Comment by marcus_holmes

Listen to the side by side comparisons. Sky has a deeper voice overall, in the gpt4o demo Sky displays a wider pitch range because the omni model is capable of emotional intonation. Her voice slides quite a bit while emoting but notably doesn't break and when she returns to her normal speaking voice you can hear a very distinct rhotic sound, almost an over-pronounced American accent and she has a tendency towards deepening into vocal fry especially before pauses. I'd describe her voice as mostly in her chest when speaking clearly.

Now listen to SJ's Samantha in Her and the first thing you'll notice are the voice breaks and that they break to a higher register with a distinct breathy sound, it's clearly falsetto. SJ seems to have this habit in her normal speaking voice as well but it's not as exaggerated and seems more accidental. Her voice is very much in her head or mask. The biggest commonality I can hear is that they both have a sibilant S and their regional accents are pretty close.

I was thinking someone thought "oh that sounds a fair bit like SJ in Her, if we can get SJ onboard, perhaps we can fine-tune what we got to sound like SJ in Her".

> But after the voice was recorded, they thought,

... that it would be even better to have a famous voice from Her than a rather generic female voice they had, but their proposal was declined. Well oops, but SJ, famous as she is, doesn't have a copyright right on all female voices other than her own.

> 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

That's a very broad definition of impersonation, one that does not match the legal definition, and one that would would be incredibly worrying for voice actors whose natural voice happens to fall within a radius of a celebrity's natural voice ("their choice to cast you was unconsciously affected by similarity to a celebrity, therefore [...]")

SJs voice has some very distinctive characteristics and she has distinctive inflections that she applies. None of that inflection, tonality, or characteristics are present in the chat bot voice. Without those elements, it can be said to be a voice with vaguely similar pitch and accent, but any reasonable “impersonation “ would at least attempt to copy the mannerisms and flairs of the voice they we’re trying to impersonate.

Listening to them side by side, the OpenAI voice is more similar to Siri than to SJ. That Sam Altman clearly wanted SJ to do the voice acting is irrelevant, considering the timings and the voice differences.

The phone call and tweet were awkward tho.

I think that reaches too far. Intent should be a defining part of impersonation. IANAL and I don't know what the law says.

I have this sinking feeling that in this whole debate, whatever anyone's position is mostly depends on whether they think it's good that OpenAI exists or not.

Then OpenAI did the priming by referencing "Her".

First two claims are "according to interviews with multiple people involved in the process", direct quotes from the casting call flier, and "documents shared by OpenAI in response to questions from The Washington Post". Given the number of (non-OpenAI) people involved, I think it would be difficult to maintain a lie on these points. Third claim is a comparison carried out by The Washington Post.

> > The article claims that: [...]

> > 3. The actress's natural voice sounds identical to the AI-generated Sky voice

> No it doesn't.

That's a verbatim quote from the article (albeit based on brief recordings).

I haven't heard the anonymous voice actress's voice myself to corroborate WP's claim, but (unless there's information I'm unaware of) neither have you to claim the opposite.

It’s an obvious comparison to make for the technology, I don’t think it was meant as “it sounds like ScarJo”

There are approximately 4 billion women in the world. Given that I know a few people who sound very similar to me, I would say that there are (subjectively) perhaps 1,000 to 10,000 different types of women's voices in the world.

This would mean that a celebrity could possess a voice similar to 0.5 million to 5 million other women, and potentially claim royalties if their voice is used.

You first said that Sky is "clearly an impersonation" of Johansson. Now you say that it's not a coincidence they chose Sky's voice actress. These are two different claims. It may not be a coincidence in the sense that they may have chosen Sky's actress because she sounds similar to Johansson. But that alone doesn't constitute an impersonation. Impersonation means deliberately assuming the identity of another person with the intent to deceive. So you'd have to demonstrate more than a degree of similarity to make that case.

Did you not read the article? They did the voice months before that.