Comment by pc86
2 years ago
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
And in fact clearly rebutted by the evidence that the actor says they never told her to copy anyone or ever mentioned Johansson or Her.
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It even assumes the opposite, since they asked SJ after recording the original voice.
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.
I'm not saying they'll necessarily win in court, all I'm saying is I'd wager my life savings that they intentionally created a voice that sounded like Scarlet's character from Her.
Anybody on this forum who says that it's entirely impossible or that it's conclusive that they didn't use her voice samples simply isn't being logical about the evidence.
TBH I really like the voice and the product, but I'm having a lot of trouble wrapping my head around the number of people who seem rather tribal about all this.
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.
> “Reasonable” does a lot of work throughout the entire legal system.
Yes, but here it’s not being invoked in the sense of “would a reasonable person believe based on this evidence that the facts which would violate the actual law exist” but “would a ‘reasonable’ person believe the law is what the law, indisputably, actually is”.
It’s being invoked to question the reality of the law itself, based on its subjective undesirability to the speaker.
>"Reasonable" does a lot of work throughout the entire legal system.
Yet it never becomes anywhere near the significant fulcrum you made it out to be here, filtering between the laws you think are good and the laws you think are bad. Further, you seem to mistake attorneys with legislators. I'd be surprised if a reasonable person thinks it is okay to profit off the likeness of others without their permission. But I guess you don't think that's reasonable. What a valuable conversation we're having.
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> "things that are reasonable to a lawyer" and "things that are reasonable to a normal human being" are essentially disjoint sets.
In litigation, any question whether X was "reasonable" is typically determined by a jury, not a judge [0].
[0] That is, unless the trial judge decides that there's no genuine issue of fact and that reasonable people [1] could reach only one possible conclusion; when that's the case, the judge will rule on the matter "as a matter of law." But that's a dicey proposition for a trial judge, because an appeals court would reverse and remand if the appellate judges decided that reasonable people could indeed reach different conclusions [1].
[1] Yeah, I know it's turtles all the way down, or maybe it's circular, or recursive.