Comment by scoot
2 years ago
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
> and somehow trained another voice within the few weeks after she said no.
Er, that is totally possible? You act like it's not a machine learning system. You train new stuff in hours or days easily, especially if you have good tooling. Imagine saying this of, say, Stable Diffusion image LoRAs: "this X artist LoRA couldn't be based on X because it was somehow trained within the few weeks after X said no!"
All the timing means is that, in good management & startup fashion, because they needed multiple voices, they had a voice pipeline going, and so could have a bunch of female voices in the pipeline for optionality. And if licensing Johansson didn't work out, you have a plan B (and C, and preferably D). This is big business, you don't do things serially or not have backups: "'hope' is not a plan".
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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.
I don't think OpenAI wants people to think ChatGPT 4 or whatever is Scarlett Johansson, that would not make any sense.
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There’s a certain group of people on this site that do not want to OpenAI, Apple, and others, to have done wrong.
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.
Yes they tried to copy film Her yet the voice ai character in the film you think was original? No other films predate that film with female AI voices? And would the actor have claim on the fictional character they played in the film vs film “owners”?
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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?
Thanks! Hadn’t heard it before now. They don’t sound all that similar to me, though perhaps I am a bit detail-oriented on account of my linguistics background.
You might be right, but still if it goes to court, OpenAI knows they have an uphill battle. Any jury is going to love Johansson.
The voice doesn't need to sound the same for OpenAI to lose.
Are you asking me to trust that a video clip posted to the ChatGPT subreddit by u/SWAMPMONK is providing an accurate audio recording of the openAI sky voice?
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uM8jhcqDP0&t=30s
Wait, what's the music artifact at 0:54? What are they even doing!?
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