Comment by Ukv
2 years ago
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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 [...]")
What you're arguing fails to pass the obviousness test ; if I were running the company it would be blankly obvious that the optics would be a problem, so I would start to collect a LOT of paperwork documenting that the casting selection was done without a hint of bias towards a celebrity's impression. Where is that paperwork? The obviousness puts the burden on them to show it.
Otherwise your argument lets off not just this scandal but an entire conceptual category of clever sleazy moves that are done "after the fact". It's not the the Kafka trap you're making it out to be.
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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.
Exactly anyone that listens to both side by side should be able to clearly distinguish them.
I think that reaches too far. Intent should be a defining part of impersonation. IANAL and I don't know what the law says.
Intent on whose part, though? Like, supposing in arguendo that the company's goal was to make the voice sound indistinguishable from SJ's in Her, but they wanted to maintain plausible deniability, so instead cast as wide a net as possible during auditions, happened upon an actor who they thought already sounded indistinguishable from SJ without special instruction, and cast that person solely for that reason. That seems as morally dubious to me as achieving the same deliberate outcome by instruction to the performer.
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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.
No, I'm happy that OpenAI exists. But alarmed that they're being so mendacious.
If they just said "we loved the film, we wanted that feel, SJ wasn't willing, so we went for it anyway. Obviously that's backfired and we're rethinking" then I would have a thousand times more comfort than this corporate back-covering bullshit.
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.
Then OpenAI did the priming by referencing "Her".
Who’s making those claims, exactly? That will tell you a lot about their likely veracity.
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.
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.
> > 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.
> That's a verbatim quote from the article
The clips are all online for you to listen to them yourself. The article can say what it likes, it's just wrong.
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Also sam had a one word tweet: “her.” So it looks like there was something going on.
It’s an obvious comparison to make for the technology, I don’t think it was meant as “it sounds like ScarJo”