Comment by gnicholas

Also looking from the perspective of the lesser known voice actress, does Scarlett Johansson have the right to trample the lesser known voice artists future job opportunities by intimidating her previous employers?

Imagine being a potential future employer of the lesser known artist, would you dare hire her in the face that Johansson's lawyers might come after you?

Is this lesser known voice artist now doomed to find a job in a different sector?

Voice archetypes are much much older than Johansson, so by symmetry arguments, could those earlier in line sue Johansson in turn?

When a strong person is offered a job at the docks, but refuses, and if then later another strong person accepts the job, can the first one sue the employer for "finding another strong man"?

At some point the courts are being asked to uphold exceptionalist treatment and effectuate it on tax-payers dollars moving executive branches in case of non-compliance.

> Except it doesn't sound like Johansson, I don't know why people keep saying this.

Would you ever say “except strawberries aren’t tasty, I don’t know why people keep saying this”?

Maybe it doesn’t sound like Johansson to you, but it does sound like her to a lot of people. Worse, evidence points to Altman wanting you to make that connection. It’s trying to sound like her performance in one specific movie.

>> 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,

To add to this, the legal standard isn't whether it sounds "like" her. It has to be a replication of her voice. Millions of people may sound or look "like" another person, that doesn't mean they are a copy of that person.

The best case study in voices imho is David Attenborough. He has a distinct voice that many have sought to replicate. But you know who else had that voice? Richard Attenborough (the actor from Jurassic Park). They are brothers. Sadly, Richard recently passed. Their voices are unsurprisingly nearly interchangeable, along with a thousand other people with similar life stories. So who gets to own complete rights to the distinctive "Attenborough" voice? In any other area of intellectual property the answer is simple: nobody. It doesn't exist and/or was created by people long before any living Attenborough walked the earth.

Similarly, courts ruled that GTA did not steal from Lindsay Lohan. One cannot own the image of generic California blonde in a red bikini. So why should Johansson own sexy/breathy voice of with a nondistinctive accent?

I've been saying this for days, and I'm pretty firmly in the OpenAI critic camp.

The only reason people think it sounds like her is because they've biased themselves into it because of all the context surrounding it.

This. Its what people want to hear. If you heard that voice in a vacuum with no context and asked someone what famous person is it, I doubt many people would say Johansson. Some, sure, but not the majority.

The only thing Sam did wrong was play too fast and loose with the implication of "Her" given that he had been talking to ScarJo. Lawyers should have told him to just STFU about it.

I was confused because it doesn’t really sound much like her normal voice, and I didn’t see Her. So I looked it up—it sounds a little bit more like her voice in her… the movie where she’s adding some AI-like affectations to her voice.

I guess they decided to remove it for PR reasons or something.

If they ask James Earl Jones to do it, he says no, and then they hire someone with a deep voice in order to sound like him? Yes.

If I play the voices back to back, nobody thinks they're the same person.

If I ask which one is SJ, people that have seen her films know, those who don't, don't. (Hint, only one sounds hoarse like early smoker voice and self-assured even in the 'Her' role, only one sounds impossibly 2020s valley girl chipper and eager to please.)

Sure seems like all the dogpiling last week either didn't do a basic listen or ignored it, as it's much better for click farming to mock the cock of the walk.

Not a lawyer, but wouldn't the important intent be the one when the voice is released, not the first moment someone gets hired? The economic harm happens when you publicize the voice in a way designed to gain value from Johannsen's reputation without her permission, not when you record it. The tweet and requests speak directly to that moment.

Is there any quality difference between hiring a voice actor specifically to provide the voice for an AI compared to cloning an actor's voice from their movies?

Much of the coverage I've seen thorough social media on this (including Johansson's statement) gives the impression that this is what OpenAI did. If the quality of doing that would be worse than using a voice actor to imitate Johansson's voice, what is the value of the publicity which gives the impression that their technology is more advanced than it is, compared to whatever they end up settling this for?

The point isn't the time line of hiring the voice actor. The question is whether OpenAI was deliberately trying to make the voice sound like Johansson.

Suppose someone asked Dall-e for an image of Black Widow like in the first Avengers movie, promoting their brand. If they then use that in advertising, Johansson's portrait rights would likely be violated. Even (especially) if they never contacted her about doing the ad herself.

This is similar to that, but with voice, not portrait.

>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.

So your theory is that this was completely coincidental. But after the voice was recorded, they thought, "Wow, it sounds just like the voice of the computer in Her! We should contact that actress and capitalize on it!"

That's what you're going with? It doesn't make sense, to me.

No-one had to explicitly say any of that for it to still be an impersonation. Her was a very popular film, and Johansson's voice character was very compelling. They literally could have said nothing and just chosen the voice audition closest to Her unconsciously, because of the reach of the film, and that would still be an impersonation.

It sounds more like Rashida Jones than SJ to me.

I think part of this PR cycle is also the priming effect, where if you're primed to hear something and then listen you do great it.

Who’s making those claims, exactly? That will tell you a lot about their likely veracity.

This is why things are decided by juries. You may well truly believe this all seems unrelated and above board. But very few people will agree with you when presented with these facts, and it would be hard find them during a jury selection.

> The actress's natural voice sounds identical to the AI-generated Sky voice

No it doesn't.

Also sam had a one word tweet: “her.” So it looks like there was something going on.

> What is clear is OpenAI referenced Her in marketing it.

Because they're building a voice-mediated AI, duh.

Given the breadth and range of female voices available, this is way too close to be just a coincidence.

Isn't it TTS + style transfer? Or is it e2e from text to waveform?

That and repeated, rejected attempts to hire ScarJo to do the voice. I expect they have ample documentation on that.

I may be wrong, but I believe this case would be made to a jury, not to a judge.

I think it would be hard to seat a jury that, after laying out the facts about the attempts to hire Johansen, and the tweet at the time of release, would have even one person credulous enough to be convinced this was all an honest mix-up.

Which is why it will never in a million years go to a trial.

Not a native speaker, so "catch phrase" is maybe not the right term or too strong.

Prompted by your comment I read up about the case and from what I understand Sega wanted to use the song in a promotion and not (what I remembered) her likeness.