Comment by summerlight

There’s a special branch of law called “right of publicity” or “manners and likeness.”

It protect celebrities who rely on endorsements and “who they are” for income.

It very clearly prohibits copycats with near-likeness as a workaround to getting permission from a celebrity.

OpenAI asked SJ to use her voice. That right there helps her case immensely.

She said no. They went ahead anyway, presumably with someone or someone’s with a similar voice.

They publicized the product by referencing SJ.

These facts are damning.

They might be just a part of the story. Maybe 100 actresses, all sounding roughly the same, were given the offer over a two year period.

Maybe they all were given the same praise. Maybe one other, who signed an agreement, was praised on social media much more.

But this isn’t a slippery slope or a grey area. SJ was asked and said no.

That prohibits using a similar sounding copycat and publicizing as SJ.

There's no clear line for this. To get the definite conclusion, you will need to bring this to the court with lots of investigation. I know this kind of ambiguity is frustrating, but the context and intention matter a lot here and unfortunately we don't have a better way than a legal battle to figure it out.

Thanks to Sam, this OpenAI case is clearer than others since he made a number of clear evidence against him.

When it comes to whether something is "wrong", in general intent matters a lot and what they did was communicate an obvious intent. There are certainly ways they could have avoided doing so, and I'm not sure I understand the value of trying to dissect it into a dozen tiny pieces and debate which particular detail pushes it over the line from ambiguous to hard-to-deny? Maybe I don't understand what kind of clarity you're trying to achieve here.

This particular area of law or even just type of "fairness" is by necessity very muddy, there isn't a set of well-defined rules you can follow that will guarantee an outcome where everyone is happy no matter what, sometimes you have to step back and evaluate how people feel about things at various steps along the way.

I'd speculate that OAI's attempts to reach out to SJ are probably the result of those evaluations - "this seems like it could make her people upset, so maybe we should pay her to not be mad?"

>If it weren't for their attempt to link the voice to SJ (i.e. with the "her" tweet), would that be OK?

Taking the recent screwup out of account... It's tough. A commercial product shouldn't try to assossiate with another brand. But if we're being realistic: "Her" is nearly uncopyrightable.

Since Her isn't a tech branch it would be hard to get in trouble based on that association alone for some future company. Kind of like how Skynet in theory could have been taken by a legitimate tech company and how the Terminator IP owner would struggle to seek reparations (to satisfy curiosity, Skynet is a US govt. Program. So that's already taken care of).

As long as you don't leave a trail, you can probably get away with copying Stewart. But if you start making Star trek references (even if you never contacted Stewart), you're stepping in hit water.

> It's probably not fine to hire a voice actor and tell them to imitate someone else.

Pretty sure this is fine, otherwise cartoons like the simpsons or south park would've gotten in trouble years ago.

> If it weren't for their attempt to link the voice to SJ (i.e. with the "her" tweet), would that be OK?

Yes

> Say I wanted to make my AI voice sound like Patrick Stewart

Don't tweet "engage" of "boldly go where no man has gone before" when you release the product and you should be ok.

> It's fine to hire a voice actor who sounds like someone else.

Not necessarily, when you're hiring them because they like someone else—especially someone else who has said that they don't want to work with you. OpenAI took enough steps to show they wanted someone who sounded like SJ.

> Surely it's OK to hire an English actor who sounds a lot like him, so long as I don't use Sir Patrick's name in the advertising.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co. and also Tom Waits vs. Frito-Lay.

> as long as they didn't mention SJ

Or tried to hire SJ repeatedly, even as late as 2 days before the launch.

> If it weren't for their attempt to link the voice to SJ (i.e. with the "her" tweet), would that be OK?

No.

The fact that it sounds very much like her and it is for a virtual assistant that clearly draws a parallel to the virtual assistant voiced by SJ in the movie (and it was not a protected use like parody) makes it not OK and not legal.

> Surely it's OK to hire an English actor who sounds a lot like him, so long as I don't use Sir Patrick's name in the advertising.

Nope.

If you made it sound identical to Patrick Stewart that would also likely not be OK or legal since his voice and mannerisms are very distinctive.

If you made it sound kind of like Patrick Stewart that is where things get really grey and it is probably allowed (but if you're doing other things to draw parallels to Patrick Stewart / Star Trek / Picard then that'd make your case worse).

And the law deals with grey areas all the time. You can drag experts in voice and language into the court to testify as to how similar or dissimilar the two voices and mannerisms are. It doesn't nullify the law that there's a grey area that needs to get litigated over.

The things that make this case a slam dunk are that there's the relevant movie, plus there's the previous contact to SJ, plus there's the tweet with "Her" and supporting tweets clearly conflating the two together. You don't even really need the expert witnesses in this case because the behavior was so blatant.

And remember that you're not asking a computer program to analyze two recordings and determine similarity or dissimilarity in isolation. You're asking a judge to determine if someone was ripping off someone else's likeness for commercial purposes, and that judge will absolutely use everything they've learned about human behavior in their lifetime to weigh what they think was actually going on, including all the surrounding human context to the two voices in question.

If "Her" weren't Sam's favorite movie, and if Sam hadn't tweeted "her" the day it launched, and if they hadn't asked SJ to do the voice, and if they hadn't tried to reach her again two days before the launch, and if half the people who first heard the voice said "Hey, isn't that SJ?" -

Then I'd say you have a point. But given all the other info, I'd have to say you're in denial.

> the Washington Post got her to record a voice sample

Actually it only says they reviewed "brief recordings of her initial voice test", which I assume refers to the voice test she did for OpenAI.

The "impersonating SJ" thing seems a straw man someone made up. The OpenAI talent call was for "warm, engaging, charismatic" voices sounding like 25-45 yr old (I assume SJ would have qualified, given that Altman specifically wanted her). They reviewed 400 applicants meeting this filtering criteria, and it seems threw away 395 of the ones that didn't remind Altman of SJ. It's a bit like natural selection and survival of the fittest. Take 400 giraffes, kill the 395 shortest ones, and the rest will all be tall. Go figure.

You’re right that a random person’s voice is not IP, but SJ is not a random person. She’s much more like Mr. Waits or Ms. Milder than you or I.

I don’t believe the burden would be to prove that the voice actor was impersonating, but that she was misappropriating. Walking down the street sounding like Bette Midler isn’t a problem but covering her song with an approximation of her voice is.

You are dead right that the order of operations recently uncovered precludes misappropriation. But it’s an interesting situation otherwise, hypothetically, to wonder if using SJ’s voice to “cover” her performance as the AI in the movie would be misappropriation.

Johansson is a super successful actress and no doubt rejects 95% of roles offered to her, just as she rejected Altman's request to be the voice of ChatGPT.

She doesn't need "go away" payments, and in any case that is not what we're looking at here. OpenAI offered her money to take the part, and she said no.

According to celebrity net worth website, SJ is worth $165M.

If her lawyers are half competent, then they wouldn’t lie. They may not tell the whole truth, but we’re not discussing what wasn’t said here.

As for your second question, yes. Otherwise you have a perfect workaround that would mean a person likeness is free-for-all to use, but we already decided that is not acceptable.

>Even so, if they got a voice actor to impersonate or sound similar to Johansson, is that something that's not allowed?

Correct, that is not allowed in the US.