Technology

From the article:

they don’t just think they’re the smartest people in the world, they think that everyone else is stupid.

And that sums up techbros in one sentence.

She is going to take them to the cleaners, and Altman and his circlejerk club will deserve every single cent of the damages they’re forced to pay. I genuinely hope she makes it an incredibly messy and eye wateringly expensive legal process for them. I’m not a ScarJo fanboy by any means, but fuck OpenAI for thinking they can get away with something so absurdly blatant and obviously unethical.

I wouldn't ever want someone to be able to own a tone/sound of voice. I'm with you there.

But it kinda sounds like they're trying to straight-up imitate her. Like they want people to hear this ai and think it's voiced by johanssen herself.

I don't know if that's true, or if it even makes a difference legally, it's just the impression I'm getting.

I'm not knowledgeable about any of this; any correction is welcome, lol.

In Scarlett Johansson‘s statement, she says that OpenAI approached her to voice the Sky voice.

Whether or not OpenAI hired another actress that sounded very similar to her (hah.) and they are weirdly cagey about naming or they just ripped off the audio from her movies and are lying about hiring a voice actress, is not the extent of the issue.

People sounding alike just happens. But that we know they asked to use Johansson’s voice for this. After being rebuffed, they created Sky, which sounds a lot like Sam, and made several references to the Her movie. Sky is even presented with the same ‘personality’ as Sam. They aren’t just ripping off Scarlett Johansson’s voice acting, they’re ripping off the character as a whole, and trying to associate themselves with the movie. That’s shameful and rips off Spike Jonze as well as all the other creatives who created that movie.
And for what? Because tech bros didn’t get what they wanted, so they decided to try to rip off the characters anyway? Because Her is sort of a cultural touchstone, and their product is merely well-positioned, but GPT-4o will be in a crowded market space within 6 months?

It’s sort of pathetic - pretending to lean on the relevance of a movie because your product is destined to become irrelevant.
Also - highly ironic to me that Her is (somewhat) about how you can’t own something that doesn’t consent to be owned. And those dumb bitches went and ripped it off when they didn’t get consent. Well, now Sky’s gone to join Sam in some non-corporeal reality.

Sorry for the novel. I didn’t sleep well and I get weird when I’m sleep deprived.

No matter how similar the voice is to Scarlett Johansson's, it would still sound fundamentally different. But there are tricks that you can use to alter the pitch and range of a voice to make it sound more like a specific person and that's probably what they did.

This kind of reminds me of Crispin Glover, from Back to the Future. He tried to negotiate a higher pay for the second movie, so the producers hired a different actor to play the role, but deliberately made the actor up to look like Glover. In response, Glover sued the producers and won. It set a critical precedent for Hollywood, about using someone's likeness without consent.

The article mentions they reached out to her two days before the launch - if she had said 'OK,' there's no way they could have even recorded what they needed from her, let alone trained the model in time for the presentation. So they must have had a Scarlett Johansson voice ready to go. Other than training the model on movies (really not ideal for a high quality voice model), how would they have gotten the recordings they needed?

If they hired a "random" voice actress, they might not run into issues. But if at any point they had a job listing, a discussion with a talent manager, or anything else where they mentioned wanting a "Scarlett Johansson sound-alike," they might have dug themselves a nice hole here.

Specifically regarding your question about hiring a voice actor that sounds like someone else - this is commonly done to replace people for cartoons. I don't think it's an issue if you are playing a character. But if you deliberately impersonate a person, there might be some trouble.

That's, uh, "Jaime Pressly", who is totally not esteemed Academy Award nominated character actress Margot Robbie doing an American Southern accent to get more work in the US.

Hey, I have more than one comedy bit I do here other than something something Hell in a Cell, OK?

Speaking of which, Hell in a Cell isn't even that exciting anymore after the WWE made it an annual event and painted the cages red, and why did Seth Rollins get disqualified after he attacked "The Fiend" Bray Wyatt with a sledgehammer 2019 even though Hell in a Cell matches have always been no disqualification?

It's like their script writers don't even care about their own rules.

OpenAI's actions could just as easily be explained by them seeking to protect their image as much as possible, knowing that if they let the voice stay then bad PR would only grow.

Even if there is no connection to ScarJo in this case, it's still in OpenAI's interest to appease the public for the sake of their reputation.

The reference was actually a reference to the earlier movie Sneakers which was one of the first movies about hacking.

And yeah, Uplink was awesome.

To add to this, Scarlett Johansson took on Disney and they settled. And Disney is like the final boss of litigious companies (either them or Nintendo). If she has the same legal team for this, and they think she has a case against OpenAI, this could open the door for OpenAI to get rightfully clobbered for their tech-bro ignoring of copyright laws.