Comment by zug_zug

Which one are we saying sounds like Johansson? I'm talking about the TTS voice in the app, is everyone else talking about the multimodal voice from the 4o demos?

Also, whether they *intended* to replicate Her and whether they *did* in the end are very different.

Genuine question, what's wrong with trying to replicate in real life an idea from a SciFi movie ?

I understand that it could be problematic if OpenAI did one of two things:

- imitated Scarlett Johansson's voice to impersonate her

- misled people into believing that GPT-4o is an official by-product of the film Her, like calling it “the official Her AI”

The first point is still unclear, and that's precisely the point of the article

For the second point, the tweets you posted clearly show that the AI from Her served as an inspiration for creating the GPT-4o model, but not a trademark infringement

Will Matt Damon receive royalties if a guy is ever stuck on Mars ?

Now I'm just sad that it doesn't respond in a flirty Gilbert Gottfried style voice.

Scarlett Johansson is apparently so devious she managed to get OpenAI to reach out to her to license her voice and likeness.

She even set up the CEO by having him directly negotiate with her, which I’m sure he also did with the alleged small voice actor. Then she perfected her scheme by having that same CEO publicly tweet “her” - timed with the release of the voice product - referencing JS’s movie of the same name where she voiced a computer system with a personality.

She even managed to get OpenAI to take down the voice in OpenAI’s words “out of respect” for SJ while maintaining their legal defense publicly that the voice was not based on hers.

SJ doesn't know who the voice actor is. Her objection is with OpenAI's actions.

Why would she?

They literally didn't question any of OAI's claims. They just regurgitated them.

They were desperate for a non-union-only actor in their casting. But repeatedly kept hitting up a union actor.

What fears for the actress' safety have been portrayed such that not only does she needs to stay anonymous, but her agent does too?

"Altman was not involved"... yet he personally reached out to SJ to try to close the deal?

They refuted it based on select documents handed to them by OpenAI.

Likeness rights are a real thing, and it's not out there to have infringed on them by going to a famous person to use their likeness, getting denied, then using another actor telling them to copy the first actor's likeness.

This is why all Hollywood contracts have actors signing over their likeness in perpetuity now; which was one of the major sticking points of the recent strikes.

It's nice of you to clearly state what reasonable persons should believe violates the law. Alas, your contention about what reasonable people believe about the law isn't actually the law.

> They asked SJ, she said no. So they went to a voice actor and used her.

My guess is they would have went with that voice actor either way. They had four different female voices available (in addition to multiple male voices) - 2 for the api, and I believe 2 for ChatGPT (different api voices are still available, different ChatGPT ones aren’t). If Johanssen had said yes, it’s likely they would have added a fifth voice, not gotten rid of Sky.

This has echoes of Crispin Glover and Back to the Future 2. They didn't rehire him and got someone else to play his character.

> That doesn't violate any law to any reasonable person.

Midler v Ford is already precedent that using a different actor isn't inherently safe legally.

I predict the case will have parallels with Queen's lawsuit against Vanilla Ice: the two songs (under pressure and ice ice baby) are "different" in that one has an extra beat, yet it's an obvious rip-off of the former.

Perhaps merely having person A sound like person B isn't enough, but combined with the movie and AI theme it will be enough. Anyway I hope he loses.

You have no idea what they did, unless you work there.

All you know is that somebody being sued for multi-millions of dollars (and who's trustworthiness is pretty much shot) is claiming what they did. And frankly given the frequency and ease of voice cloning, there are very few people who can say with confidence that they know 100% that nobody at the company did anything to that effect.

What employee, if any, could say with 100% confidence that this model was trained with 100% samples from the voice actress they alledge and 0% from samples from Scarlett Johansson/her? And if that employee had done so, would they rat out their employer and lose their job over it?

"Reasonable" is doing a ton of work here.

Ford gave explicit instructions to imitate a copyrighted performance. Because that specific recording as owned by a record studio.

If you can describe a woman's voice and mannerisms and the result sounds similar to a copyrighted performance, that is natural circumstance.

If you want an example of purposefully imitating something with a copyright, look at GNU. Anyone who looked at the UNIX code was realistically prevented from writing their own kernel with similar functions. But if a handful of folks describe what the kernel ended up doing and some <random> guy in his own head comes up with some C code and assembly to do end up with the same high level functions, well thats just fine, even if you include the original name.

The details matter. There is absolutely enough vocal difference, it doesn't take an audiologist to hear the two voices do sound different but very close. It would not be hard for the producers to describe "a" voice and that description would overlap heavily with ScarJo, and wow the marketing team reached out to see if she would attempt to fill the existing requirements. When she said no, they found a suitable alternative. If the intent was to have ScarJo do the voice and she said no and they did it anyways, thats illegal.

To the Washington Post, which verified it. The Post doesn't much care if you can verify their work, because no reasonable person believes they're making this up.

If you read the WaPo article that's the topic of this thread, you'll see that the actual voice artist is quoted in the article.