Comment by sanderjd
2 years ago
> Would those doing the casting have the foresight to predict, ...
Yes, this should all have been obvious to those people. It would require a pretty high degree of obliviousness for it to not be obvious that this could all blow up in exactly this way.
It blew up by way of people believing it was an intentional SJ deepfake/soundalike hired due to being rejected by SJ. I think this article effectively refutes that.
I don't think it blew up by way of people believing simply that those doing the casting could have a hint of a subconscious bias towards voices that sound like celebrities. To me that seems like trying to find anything to still take theoretical issue in, and would've just been about something else had they made the casting selection provably unbiased and thoroughly documented.
Again, I think it requires a high degree of obliviousness to not have the foresight during casting to think, "if we use a voice that sounds anything like the voice in the famous smash hit movie that mainstreamed the idea of the kind of product we're making, without actually getting the incredibly famous voice actress from that movie to do it, people will make this connection, and that actress will be mad, and people will be sympathetic to that, and we'll look bad and may even be in legal hot water". I think all of that is easily predictable!
It seems way more likely to be a calculated risk than a failure of imagination. And this is where the "ethics" thing comes into play. They were probably right about the risk calculation! Even with this blow-up, this is not going to bring the company down, it will blow over and they'll be fine. And if it hadn't blown up, or if they had gotten her on board at any point, it would have been a very nice boon.
So while (in my view) it definitely wasn't the right thing to do from a "we're living in a society here people!" perspective, it probably wasn't even a mistake, from a "businesses take calculated risks" perspective.
> "if we use a voice that sounds anything like the voice in the famous smash hit movie that mainstreamed the idea of the kind of product we're making [...]
I think it's deceptively easy to overestimate how likely it is for someone to have had some specific thought/consideration when constructing that thought retroactively, and this still isn't really a specific enough thought to have caused them to have set up the casting process in such a way to eliminate (and prove that they have eliminated) possible subconscious tendency towards selecting voice actors with voices more similar to celebrities.
But, more critically, I believe the anger was based on the idea that it may be an intentional SJ soundalike hired due to being turned down by SJ, or possibly even a deepfake. Focusing on refuting that seems to me the best PR move even when full knowledge of what happened is available, and that's what they're doing.
8 replies →