Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 1001 posts

Re: OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show

#131

Post by gambiting »

numpad0 wrote: post #99
fsloth wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the unique aspects of a sound? A lot of people look and sound stunningly alike. As a recent example Baldur’s Gate 3, Andrew Wincott voiced Raphael, an npc-antagonist, who to my untrained ear sounded exactly like Charles Dance, and the character model had more than a passing semblance to Mr. Dance as well. It was not a Charles Dance carbon copy but all aspects of the character were strongly aligned with him.…

Try loading random voice file done by real (voice)actors into Audacity, switch view to spectrogram mode, drag down to expand, and compare it to yours. Professionally done voice should look like neatly arranged salmon slices, yours will look like PCIe eye diagrams. You can also obviously compare multiple voice files recorded with similar sounding but different individuals, they rarely look similar on spectrograms.

Sure, except literally no one actually does this. You listen to a voice and it sounds similar in your head? That's who you picture when you hear it. Unless you're a robot I guess.

Re: OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show

#132

Post by visarga »

pavlov wrote: post #13
jrockway wrote: post #10

I was perusing some Simpsons clips this afternoon and came across a story to the effect of "So and so didn't want to play himself, so Dan Castellaneta did the voice." It's a good impression and people didn't seem very upset about that. I am not sure how this is different. (Apparently this particular "impression" predates the Her character, so it's even easier to not be mad about. It's just a coincidence. They weren't…

Surely there’s some kind of difference between “voice impression for a two-line cameo in one episode of an animated sitcom” and “reproducing your voice as the primary interface for a machine that could be used by billions of people and is worth hundreds of billions of dollars.” Is there a name for this AI fallacy? The one where programmers make an inductive leap like, for example, if a human can read one book to lear…

It's not a fallacy. Behind the AI are 180M users inputting their own problems and giving their guidance. Those millions of books only teach language skills they are not memorized verbatim except rare instances of duplicated text in the training set. There is not enough space to store 10 trillion tokens in a model.

And if we wanted to replicate copyrighted text with a LLM, it would still be a bad idea, better to just find a copy online, faster and more precise, and usually free. We here are often posting paywalled articles in the comments, it's so easy to circumvent the paywalls we don't even blink twice at it.

Using LLMs to infringe is not even the intended purpose, and it only happens when the user makes a special effort to prompt the model with the first paragraph.

What I find offensive is restricting the circulation of ideas under the guise of copyright. In fact copyright should only protect expression not the underlying ideas and styles, those are free to learn, and AIs are just an extension of their human users.

Re: OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show

#133

Post by throwaway115 »

This whole thing is starting to feel like another Sam Altman spotlight production. There's enough evidence to show no wrongdoing, but it was handled in a way to make people think there was a scandal. Maximum spotlight for relatively low risk. I wonder if people will get tired of being jerked around like this.

Re: OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show

#134

Post by usrusr »

maxglute wrote: post #74
pavlov wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “Do actor/esses get to monopolize their depiction of fictional characters? Especially when it's not tied to physical represenation.” If Annapurna Pictures (the production company that owns the rights to “Her”) made a sequel where the voice AI is played by someone else than Johansson but sounded the same and was marketed as a direct continuation, I think there would be a lawsuit. She didn’t write the script or devel…

But OpenAI isn't making a sequel to Her, which I feel like there would be prexisting legal text in contract about repraising role in event of franchise if johansson has leverage, or ability to cast close facsimile if studio has leverage. Right now Johansson has leverage in court of public opinion, not necessarily law. What if OpenAI used a cartoon cat avatar that sounded like "Her", what if they have one interaction…

They aren't making a sequel, they are doing an unlicensed video game conversion.

Reading all these musings here about a possible "there is no bad publicity" approach, I'm starting to wonder if the plan for if Johansson signed up was achieving court drama publicity by getting sued by Annapurna Pictures. "Can a three-letter tweet be the base of a copyright case?"

Re: OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show

#135

Post by JumpCrisscross »

mike_hearn wrote: post #112
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what's to stop less-famous actors from suing over the use of a famous actor who sounds just like them in big-budget movies? Not having idiots (or ChatGPT) for judges.

That's a common retort on HN but it's information free. Judges are at least theoretically and often in practice bound to follow both written law and logic, even if it yields apparently silly outcomes. The prevalence of openly political judgements in the news makes it seem like this isn't the case, but those judgements are newsworthy exactly because they are shocking and outrageous. If voices being similar to each oth…

> it's very unlikely that precedent would be interpreted as "whoever the judge heard of first wins"

No, it's whoever's voice is famous. The voice per se isn't valuable, its fame is. Personality rights are precedented [1].

> voices being similar to each other is found to be grounds for a successful tort action then it'd establish a legal precedent

It's not about similarity. It's about property. Johansson developed her voice into a valuable asset. It's valuable because it's Scarlet Johansson's voice.

Tweeting Her explicitly tied it to Johansson, even if that wasn't the case up to that point.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights

Re: OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show

#136

Post by cruise9 »

contrarian1234 wrote: post #120

I think it's really problematic that the government is protecting voice actor's careers. It's like if they disallowed cars on the roads to protect horse carriages. Clearly with the new technology a whole economic sector is gone and irrelevant over night. Now amateurs and small projects can afford to add good sounding voices to their creations. This is good news in the end The same goes for actors and their likenesses…

That's a pretty generous take on the situation. Sam Altman isn't some robin hood character taking from the rich to give to the poor. If AI companies can keep operating with impunity, taking as much data as they want with no compensation for the creators, or consequence for infringement, that's not good.

I agree that the technology is great, and it will empower small creators, but I'm also worried about the cowboy behaviour of all these tech billionaires.

Re: OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show

#137

Post by gambiting »

numpad0 wrote: post #77
MattGaiser wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with a unique voice Is your voice truly unique out of the 8 billion out there in the world? Nobody could plausibly pass as you?

There are only 330m US Americans. Just having American throat development patterns narrow you down to a group of less than 4% of population, and it only goes down from there - e.g. PNW has only 13m people total, half that by gender, that makes someone from there belonging to a group of 0.08% of the world. You might think voice is something you're born with. It's not, it rather partially comes from languages and your…

You're talking about literal identical voice due to throat development and cultural background etc - which is obviously technically true, but I imagine a number of people who sound 99% like you(where a casual listener can't tell the difference) must be quite large.

Case in point - my wife has two twin brothers. Even though I've been interacting with them for over 10 years now, they sound exactly the same to me. If I close my eyes then there is zero chance I could tell them apart by voice alone. I know, it's an anecdote - but while I'm sure you could tell them apart by some really small thing that they do, to someone who isn't actively looking for those cues they are - for all intentions and purposes - the same.

Re: OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show

#138

Post by junon »

Strawberry76 wrote: post #105

I think it's pretty obvious that OpenAI had decided at an early stage that the new voice should resemble the voice of SJ in "Her", regardless of which voice actresses they then contacted and in which sequence.

Yeah this seems pretty clear to me too. The voice was also overtly horny, way more so than the others are. I say this as a gay man - I was uncomfortable listening to her talk about ISA specifications like she had a fetish for them.

Seemed like an easy "pop culture" win akin to Cortana / Halo and Pacific Rim / GladOS.

Re: OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show

#139

Post by LewisVerstappen »

throwaway115 wrote: post #133

This whole thing is starting to feel like another Sam Altman spotlight production. There's enough evidence to show no wrongdoing, but it was handled in a way to make people think there was a scandal. Maximum spotlight for relatively low risk. I wonder if people will get tired of being jerked around like this.

I honestly don't understand how delusional you have to be to think OpenAI wanted this to happen.

Re: OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show

#140

Post by gambiting »

boxed wrote: post #86
hotdogscout wrote: post #6

A sensational lie spread much quicker than the truth even on HN, with no sign of course correction. I hope Sam feels fine after so much baseless harassment.

You are getting confused by an implementation detail. They wanted to copy her voice, and they did it. They asked for permission and she said no. So they went ahead and did it anyway. The voice actor involved is irrelevant.

>> The voice actor involved is irrelevant.

Quite the contrary, unless you believe that Scarlett Johanson owns the rights to the voice of anyone who sounds like her?

Post reply on HN