Comment by dbreunig
2 years ago
This shows how bad it is. If you're proactively sharing a package of docs with the Washingington Post, you're toast.
Altman's outreach, his tweet, and the thousands of tweets and comments talking about how similar Sky is to ScarJo is enough to win the case in California.
The Washington Post comprehensively refuted the story. This is like the "this is good for Bitcoin because ____" meme, but in reverse.
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.
Then we can add this to the long list of insane lawsuits going the wrong way in California.
They asked SJ, she said no. So they went to a voice actor and used her. Case closed, they didn't use SJ's voice without her permission. That doesn't violate any law to any reasonable person.
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.
>> "then using another actor telling them to copy the first actor's likeness"
Assumes facts not in evidence
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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?
It's not (or shouldn't be) about things that have some finite probability (no matter how small) of being true, but rather about what can be proven to be true.
There's no doubt a very small (but finite) probability that the voice sounds like a grey alien from Zeta Reticuli.
That doesn't mean the alien is gonna win in court.
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If they did clone her voice, they did a poor job of it. Other than that the voice is female there's not a whole lot of resemblance in tone and timbre.
"Reasonable" is doing a ton of work here.
"Reasonable" does a lot of work throughout the entire legal system.
If there's one constant that can be relied upon, it's that "things that are reasonable to a lawyer" and "things that are reasonable to a normal human being" are essentially disjoint sets.
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