Comment by flexie
2 years ago
It's not a clone. What is ethically murky about it?
You want Brad Pitt for your movie. He says no. You hire Benicio Del Toro because of the physical resemblence. Big deal.
Having seen "Her" and many other Scarlet Johansson movies, I didn't think for a second that GPT-4o sounded like her. On the contrary, I wondered why they had chosen the voice of a middle aged woman, and whether that was about being woke. It wasn't until social media went hysterical, I realized that the voices were sort of similar.
If it's a sequel and Brad Pitt was in the first movie and you use trickery to make people think he's in the second movie, there's a case. See Crispin Glover, the dad from Back to the future, which was NOT the upside-down dad in BTTF2. They settled for 760k USD.
Openai never claimed it was Scarlett Johansson though. They didn't trick anyone.
Spielberg & co never claimed Glover was in BTTF 2. The replacement actor is credited. However they heavily implied that Glover came back, by approximating his appearance with prosthetics, preventing his face from being seen up close, and having the replacement actor mimic Glover's voice.
Glover sued and won.
3 replies →
Not explicitly, no. They just heavily implied it.
Typical sleazy open AI / Sam Altman behaviour, AFAICS.
Sam tweeting "Her" is a clear as daylight indication that they are deliberately trying to associate the voice with ScarJo's performance.
They're squarely in the zone with knockoff products deliberately aping the branding of the real thing.
"Dr Peppy isn't a trick to piggyback on Dr Pepper, it's a legally distinct brand!" might give you enough of a fig leaf in court with a good lawyer, but it's very obvious what kind of company you're running to anybody paying attention.
5 replies →
> I wondered why they had chosen the voice of a middle aged woman
AIs and automated systems, real and fictional, traditionally use women more than men to voice them. Apparently there was some research among all-male bomber crews that this "stood out", the B-58 was issued with some recordings of Joan Elms (https://archive.org/details/b58alertaudio ) and this was widely copied.
(obvious media exception: HAL)
You then tweet out, "look its Brad Pitt in my movie".
They never claimed it was Scarlett Johansson's voice though.
If the objective is to absolutely always avoid reading between the lines, then yes you're correct.
In public, other than Sam’s tweet.
Do you think nobody said anything like this in an email or Slack?
> I wondered why they had chosen the voice of a middle aged woman, and whether that was about being woke
really weird line of reasoning. Siri, Alexa, Google Home… etc.