Comment by omnicognate
2 years ago
Comments full of people reading the headline and assuming that what OpenAI did here is fine because it's a different actress, but that's not how "Right of publicity" (*) laws work. The article itself explains that there is significant legal risk here:
> Mitch Glazier, the chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, said that Johansson may have a strong case against OpenAI if she brings forth a lawsuit.
> He compared Johansson’s case to one brought by the singer Bette Midler against the Ford Motor Co. in the 1980s. Ford asked Midler to use her voice in ads. After she declined, Ford hired an impersonator. A U.S. appellate court ruled in Midler’s favor, indicating her voice was protected against unauthorized use.
> But Mark Humphrey, a partner and intellectual property lawyer at Mitchell, Silberberg and Knupp, said any potential jury probably would have to assess whether Sky’s voice is identifiable as Johansson.
> Several factors go against OpenAI, he said, namely Altman’s tweet and his outreach to Johansson in September and May. “It just begs the question: It’s like, if you use a different person, there was no intent for it to sound like Scarlett Johansson. Why are you reaching out to her two days before?” he said. “That would have to be explained.”
* A.K.A. "Personality rights": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights
The Midler case is readily distinguishable. From Wikipedia:
> Ford Motor created an ad campaign for the Mercury Sable that specifically was meant to inspire nostalgic sentiments through the use of famous songs from the 1970s sung by their original artists. When the original artists refused to accept, impersonators were used to sing the original songs for the commercials. Midler was asked to sing a famous song of hers for the commercial and refused. Subsequently, the company hired a voice-impersonator of Midler and carried on with using the song for the commercial, since it had been approved by the copyright-holder. [1]
If you ask an artist to sing a famous song of hers, she says no, and you get someone else to impersonate her, that gets you in hot water.
If you (perhaps because you are savvy) go to some unknown voice actress, have her record a voice for your chatbot, later go to a famous actress known for one time playing a chatbot in a movie, and are declined, you are in a much better position. The tweet is still a thorn in OA's side, of course, but that's not likely to be determinative IMO (IAAL).
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
> later go to a famous actress known for one time playing a chatbot in a movie, and are declined, you are in a much better position
But they asked her first!:
"Last September, I received an offer from Sam Altman, who wanted to hire me to voice the current ChatGPT 4.0 system. He told me that he felt that by my voicing the system, I could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and Al. He said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people....
https://twitter.com/BobbyAllyn/status/1792679435701014908
So its: ask Johansson, get declined, ask casting directors for the type of voice actors they are interested in, listened to 400 voices, choose one that sounds like the actor, ask Johansson again, get declined again, publish with a reference to Johansson film, claim the voice has nothing todo with Johansson.
[EDIT] Actually it looks like they selected the Sky actor before they asked Johansson and claim that she would have been the 6th voice, its still hard to believe they didn't intend it to sound like the voice in her though:
https://openai.com/index/how-the-voices-for-chatgpt-were-cho...
> So its: ask Johansson, get declined, ask casting directors for the type of voice actors they are interested in, listened to 400 voices, choose one that sounds like the actor
Except it doesn't sound like Johansson, I don't know why people keep saying this. At best, the voice has a couple of similar characteristics, but I didn't think for one second that it was her. Can James Earl Jones sue if someone uses a voice actor with a deep voice?
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Read the main article again. The voice actor was already auditioned and chosen before they went to Johansson. Maybe they had a change of plan and thought it would be cool to have Johansson's voice rather than an unknown actor's.
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> it's still hard to believe they didn't intend it to sound like the voice in her though:
Especially when you have ex-OAers, who had been working there at the time on 'J.A.R.V.I.S.', tweeting things like https://x.com/karpathy/status/1790373216537502106 "The killer app of LLMs is Scarlett Johansson."
The actress did impersonate Her though.
It's not just a random "voice for your chatbot", it's that particularly breathy, chatty, voice that she performed for the movie.
I would agree with you completely if they'd created a completely different voice. Even if they'd impersonated a different famous actress. But it's the fact that Her was about an AI, and this is an AI, and the voices are identical. It's clearly an impersonation of her work.
> The actress did impersonate Her though.
Did she? The article claims that:
1. Multiple people agree that the casting call mentioned nothing about SJ/her
2. The voice actress claims she was not given instructions to imitate SJ/her
3. The actress's natural voice sounds identical to the AI-generated Sky voice
I don't personally think it's anywhere near "identical" to SJ's voice. It seems most likely to me that they noticed the similarity in concept afterwards and wanted to try to capitalize on it (hence later contacting SJ), opposed to the other way around.
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> The actress did impersonate Her though
This is unclear. What is clear is OpenAI referenced Her in marketing it. That looks like it was a case of poor impulse control. But it's basis for a claim.
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How do you explain the many people saying that the voices do not sound especially similar?
"The pitch is kiiiiiind of close, but that's about it. Different cadence, different levels of vocal fry, slightly different accent if you pay close attention. Johansson drops Ts for Ds pretty frequently, Sky pronounces Ts pretty sharply. A linguist could probably break it down better than me and identify the different regions involved."
https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1cx24sy/vocal_...
There is also a faction claiming that Sky's voice is more similar to Rashida Jones's than Scarlett Johansson's:
https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1cx9t8b/vocal_comp...
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In the Ford case they hired an impersonator to sing one of her copyrighted songs, so it's clearly an impersonation.
In OpenAI's case the voice only sounds like her (although many disagree) but it isn't repeating some famous line of dialog from one of her movies etc, so you can't really definitively say it's impersonating SJ.
> it's that particularly breathy, chatty, voice that she performed for the movie.
Good luck proving that in court.
“You’re honor our evidence is that the audio clips both sound breathy”
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Can someone explain to me the outrage about mimicking a public persons voice, while half the people on hacker news argue that it's fine to steal open source code? I fail to see the logic here? Why is this more important?
The order of the events is different, but it still comes down to whether OA had a specific voice in mind when building the chatbot.
By your logic, I could go find a Tim Cook looking and sounding guy, make a promotion video with him praising my new startup, ping Tim Cook to check if by any chance he wouldn't miraculously be willing to do me a favor to avoid me all the trouble in the first place, but still go on and release my video ads without any permission.
"I did all the preparation way before asking the celebrity" wouldn't be a valid defense.
You could have an ad with a voiceover saying all sorts of positive things about your company, in a voice that sounds somewhat like Tim Cook. What you could not do is use a body double, dress someone up like him, or otherwise give the impression that your startup is loved by Tim Cook himself. He doesn’t have a monopoly on slightly southern accents.
The tweet + approach is probably sufficient to bring a lawsuit and get into discovery and then it'll come down to if there's a smoking gun documents (e.g. internal emails comparing the voice to Her, etc.)
It's likely that someone internally must have noticed the similarity so there's like some kind of comms around it so it very much will depend on what was written in those conversations.
Pulling the voice when ScarJo complained is not a good look. I’m sure her attorneys would be very excited to do discovery around that decision should it come to trial.
It won’t though, this is primarily a PR problem for OpenAI. Which is still a real problem when their future product development depends entirely on everyone giving them tons of data.
There are probably a number of other cases. The one I remember is when Sega asked Lady Miss Kier of Deee-Lite fame to use her public image for a game. Nothing come out of it but Sega made the character Ulala[1] anyway. If you grew up in the 90s the characters name was strongly connected to Lady Miss Kier's catch phrase, but unfortunately she lost the suit and had to pay more than half a million.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulala_(Space_Channel_5)
> Lady Miss Kier's catch phrase
Not to over-analyze your use of language, but using the possessive here makes it seem like she personally owned that phrase or its use was associated with her. First, I don't know if that's true. Did she say, "Ooh la la," constantly, or is it just something she said at the beginning of the music video (and possibly studio recording) of the one hit from Deee-Lite, Groove Is In The Heart? Moreover, that phrase is a fairly well-known and widely-used one, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ooh_La_La. It certainly was not original to her nor would its use indicate an association to her. To your point, its use plus the aesthetic of the character does seem like a reference to Lady Miss Kier's appearance in that music video (if not also her style and appearance more generally, I don't know if that is how she always looks). But she didn't sue everyone else on this list for the use of her supposed catch phrase, ooh la la.
I hate to say one person's fame is so great that they get special or different treatment in court, but I think "Lady Miss Kier" was punching above her weight in trying to sue over use of her image. Her fame was a flash-in-the-pan one-hit-wonder in the early 90s, no offense to any Deee-Lite fans. It was certainly a great song (with some help from Herbie Hancock, Bootsy Collins, and Q-Tip).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etviGf1uWlg
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Counter-intuitively, I think this puts Johansson in a stronger position.
OpenAI did not want to copy her the actress, they wanted to copy HER the performance from the movie.
Wouldn't that apply to entertainers like Rich Little whose entire career was him doing his best to exactly impersonate famous peoples' voices and mannerisms?
Parody tends to fall into various exemptions. Of course one might argue that OpenAIs work itself is a parody of AGI.
If someone impersonates people but doesn't disguise/hide their appearance, there's no risk of confusing listeners about who is making the voice.
Also a lawyer, and the Middler case is apparently not understood so narrowly. The possible chilling effect on employability of actors who happen to look or sound just like already famous actors rankled me, too, and I really got into it with my entertainment law professor (who has had some quite high profile clients). His advice in no uncertain terms was basically “Sorry to those actors, but if you try to get away with hiring one of them knowing they’re likely to be confused with someone more famous, you’re stupid.”
>The tweet is still a thorn in OA's side, of course, but that's not likely to be determinative IMO (IAAL).
It amounts to nothing as it was a single word and they could spin that any way they want, it's even a generic word, lol. The "worst" interpretation on that tweet could be "we were inspired by said movie to create a relatable product" which is not an unlawful thing to do.
I see this a lot in space like HN focused on hard science and programming — this idea that judgments couldn't possibly consider things like context beyond what has been literally spelled out. To paraphrase a fitting XKCD, they have already thought of that "cool hack" you've just come up with [0].
I lack the knowledge to make a judgment one way or another about whether this will go anywhere, because I know very little about this area of law, more so in the US. However, this idea that tweeting the title of that specific movie in the context of such a product release couldn't possibly be connected to one of those voices having a similar cadence and sound of a specific actor in that same movie they approched beforehand, couldn't have no legal bearing seems naive. Is it that doubtful that a high-priced legal team couldn't bring a solid case, leading to a severe settlement, or more if she wants to create a precedent?
Clichéd Mafia talk is not a foolproof way to prevent conviction in most jurisdictions.
[0] https://xkcd.com/1494/
The sad thing is: most probably absolutely nothing will happen.
These startups break laws, pay the fines and end up just fine.
Remember that it was Sam Altman who proposed to change the YC questionnaire to screen applicants by incidents where they have successfully broken rules. YC even boasts about that.
> These startups break laws, pay the fines and end up just fine.
That thought process puts them in the same boat as: Theranos, FTX, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Countrywide Financial, Enron, Washington Mutual, Kidder Peabody, and many other companies which no longer exist.
So if (since?) they lack the ethical compass to not break the rules, perhaps a simple history of what happens to companies that do break the rules might be useful guidance...
They're likely going to write Scarlett Johansson a large check and get a new voice.
What else do you think is going to happen?
The entire company gets shut down?
Why would it be a particularly large check? What are her damages?
Then you don’t know ScarJo. She doesn’t fuck around and she has enough money to put legal fees where her mouth is. She was the vanguard of actors suing for streaming royalties, for example.
Or to rephrase it, the laws don't apply to the rich. They just have to pay a little bit more "tax" (which probably still works out to be less than typical small business has to pay % wise anyway) to be allowed to break them.
Do we really want someone's voice to be copyrightable, to a point where similar sounding people can't be used?
This is such a weird issue for HN to be upset about when other IP related issues (e.g. companies suing for recreating generic code, patent trolls, trademark colors, disregard of paywall, reverse engineering, etc), people here overwhelmingly fall on the side of weaker IP protections.
I guess the diff is some people just pick the side of "the little guy" and the example of centi millionaire beautiful actress vs billion dollar founder, the scales tip to the actress
What sort of damages can Scarlett Johansson expect to get if OpenAI launches with the Sky voice for a short while, then pulls it quickly after the backlash (like they did)?
Are punitive damages commonplace for such scenarios?
I’m sure someone can do some type of math about her general pay rate per performance minute then multiply it by the millions of hours Sky has been heard using her voice. I think that number would likely be quite high.
Any damages are probably going to be way cheaper than the cost of an equivalent publicity campaign.
Bad PR is also PR.
> > Several factors go against OpenAI, he said, namely Altman’s tweet and his outreach to Johansson in September and May. “It just begs the question: It’s like, if you use a different person, there was no intent for it to sound like Scarlett Johansson. Why are you reaching out to her two days before?” he said. “That would have to be explained.”
I think there's a pretty reasonable answer here in that the similarities to Her are quite obvious, and would be regardless of whose voice it was. If you wanted it to be SJ, reaching out right at the last minute seems rather odd, surely you'd reach out at the start?
There are three timelines that seem to be suggested here
* OAI want the voice to sound like SJ
* They don't ask her, they go and hire someone else specifically to sound like her
* They work on, train and release the voice
* OAI, too late to release a new voice as part of the demo, ask SJ if they can use her voice
This requires multiple people interviewed to be lying
Or
* OAI hire someone for a voice
* They train and release the voice
* People talking to a computer that reacts in this way is reminiscent of Her
* "We should get SJ as an actual voice, that would be huge" * Asks SJ
One third one, probably more middle of the road?
* OAI hire someone for a voice
* They train and release the voice
* People talking to a computer that reacts in this way is reminiscent of Her
* "Is this too similar to SJ? Should we ask them?"
* Asks SJ
> He compared Johansson’s case to one brought by the singer Bette Midler against the Ford Motor Co. in the 1980s. Ford asked Midler to use her voice in ads. After she declined, Ford hired an impersonator. A U.S. appellate court ruled in Midler’s favor, indicating her voice was protected against unauthorized use.
Sure, though worth noting that they hired a Bette Midler impersonator to sing a cover of a Better Midler song (edit - after asking and getting a "no")
To be honest, I'm not really that convinced it sounds like her
https://youtu.be/GV01B5kVsC0?t=165
https://youtu.be/D9byh4MAsUQ?t=33
Maybe they didn't need SJ to do anything to train the voicebot as it was already trained with the material from the movie.
(I'm in a camp that Sky voice doesn't really like Johansson's)
Here’s the thing though - if I was OpenAI, I’d be more interested in the actor sounding like the voice agent in Her, than Scarlett Johansen.
After all, Scarlett was playing a role in the movie (lending her voice to it), and they wanted to replicate this acted out role.
If the intent alone mattered, OpenAI should be in the clear. More so if they never specially instructed this voice actor to “sound like Scarlett”.
On the other hand, Sama reaching out to Scarlett directly over a number of times doesn’t lend a good look. Perhaps they felt that Scarlett has already done it (acted out as a voice agent they were trying to bring to life) and she would truly understand what they were going for.
Maybe, it was also a bit for marketing and the buzz-worthy story it might generate (“OpenAI worked with ScarJo to create their life-like AI voice. Scarlett was also the voice behind the AI in “Her”).
However, I’m not a lawyer and the the law could very well view this more favourably towards Scarlett.
I don't get it. He was looking for specific voice. Scarlett Johansson is one of the people who has the voice of this kind. She wasn't interested. It's only logical to approach a different person with the same kind of voice.
It's kinda nasty for one person to monopolize work for all actors that have similar voice to them just because she's most famous of all of them.
100% this.
I'm in the exact same camp, bur for some reason HN crowd thinks that Scarlet has a right here as the other voice actor has a similar voice. Apparently there's an [archaic] law called right to publicity (or something like that) that makes even working with someone with a similar voice illegal. According to that restrictive logic no one can do anything on Earth as they might be doing/looking/sounding similar to someone else who might get offended, as everyone's offended by literally anything nowadays.
I frankly want to see a lawsuit of OpenAI vs Scarlet on this one, where OpenAI wins.
"Mitch Glazier, the chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, said that Johansson may have a strong case against OpenAI"
Of course he does. RIAA thinks nearly everything is illegal, and in general mocked or critiqued on the site when they go after some shared mp3s or whatever.
His opinion is neither authoritative or informative.
Oh lovely, RIAA mingling in among the good guys...
This may well be the only taint on Johansson's case.
> After she declined, Ford hired an impersonator. A U.S. appellate court ruled in Midler’s favor, indicating her voice was protected against unauthorized use.
That's because it was impersonating them, not sounding like them. If they didn't try to sell it as them they would have been fine
That's the problem here too right? Sam implies the voice is scarlet with his references to Her.
To me it all just shows these tech-bro's are just spoiled little brads with strong incel energy. I 100% expect a scandal in a few months where it turns out Sam has a bunch of VR porn bots generated by AI that just 'happen' to look and sound EXACTLY like some celebs...
[dead]
> indicating her voice was protected against unauthorized use
But it wasn't her voice, it was the voice of the impersonator. By that logic, the impersonator can never speak without authorization because the impersonator would use Bette Midler's voice.
They wanted people to either think that is was Bette Midler, or someone that sounded very like her to gain the benefit of association with her. They wanted to use some of Bette's cultural cachet, without her permission.
OpenAI hires voice actress. Then it contacts famous actress for a license. Why. The implication is that OpenAI knows there is a potential legal issue.
Then later, when OpenAI promotes voice actress with an apparent reference to famous actress' work, and famous actress complains, OpenAI "pauses" the project. If OpenAI believes there is no issue, then why pause the project.
This behaviour certainly looks like OpenAI thought it needed a license from famous actress. If there is another explanation, OpenAI has not provided it.
They contacted Johansson after the Sky voice was created, they didn’t create it because she declined.
The voice actor isn’t a Johansson imitator, and the voice isn’t an imitation.
The only similarity between the Sky voice and Johansson’s is that it’s a white American female, so by your logic a significant percentage of the US population has a case.
> They contacted Johansson after the Sky voice was created, they didn’t create it because she declined.
Her statement says otherwise:
"Last September, I received an offer from Sam Altman, who wanted to hire me to voice the current ChatGPT 4.0 system. He told me that he felt that by my voicing the system, I could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and Al. He said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people.
https://twitter.com/BobbyAllyn/status/1792679435701014908
The Sky voice was released with the first ChatGPT voices last year in September, so there's no contradiction there unless they asked her on the 1st of September and somehow trained another voice within the few weeks after she said no.
Here's a video that someone posted in October talking to the same Sky voice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SamGnUqaOfU
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> Her statement says otherwise
In what way?
That in no way contradicts the fact that the Sky voice was created first, although it does seem to suggest a misunderstanding by Johansson that this was to be an exclusive deal to be "the" voice, leading to the incorrect conclusion that the Sky voice was created after she declined, and must therefore be an impersonation (despite sounding nothing like her/Her, as she herself must know better than anyone). Stretch after stretch after stretch. (Being kind.)
In fact the recordings used for training were made in June/July 2023, which is before Johansson was contact as a possible "also-ran": https://openai.com/index/how-the-voices-for-chatgpt-were-cho...
Imaging this to be such a legal minefield, can't sell my own voice because a celeb sounds a bit alike as my own voice.
You can sell your voice to whoever you want.
What you can't do is USE that voice in a way that seeks to mislead (by however much) people into believing it is someone else.
I'm really not sure why people can't understand that it is intent that matters.
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A celeb creates a particular voice personality for a role as an AI in a very successful movie. You create an AI, and "co-incidentally" create a strikingly similar voice personality for your AI. Not a legal minefield, you copied the movie, you owe them.
They could have used any accent, any tone, anyone. Literally anyone else. And it would have been fine. But they obviously copied the movie even if they used a different actress.
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You wouldn’t be the one liable. Any company that hired you might be liable if you sound like a famous voice and the more famous individual had already declined using their voice.
The company would also be liable if they used your voice and claimed it was someone more famous.
Ultimately you’re not liable for having a similar voice because you’re not trying to fool people you’re someone else. It’s the company that hired you who’s doing that.
This is why tribute acts and impressionists are fine…as long as they are clear they’re not the original artist
Because of laws and regulations like these, innovation is getting slower and slower.
I'm afraid the whole world will get regulated like EU someday, crippling innovation to a point that everyone's afraid to break a law that they aren't even aware of, and stop innovating.
Exactly, that would be absolutely nonsensical.
> The only similarity between the voice and Johansson’s is that it’s female, so by your logic half of California has a case.
My understanding was that the voices sound quite similar. I haven't heard the original Sky voice so don't know. Are there any samples online?
Listen to the voices side by side:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1cwy6wz/vocal_comp...
And here is voice of another actress ( Rashida Jones ):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=385414AVZcA
If you click through and listen please reply and answer these questions: which actress do you think is similar to the openAI sky voice? And what does that tell you about likely court result for Johansson? And having reached this conclusion yourself would you now think the other actress Rashida Jones is entitled to compensation based on this similarly test?
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uM8jhcqDP0&t=30s
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If you program a digital voice to sound like someone, there's zero difference than using an impersonator. A voice actress playing a role in a movoe (Her), is 100% that actress's voice too.
People are so weird on this. OpenAI screwed up, they know it, their actions show it, there isn't much to discuss here.
Hmmm. This isn’t voice acting though. I suspect that we’ll find that OpenAI used thousands of Johansson’s voice samples for general training to give the voice a “Her” feel and then found someone with a similar voice for fine tuning but had Johansson said yes, they could then have had her do it instead.
If the records show that they did train Sky with Johansson’s voice samples it will be an interesting case.
The jury will decide on the latter.
At any rate, Altman made clear allusions to hint that they are capable of synthesizing ScarJo's voice as a product feature. The actress retaliated saying she verbally did not consent, and now OpenAI's defense is that they hired a different actress anyway.
...which means they lied to everyone else on the capabilities of the tech, which is y'know, even worse
Exactly. And regardless of the timeline outlined, when discovery happens, they’ll be a bunch of internal messages saying they want ScarJo to do the voice or find someone they can match her close enough. They went down both paths.
This will settle out of court.
her
I’ll admit that my cynicism is in overdrive but I wonder if OpenAI deliberately provoked this. Or at least didn’t mind it as an outcome.
More and more you see legal action as a form of publicity (people filing frivolous lawsuits etc), a lawsuit like this would help keep OpenAI looking like an underdog startup being crushed by the rich and powerful rather than the billion dollar entity it actually is.
However strong her case may be but in lawsuits like these, the prosecution usually needs to prove *beyond reasonable doubt* that OpenAI copied her voice and that too intentionally. This, in all likelihood, seems very tough to come given the evidence so far. Yes, she might drag on the case for a long time but doubt that will cause the slightest dent in OpenAI's business.
> Crimes must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, whereas civil claims are proven by lower standards of proof, such as the preponderance of the evidence.
[1] https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-law-basics/the-dif...
This would be a civil not criminal case, there is no prosecution as well “beyond a reasonable doubt” is not the standard, rather Johansson’s lawyers only need to show that the balance of probabilities lies in her favour.
You misunderstand how personality rights work.
Called it in the other thread and calling it in this one, there is no wrongdoing on OpenAI's side.
Looking/sounding like somebody else (even if its famous) is not prosecutable. Scarlet Johansson has nothing in this case, whether people like it or not. That's the reality.
> whether people like it or not. That's the reality.
That is exactly it - people do not like how OpenAI is acting. Whether or not there is legal action to be had is an interesting tangent, but not the actual point - OpenAI's actions are ticking people off. Just because something is legal does not mean it is the right thing to do.
Nobody said looking/sounding like someone else is "prosecutable", and this willfully obtuse reading is getting annoying.
Many people here, including you, seem to be under the impression that a person who sounds like a celebrity can, because they are not that celebrity, do whatever they want with their voice regardless of whether or not they seem to be passing off as or profiting from the persona of that celebrity. This is not the case.
When others point this out many people, again including you, then go "so you're saying the fact that someone sounds like a celebrity means they can't do anything with their voice - how absurd!", and that isn't the case either, and nobody is saying it.
This binary view is what I'm calling obtuse. The intent matters, and that is not clear-cut. There are some things here that seem to point to intent on OpenAI's part to replicate Her. There are other things that seem to point away from this. If this comes to a court case, a judge or jury will have to weigh these things up. It's not straightforward, and there are people far more knowledeable in these matters than me saying that she could have a strong case here.
People have now said this an absurd number of times and yet you seem to be insisting on this binary view that completely ignores intent. This is why I am calling it willfully obtuse.
If the above are misrepresentations of your argument then please clarify, but both seemed pretty clear from your posts. If instead you take the view that what matters here is whether there was intent to profit from Scarlett Johannson's public persona then we don't disagree. I have no opinions on whether they had intent or not, but I think it very much looks like they did, and whether they did would be a question for a court (alongside many others, such as whether it really does sound like her) if she were to sue, not that there is any indication she will.
Edit: And I should say IANAL of course, and these legal questions are complex and dependent on jurisdiction. California has both a statutory right and a common law one. Both, I think, require intent, but only the common law one would apply in this case as the statutory one explicity only applies to use of the person's actual voice. (That seems a bit outdated in today's deepfake ridden world, but given the common law right protected Midler from the use of an impersonator perhaps that is considered sufficient.)
https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/california-right-publicity-...
> You misunderstand how personality rights work .. Called it in the other thread
One of the great things about HN is you get all kinds of experts from every field imaginable.
> is not prosecutable
Yikes.
Who said it was ‘prosecutable’?
Scarlet Johansson is threatening legal action against OpenAI for this.
Are you not aware of this?
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All we need is discovery. They’ll settle before that because we all know they are swimming in dirt.