Oh goodness, this is just the kind of behavior that shows how incapable OpenAI and Altman himself are of conducting their business in a responsible manner. Just the thing you don't want to see in the field of AI. Up next, SJ AI generated revenge porn in retaliation for her causing the ruckus. Of course, completely disassociated from anything at OpenAI (wink, wink).
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
#722Earlier quoted context omitted.
They hired the actor that did the voice months before they contacted SJ . The reaction on this site to the news that this story was false is kind of mindbending.
Yeah, but then again, I totally expected this opening the comment threads. Same happened with RMS debacle, same happened with similar events earlier, same happened on many a Musk stories. It seems that a neat narrative with clear person/object to hate, once established, is extremely resilient to facts that disprove it.
What facts disprove OpenAI making a voice that sounds like SJ such that the movie Her is referenced by Altman, and why is that actress upset?
Re: OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show
#723I never made the connection between the Sky voice and Scarlett Johansson's. I've seen many of her movies. She has an extremely distinctive voice that has a certain huskiness to it and the Sky voice totally lacks that. Some voices are sexy and both of them fall into that category -- but that's beside the point. That aside, it is genuinely pleasant to have a conversation with chatGPTo and some of that has to do with th…
counterpoint - it is the first connection made when I heard the voice. I also really enjoyed the movie Her.
Re: OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show
#724Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Movie Her predates all of this by years, and Sam Altman even tweeted "her"! The OpenAI team are clearly well aware of Scarlett's voice (its inconceivable the majority of the team at OpenAI haven't at least seen part of the film that almost defined their industry). The movie predates all of this by years - of course they knew. When auditioning actors "months before" they can still look for an actor who guess what?…
> its inconceivable the majority of the team at OpenAI haven't at least seen part of the film that almost defined their industry Let's not exaggerate. It was a somewhat popular movie, yes, but not really defining and far from the first example of conversational AI speaking woman's voice. There are plenty of examples in movies and TV shows. If anything, the seminal work in this space is Star Trek casting Majel Barrett…
What matters is whether OpenAI leadership had the movie Her in mind, and the AI in Her is more similar to LLMs than the Next Generation Star Trek main computer.
Re: OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show
#725These white swans prove there are no black swans! \s
Re: OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show
#726Earlier quoted context omitted.
Genuine question, what's wrong with trying to replicate in real life an idea from a SciFi movie ? I understand that it could be problematic if OpenAI did one of two things: - imitated Scarlett Johansson's voice to impersonate her - misled people into believing that GPT-4o is an official by-product of the film Her, like calling it “the official Her AI” The first point is still unclear, and that's precisely the point o…
Pretty sure the CEO of OpenAI tweeted "Her." after the reveal of the voice. Isn't that a suggestion that what they're doing is similar to "the Her AI"?
It's a suggestion that they were inspired by the movie, not that they are releasing a product under the "Her" trademark
It's a movie, not a patent on women voice AI assistants
Re: OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show
#727Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just a best practice that serves as a healthy counterbalance to cognitive biases, that might otherwise urge us to convict without evidence. It's not necessarily what will prove true at the end of the day but I think we owe people the presumption of innocence.
Is it necessarily a bad bias to assume OpenAI is still behaving as it's been behaving during its entire history: recklessly taking other people's IP?
Yes, because the courts have yet to decide whether OpenAI has been "recklessly taking other people's IP" in an illegal way. Right now, it's only something believed by people who wish it to be true; legally, it's not clear just yet. In contrast, actually doing SJ impersonation here would be a much clearer violation. There's a huge gap between the two deeds, and I don't see the reason to just assume OpenAI crossed it.
It's like, the people dropping leaflets in your physical mailbox are delivering spam, but you wouldn't automatically assume those same people are also trying to scam you and your neighbors by delivering you physical letters meant to trick people into parting with their savings. In both cases, the messages are spam, but one is legal, other is not, and there's a huge gap between them.
Re: OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show
#728Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an impersonation of a parody song in his style. This is a voice actor who has a voice that's kinda similar to ScarJo and kinda similar to Rashida Jones but not quite either one doing something different. Cases are not a spell you can cast to win arguments, especially when the facts are substantially different.
In both cases the companies are specifically trading on creating confusion of a celebrity’s likeness in an act that celebrity trades in, and with the motivation of circumventing that very celebrity’s explicit rejection of the offer for that very work. Just because one is a singer and the other is an actor isn’t the big difference you think it is. Actors do voice over work all the time. Actors in fact get cast for the…
> In both cases the companies are specifically trading on creating confusion of a celebrity’s likeness in an act that celebrity trades in, and with the motivation of circumventing that very celebrity’s explicit rejection of the offer for that very work.
Are they? Where did they advertise this? The voice doesn't even sound that much like ScarJo!
> Just because one is a singer and the other is an actor isn’t the big difference you think it is. Actors do voice over work all the time. Actors in fact get cast for their voice all the time.
It's a very big difference when the jurisprudence here rests on how substantial the voice is as a proportion of the brand, especially in the presence of the other disanalogies.
> Yelling, “Parody!” Isn’t some get out of jail free card, particularly where there is actual case law, even more particularly when there are actual laws to address this very act.
Sure -- If you read that back, I'm clearly not doing that. An impression in a parody in the artist's unique style (Waits) was a case where it was a violation of publicity rights. This is radically different from that. It's not clear that Midler and Waits have much bearing on this case at all.
Re: OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show
#729Earlier quoted context omitted.
Clearly an SJ voice was the goal, given that Altman asked her to do it, asked her a second time just two days before the ChatGPT-4o release, and then tweeted "her" on the release day. The next day Karpathy, recently ex-OpenAI, then tweets "The killer app of LLMs is Scarlett Johansson". Altman appears to be an habitual liar. Note his recent claim not to be aware of the non-disparagement and claw-back terms he had depa…
They hired the actor that did the voice months before they contacted SJ . The reaction on this site to the news that this story was false is kind of mindbending.
My guess: Sam wanted to imitate the voice from Her and became aware of Midler v. Ford cases so reached out to SJ. He probably didn't expect her decline. Anyway, this prior case tells that you cannot mimic other's voice without their permission and the overall timeline indicates OpenAI's "intention" of imitation. It does not matter if they used SJ's voice in the training set or not. Their intention matters.
Re: OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show
#730Well, here are some things that aren't really being disputed: * OpenAI wanted an AI voice that sounds like SJ * SJ declined * OpenAI got an AI voice that sounds like SJ anyway I guess they want us to believe this happened without shenanigans, but it's bit hard to. The headline of the article is a little funny, because records can't really show they weren't looking for an SJ sound-alike. They can just show that those…
Regardless of the moral implications, "sounds almost exactly the same" is not copyright infringement. Perhaps it could be trademark infringement if she had trademarked her voice like Harley-Davidson attempted (and failed) to trademark the sound of their motorcycles, but "sounds alike" is a pretty hard case to prove, and it's completely blown away if they can demonstrate that another human sounds indisputably similar.…
> it sounds like she had the opportunity to write herself a nice check, and she turned it down.
If I were SJ, I'd turn it down too. Shes in no need of money, and selling her voice to OpenAI would make most of creators and every single voice actor hate her (not to mention the Twitter mob).
In majority of creative circles, the current social norm is to hate AI, so touching AI in any way is too risky for reputation.