Live data from Hacker News

Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice

twitter.com

541–550 of 1001 posts

Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice

#541
post #412

Isn'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…

> No one is going to push back against OpenAI meaningfully.

Couldn't, perhaps, one of the more famous people on Earth be responsible for "meaningfully" taking OpenAI to task for this? Perhaps even being the impetus for legislative action?

Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice

#542
post #466
post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Withdrew too quickly? They didn’t come to an agreement to use her voice, they used her voice. And they obviously knew it was a problem because they went back to her like the night before trying to get her approval again. The correct thing to do was NOT use her voice. You don’t get to steal something, get all the benefit from it (the press coverage), and then say “oops never mind it was just a few hours you can’t sue…

They make no representation that it is her voice, and there's a really good chance that they separately made a voice that sounds similar enough to where if they could tack her name to it, it'd be good for advertising, but otherwise isn't her voice. Voices are really hard for people to distinguish as being a certain person without priming, so really she's doing for free the advertising they were hoping she'd do for pa…

> there's a really good chance that they separately made a voice that sounds similar enough to where if they could tack her name to it, it'd be good for advertising, but otherwise isn't her voice.

There’s also a really good chance this is in some way a deepfake. Would be interesting to see this get examined by courts.

Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice

#543
post #410
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

it could make life better for a lot of people, but training their models on copyright material, which makes life worse for another set of people.

Creatives will use AI even more than regular people and with better results. What I find dangerous is to protect all paraphrases and variations as well, akin to owning an idea. When not replicating expression ideas should be free, even in copyrights works

Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice

#544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’ll settle as soon as they figure that out. Idiot tax.

She has no incentive to settle and actually could win big by being the figurehead of the creative industry against AI. It’s understandable why she accepted a settlement from Disney, but there’s no reason why she should settle with a random startup that has no other influence on her employability in Hollywood.

OpenAI will settle, not sure how you read that in reverse.

Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice

#545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't think Scarlett (the person, not her "her" character) has anything to favor their case, aside from the public's sympathy. She may have something only if it turns out that the training set for that voice is composed of some recordings of her (the person, not the movie), which I highly doubt and is, unfortunately, extremely hard to prove. Even that wouldn't be much, though, as it could be ruled a deriva…

Likeness rights and copyright are different.

Fictional characters cannot have personality rights, for obvious reasons.

That falls under copyright, trademarks, ...

Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice

#546
post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. If what they’re doing is so incredibly valuable, just pay for the resources you’re using. If your business model only works if you steal stuff from other people you don’t have a business.

Sounds like you're using the music industry's definition of "steal." Nothing was stolen, because nobody was deprived of the thing.

In this case it just sounds like her , not even a direct copy

Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice

#547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She has no incentive to settle and actually could win big by being the figurehead of the creative industry against AI. It’s understandable why she accepted a settlement from Disney, but there’s no reason why she should settle with a random startup that has no other influence on her employability in Hollywood.

OpenAI will settle, not sure how you read that in reverse.

Settling isn't unilateral. OpenAI can offer to settle, but if she doesn't accept, there will be no settlement.

Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice

#548
post #296

I found the whole ChatGPT-4o demo to be cringe inducing. The fact that Altman was explicitly, and desperately, trying to copy "her" at least makes it understandable why he didn't veto the bimbo persona - it's actually what he wanted. Great call by Scarlett Johansson in not wanting to be any part of it. One thing these trained voices make clear is that it's a tts engine generating ChatGPT-4o's speech, same as before.…

I think it is more then a simple tts engine. At least from the demo, they showed: It can control the speed and it can sing when requested. Maybe its still a seperate speech engine, but more closely connected to the llm.

Azure Speech tts is capable of doing this with SSML. I wouldn't be surprised if it's what OpenAI is using on the backend.

Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice

#549
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Sam Altman has a smarmy, borderline vomit inducing face. The fact that I have to see his face every day while scrolling through the interwebs feeds has made my life worse.

See, I don't like Sam Altman either, but this habit of criticizing people for their faces seems wrong-headed. Isn't it his behavior that we should be criticizing?

Re: Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice

#550

I found the whole ChatGPT-4o demo to be cringe inducing. The fact that Altman was explicitly, and desperately, trying to copy "her" at least makes it understandable why he didn't veto the bimbo persona - it's actually what he wanted. Great call by Scarlett Johansson in not wanting to be any part of it. One thing these trained voices make clear is that it's a tts engine generating ChatGPT-4o's speech, same as before.…

> One thing these trained voices make clear is that it's a tts engine generating ChatGPT-4o's speech, same as before. I'm not familiar with the specifics of how AI models work but doesn't the ability from some of the demos rule out what you've said above? Eg. The speeding up and slowing down speech and the sarcasm don't seem possible if TTS was a separate component

Azure Speech tts is capable of speeding up, slowing down, sarcasm, etc with SSML. I wouldn't be surprised if it's what OpenAI is using on the backend.
Post reply on HN