What a stupid self own by OpenAI that could have easily been avoided.
Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice
411–420 of 1001 posts
Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice
#412Isn't OpenAI mostly built upon disregarding the copyright of countless people?
And hasn't OpenAI recently shown that they can pull off a commercial coup d'état, unscathed?
Why would they not simply also take the voice of some actress? That's small potatoes.
No one is going to push back against OpenAI meaningfully.
People are still going to use ChatGPT to cheat on their homework, to phone-in their jobs, and to try to ride OpenAI's coattails.
The current staff have already shown they're aligned with the coup.
Politicians and business leaders befriend money.
Maybe OpenAI will eventually settle with the actress, for a handful of coins they found in the cushions of their trillion-dollar sofa.
Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scar Jo thought it sounded like herself, and so did people who knew her personally. That is what matters. OWNERSHIP over her contributions to the world.
More notably for legal purposes, there were several independent news reports corroborating the vocal similarity.
...and sama's tweet referencing "Her"
Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice
#414Really not a smart idea for OpenAI to do this when one of the top Congresspeople represents the Hollywood area, is about to be elected Senator, and already has a bill ready to require AI companies to abide by copyright: https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2024/04/adam-schiff-ai-video-games...
VCs and angel investors feeling the burn right now. I hope all the firms on Sand Hill Rd get bent
Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice
#415Well, that statement lays out a damning timeline: - OpenAI approached Scarlett last fall, and she refused. - Two days before the GPT-4o launch, they contacted her agent and asked that she reconsider. (Two days! This means they already had everything they needed to ship the product with Scarlett’s cloned voice.) - Not receiving a response, OpenAI demos the product anyway, with Sam tweeting “her” in reference to Scarle…
Does it really cost a to train one voice?
Seems pretty reckless to not have alternatives just in case Scarlett refused.
Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's been mentioned so much in the last 8 months it prompted me to go watch "Her" 11 years after it came out.
I only saw Scarlett Johansson and "Her" being mentioned only after the presentation of ChatGPT-4o. I saw people asking for a Scarlett Johansson voice tho.
This way prior to 4o. The demo did seem to make the discussion louder though as everyone was suddenly talking about the voice feature whereas previously it was a slow side option for mobile devices only.
Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not the purpose though, clearly. If anything, you could make the argument that they're trading in on the association to the movie "Her", that's it. Neither Sky nor the new voice model sound particularly like ScarJo, unless you want to imply that her identity rights extend over 40% of all female voice types. People made the association because her voice was used in a movie that features a highly emotive voice a…
> People made the association because her voice was used in a movie that features a highly emotive voice assistant reminiscent of GPT-4o, which sama and others joked about. Whether you think it sounds like her or not is a matter of opinion, I guess. I can see the resemblance, and I can also see the resemblance to Jennifer Lawrence and others. What Johannson is alleging goes beyond this, though. She is alleging that A…
I honestly don't think it is a matter of opinion, though. Her voice has a few very distinct characteristics, the most significant of which being the vocal fry / huskiness, that aren't present at all in either of the Sky models.
Asking for her vocal likeness is completely in line with just wanting the association with "Her" and the big PR hit that would come along with that. They developed voice models on two different occasions and hoped twice that Johannson would allow them to make that connection. Neither time did she accept, and neither time did they release a model that sounded like her. The two day run-up isn't suspicious either, because we're talking about a general audio2audio transformer here. They could likely fine-tune it (if even that is necessary) on her voice in hours.
I don't think we're going to see this going to court. OpenAI simply has nothing to gain by fighting it. It would likely sour their relation to a bunch of media big-wigs and cause them bad press for years to come. Why bother when they can simply disable Sky until the new voice mode releases, allowing them to generate a million variations of highly-expressive female voices?
Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they are not trying to trick people into believing xyz person did the voice acting, and instead are going for a certain style, I think they would be protected by freedom of expression. Think of how authors of books describe voices in great detail. i.e. intent matters. In this case, since the other voice actor has a clearly different voice than SJ, it seems like their intent is to just copy the general 'style' of t…
> In this case, since the other voice actor has a clearly different voice than SJ, it seems like their intent is to just copy the general 'style' of the voice, and not SJ's voice itself. How can you say that when they literally approached SJ for her voice, and then asked the voice actor to reproduce SJ's voice?!
> and then asked the voice actor to reproduce SJ's voice?!
you are just making that up afaict.
> How can you say that when they literally approached SJ for her voice
Almost by definition SJ's voice will match the style of 'Her', at least for awhile (*). So why not ask SJ first?
(*) voices change significantly over time.
Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, that's apples-to-pizzas comparison. You're conflating work and identity . There's an ocean of difference between mimicking the style of someone's art in an original work, and literally cloning someone's likeness for marketing/business reasons. You can hire someone to make art in the style of Taylor Swift, that's OK. You can't start selling Taylor Swift figurines by the same principle. What Sam Altman did, figu…
But they aren't doing anything with her voice(allegedly?). They're doing something with a voice that some claim sounds like hers. But if it isn't, then it is more like selling a figurine called Sally that happens to look a lot like Taylor Swift. Sally has a right to exist even if she happens to look like Taylor Swift. Has there ever been an up and coming artist who was not allowed to sell their own songs, because the…
The detail you're missing is that who claim it sounds like "her" includes the CEO of the company
Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
But like, Uber gave us taxis on our phones. No taxi company was going to do that without a force like Uber making them to it.
It also gave you cab drivers who don't earn enough to be able to replace their vehicles. You can cheer on "forces" like Uber all you like but I would prefer it if progress happened without criminal deception: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/jul/10/uber-files-leak... I don't see how anyone can read this and think the uber app is a net positive.
Citation needed on the "drivers who can't replace their vehicles" part. Lots of cities in the US have passed laws about how much such workers must be paid and I generally think the government is the one that should be solving that problem.
I read that whole article. I didn't know about the intentional strategy to send Uber drivers into likely violent situations. That's fucked up.
Most of that article seemed to focus on Uber violating laws about operating taxi services though. Sounds good to me? Like there's nothing intrinsically morally correct about taxi service operation laws. This sort of proves my point too. Some company was going to have to fight through all that red tape to get app-based taxis working and maybe it's possible to do that without breaking the law, but if it's easier to just break the law and do it, then whatever. I can't emphasize how much I don't care about those particular laws being broken and maybe if I knew more about them I'd even be specifically happy that those laws were broken.