Comment by sanderjd
2 years ago
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.
I'm sorry, but your first paragraph is a level of credulity that I just can't buy, to the point that I'm struggling to find this line of argument to be anything besides cynical. The most charitable interpretation I might buy is that you think the people involved in this are oblivious, out of touch, and weird to a degree I'm not willing to ascribe to a group of people I don't know.
If you are an adult living and working in the US in the 2020s, and you are working on a product that is an AI assistant with a human voice, you are either very aware of the connection to the movie Her, or are disconnected from society to an incredible degree. I would buy this if it were a single nerd working on a passion project, but not from an entire company filled with all different kinds of people.
The answer is based on "they wanted a voice that sounds like the one in Her, but the person whose voice that is told them no, but then they did it anyway". The exact sequence of events isn't as important to the anger as you seem to think, though it may be more important to the legal process.
My claim is not that they hadn't heard of the movie her, but that while setting up auditions, the chain of thought that would lead them to predict a group would take issue in this very particular way (marcus_holmes's assertion that unconsciously favoring the VA's audition would constitute impersonation) that necessitates the proposed rigor (setting up auditions in a way to eliminate possibility of such bias, and paperwork to prove as such), and consider it worthwhile appeasing the group holding this view, is not so certain to have occurred that the seeming lack of such paperwork can be relied on to imply much at all.
I would go further and say that chain of reasoning is not just uncertain to have occurred, but would probably be flawed if it did - in that I don't think it would noticeably sway that group. Opposed to the evidence in the article, or some forms of other possible possible evidence, which I think can sway people.
> The exact sequence of events isn't as important to the anger as you seem to think, though it may be more important to the legal process.
Less the order of events, and more "seeking out an impersonator and asking them to do an imitation" vs "possibility of unconscious bias when selecting among auditions"
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