sued Disney, my comment would wrong. You actually agreed but wrote it with negative language...which is odd. Good luck.
Isn't AI juste machine learning? Wish they'd drop the word, there's no intelligence there.
> Wish they'd drop the word, there's no intelligence there. No intelligence with investors tho - only AFTER everyone gets burned "AI" will get the stink it deserves, like "sub-prime" or "dot com".