Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice

A company can't take a photo from your Facebook and plaster it across an advertisement for their product without you giving them the rights to do that.

And if you're a known public figure, this includes lookalikes and soundalikes as well. You can't hire a ScarJo impersonator that people will think is ScarJo.

This is clearly a ScarJo soundalike. It doesn't matter whether it's an AI voice or clone or if they hired someone to sound just like her. Because she's a known public figure, that's illegal if she hasn't given them the rights.

(However, if you generate a synthetic voice that just happens to sound exactly like a random Joe Schmo, it's allowed because Joe Schmo isn't a public figure, so there's no value in the association.)

And in terms of collaboration potential... OpenAI is a big draw for businesses and a subset of tech enthusiasts, but I don't think artists in any industry are dying to collaborate with them.

> They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter.

The question becomes "what rules matter?". And the answer inevitably becomes "only the ones that work in my favor and/or that I agree with".

I think someone trying to defend this would go "oh come on, does it really matter if a rich actress gets slightly richer?" And no, honestly, it doesn't matter that much. Not to me, anyway. But it matters that it establishes (or rather, confirms and reinforces) a culture of disregard and makes it about what you think matters, and not about what someone else might think matters about the things in their life. Their life belongs to them, a fact that utopians have forgotten again and again everywhere and everywhen. And once all judgement is up to you, if you're a sufficiently ambitious and motivated reasoner (and the kind of person we're talking about here is), you can justify pretty much whatever you want without that pesky real-world check of a person going "um actually no I don't want you to do that".

Sometimes I think anti-tech takes get this wrong. They see the problem as breaking the rules at all, as disrupting the status quo at all, as taking any action that might reasonably be foreseen to cause harm. But you do really have to do that if you want to make something good sometimes. You can't foresee every consequence of your actions - I doubt, for example, that Airbnb's founders were thinking about issues with housing policy when they started their company. But what differentiates behavior like this from risk-taking is that the harm here is deliberate and considered. Mistakes happen, but this was not a mistake. It was a choice to say "this is mine now".

That isn't a high bar to clear. And I think we can demand that tech leaders clear it without stifling the innovation that is tech at its best.

I mention this specifically because I remember mark andreseen comment something similar in lex fridman's podcast, something along the lines of getting "those creative people" together to build on ai.