Earlier quoted context omitted.
How unique is a voice? I'm sure there's enough people out ther who sounds like Johansson. There's probably some argument for voice + personality + face + mannerisms, some gestalt that's more comparable to copying the likeness "person". But openAI is copying a fictional character played by Johansson, it's not her. Do actor/esses get to monopolize their depiction of fictional characters? Especially when it's not tied t…
> “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…
OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show
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Re: OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show
#72It seems increasingly difficult for common people to protect their voices, especially when even Scarlett Johansson can't manage it. As a part-time voice actor with a unique voice, I'm concerned about what I should do if my voice is used without permission and the company denies it. How can I protect myself in such a situation?
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.…
Wincott and Dance and are both British actors that began their careers on stage, so they have similar accents, cadences, and vocal mannerisms common to stage actors. For example, both of them speak like Patrick Stewart, another English who also began his career on stage. But otherwise they all clearly have very different voices: they have different timbres, vocal fry, and only one of them (Dance) can sing well and he has a surprisingly large vocal range (see his performance as the Phantom in Phantom of the Opera).
In this case, the actress selected for OpenAI was clearly selected for similarity to SJ. And that by itself would have been okay, because the actress is speaking in her natural voice, and SJ doesn't have a monopoly on voice acting...but OpenAI went further, and had the unknown[1] actress base her inflections, cadence, and mannerisms on SJ's performance in the movie Her. And Altman even tweeted the movie's name to advertise the connection.
The problem is that there is a well-settled case law stretching back over several decades that makes this a slam-dunk case for SJ, because it doesn't matter that OpenAI didn't "steal" her voice, they stole her likeness.[2] It wasn't just some unknown actress speaking in her own voice, it was an actress with a voice similar to SJ given lines and directing by OpenAI with the clear intent of mimicking SJ's voice performance in one of her more-famous roles.
[1] There is a very short list of a few actresses who both sound like SJ and do voice-over work circulating around Hollywood, so a lot of people have a pretty good idea of who it is, but nobody will identify the actress unless she identifies herself, out of solidarity.
[2] Likeness rights are quite strong in the U.S. They're even stronger in Europe.
Re: OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show
#73I can't help but think that this was all planned. It is a very intricately planned, and geniously executed marketing ploy to make sure everyone knows about the company, the new release, that there is voice now, and even makes everyone look into it just to "see for themselves". Whether this was in with ScarJo in the loop or not, does not really change the outcome, but would be a nice information we probably will never…
Regardless of legal outcome, there now exists a corpus of public text from news coverage of this incident, upon which OpenAI will be trained, which correlates SJ's name to reporting on a 2024 OpenAI voice.
Re: OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
How unique is a voice? I'm sure there's enough people out ther who sounds like Johansson. There's probably some argument for voice + personality + face + mannerisms, some gestalt that's more comparable to copying the likeness "person". But openAI is copying a fictional character played by Johansson, it's not her. Do actor/esses get to monopolize their depiction of fictional characters? Especially when it's not tied t…
> “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 that doesn't comport to "Her" personality from the movie, thereby indicating a different being. Is there some comprehensive method acting documentation outlining the full complexity of a fictional character. Seems like there aremany ways for openAI to make voice sound like her, but not embody "Her" but they'd rather strategically retreat out of optics. But IANAL, but I am interested in seeing how this will get resolved in court.
Re: OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show
#75I 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…
That example isn't really pertinent, because in the case of the Simpsons it's fairly certain that the actors and actresses sign away the rights to their likeness to the company, otherwise there'd be major issues if one ever quit, became unable to work, just wanted a bunch of money, or whatever. There's probably some poor analogy with how if you write software, your company [generally] owns it. For something more gene…
I know it’s pendantic, but Ford did not own the copyright to either the original Bette Midler performance recording nor the lyrics/melody of the song. The marketing company that prepared the ‘Yuppie Campaign’ for Ford did negotiate a license for the lyrics/melody from the copyright holder. It doesn’t make a substantial difference, but commenters have been using wide ranging analogies in this thread and I wanted to make sure nobody jumped on a flawed foundation when arguing about the precedent case.
Re: OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show
#76I 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…
"The agent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to assure the safety of her client, said the actress confirmed that neither Johansson nor the movie “Her” were ever mentioned by OpenAI."
Re: OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show
#77It seems increasingly difficult for common people to protect their voices, especially when even Scarlett Johansson can't manage it. As a part-time voice actor with a unique voice, I'm concerned about what I should do if my voice is used without permission and the company denies it. How can I protect myself in such a situation?
> 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 backgrounds. So random chances of someone literally sounding by DNA from half a world away is quite low.
Re: OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show
#78I don’t think OpenAI has a chance to win this in open court. They are very likely to settle out of court. Investors get a bit anxious with pending litigation. But I honestly hope Johansson does not. She certainly has the runway to take it all the way. Make them look like fools in open court. Show the people their real colors.
Why do you feel OpenAI doesn't have a chance to win in court given the information presented in this WaPo article? It seems fairly conclusive to me.
Copying by hiring a sound-alike/impersonator is an implementation detail. They knew full well that they were trying to copy her voice. Then they asked. And they got a no. And then they did it anyway.
I don't see how the implementation details matter at all.
Re: OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show
#79You can hear both voices for yourself and tell they are different, but y'all such NPCs you just believe the bullcrap the media spoon-feeds you not the literal sounds in your ears.
New theory, HN is a honey pot for dumb people that Y Combinator studies how to make money from.
Previous theory it was a Alzheimer's style "Fake bus stop" used to round up imposter hackers and keep them contained while the real Hackers did stuff.
Re: OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> for example, if a human can read one book to learn something, then it’s ok to scan millions of books into a computer system because it’s just another kind of learning. Since this comes up all the time , I ask: What exactly is the number of books a human can ingest before it becomes illegal?
This is a bit like someone saying they don't want cars traveling down the sidewalk because they're too big and heavy, and then having someone ask how big and heavy a person needs to get before it becomes illegal for them to travel down the sidewalk.
It misses the point, which is that cars aren't people. Arguments like "well a car uses friction to travel along the ground and fuel to create kinetic energy, just like humans do", aren't convincing to me. An algorithm is not a human, and we should stop pretending the same rules apply to each.