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Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice

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

#911

Post by [deleted] »

akudha wrote: post #790
windexh8er wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about the situation is that Altman is willing to lie and steal a celebrity's voice for use in ChatGPT. What he did, the timeline, everything - is sleazy if, in fact, that's the story. The really concerning part here is that Altman is, and wants to be, a large part of AI regulation [0]. Quite the public contradiction. [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-openai-artificial...

What is so special about her voice? They could’ve found a college student with a sweet voice and offered to pay her tuition in exchange for using her voice, no? Or a voice actor? Why be cartoonishly stupid and cartoonishly arsehole and steal a celebrity’s voice? Did he think Scarlett won’t find out? Or object? I don’t understand these rich people. Is it their hobby to be a dick to as many people as they can, for no r…

[deleted]

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

#913

Post by Nasrudith »

gibbitz wrote: post #379
ncallaway wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are we seriously saying we can't make voices that are similar to celebrities, when not using their actual voice? They clearly thought it was close enough that they asked for permission, twice. And got two no’s. Going forward with it at that point was super fucked up. It’s very bad to not ask permission when you should. It’s far worse to ask for permission and then ignore the response. Totally ethically bankrupt.

Are we surprised by this bankruptcy. As neat as AI is, it is only a thing because the corporate class see it as a way to reduce margins by replacing people with it. The whole concept is bankrupt.

That is wrong on several levels. First off, it ignores the role of massive researchers. Should we start de-automating processes to employee more people at the cost of worsening margins?

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

#914

Post by cjbgkagh »

BeefWellington wrote: post #708
cjbgkagh wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK they yanked it pretty quickly and the subsequent scandal has widely informed people that it was not authorized by Scarlett Johansson. So while it was clearly a violation resulting from a sequence of very stupid decisions by OpenAI, I am not sure if there would be much in the way of damages.

In cases like this, don't damages essentially equate to the profit a company makes from the false association with the celebrity? Otherwise, it'd be impossible to show damages if you weren't personally being denied business because of the association.

That is one way to measure damages but it's difficult. It would be easier to measure what she would have been paid if she had agreed to do it, Mrs. Johansson is in the business of selling rights to use her likeness for large amounts of money - it would be easy to demonstrate that she would have been paid at least as much as the use of her voice in the movie Her. Since she did decline the offer it would be easy to suggest that the amount she would have agreed to would have been much more than the movie Her.

The other aspect is that OpenAIs infringement is open ended, in that it is not equivalent to the single use within a single movie, it is substantially more. People who want Mrs. Johansson to voice their projects could now instead use OpenAI to obtain the same likeness - so the damages are for the deprivation all the future earnings Mrs. Johansson could have made.

Then there is reputational damage, if someone using OpenAI generated and disseminated a voice message before committing a heinous crime then the public would associate the voice with the crime and Mrs. Johansson would be intrinsically linked to the same crime. People hearing her voice would be reminded of the crime. This would again prevent Mrs. Johansson from making money from her likeness but would also negatively impact all aspects of her life and all future earnings, business dealings, and personal life.

Unusually the initial remedy is an injunction to prevent further infringement but OpenAI yanked it immediately so no injunction was needed. One way to repair reputational damage is to pay for news media to widely and publicly correct the reputationally damaging falsehood. As this has been a substantial scandal that media coverage has been already given for free and it is unlikely that there is anyone left who still believes that OpenAI is using Mrs. Johansson's likeness with either tacit or explicit permission.

As stated by your peer comment there are still reasons for Mrs. Johansson to bring a lawsuit for damages even where there are no significant damages - the lawsuit itself would be damaging to OpenAI so it would be in OpenAIs interest to pay to avoid it. At the same time it would be in other large companies interests for it to continue, so there may be a bidding war on whether or not Mrs. Johansson continues with the lawsuit. In addition it would benefit Mrs. Johansson personally and professionally to be seen as a champion of the rights of artists - especially at a time when AI companies like OpenAI are trampling all over those rights.

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

#915

Post by ben_w »

maeln wrote: post #884
ben_w wrote: post #872

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That’s as much of a contradiction as a thief wanting to be a large part of lock regulation. Based on what I see in the videos from The Lockpocking Lawyer, that would be a massive improvement . Now, the NSA and crypto standards, that would have worked as a metaphor for your point. (I don't think it's correct, but that's an independent claim, and I am not only willing to discover that I'm wrong about their sincerity,…

> > That’s as much of a contradiction as a thief wanting to be a large part of lock regulation. > Based on what I see in the videos from The Lockpocking Lawyer, that would be a massive improvement. A thief is not a lock picker and they don't have the same incentive. A thief in a position to dictate lock regulation would try to have a legal backdoor on every lock in the world. One that only he has the master key for.…

Indeed, but locks are so bad (as demonstrated by LPL) that even a thief would make them better.

> Something something NSA & cryptography :)

Indeed, as I said :)

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

#916

Post by ben_w »

lawn wrote: post #895
ben_w wrote: post #872

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That’s as much of a contradiction as a thief wanting to be a large part of lock regulation. Based on what I see in the videos from The Lockpocking Lawyer, that would be a massive improvement . Now, the NSA and crypto standards, that would have worked as a metaphor for your point. (I don't think it's correct, but that's an independent claim, and I am not only willing to discover that I'm wrong about their sincerity,…

> Based on what I see in the videos from The Lockpocking Lawyer, that would be a massive improvement. If you've watched his videos then surely you should know that lockpicking isn't even on the radar for thieves as there are much easier and faster methods such as breaking the door or breaking a window.

Surely that just makes the thief/locks metaphor even worse? Or have I missed something?

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

#917

Post by unraveller »

kuboble wrote: post #649
foobarian wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it kind of looks like they released it knowing they couldn't defend it in court which must seem pretty bonkers to investors. That actually seems like there may be a few people involved and one of them is a cowboy PM who said fuck it, ship it to make the demo. And then damage control came in later. Possibly the PM didn't even know about the asks for permission?

> a cowboy PM who said fuck it, ship it to make the demo. Given the timeline it sounds like the PM was told "just go ahead with it, I'll get the permission".

Ken Segall has a similar Steve Jobs story, he emails Jobs that the Apple legal team have just thrown a spanner in the works days before Ken's agency is set to launch Apple's big ad campaign and what should he do?

Jobs responds minutes later... "Fuck the lawyers."

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

#918

Post by munksbeer »

voltaireodactyl wrote: post #292
avarun wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They clearly thought it was close enough that they asked for permission, twice. You seem to be misunderstanding the situation here. They wanted ScarJo to voice their voice assistant, and she refused twice. They also independently created a voice assistant which sounds very similar to her. That doesn't mean they thought they had to ask permission for the similar voice assistant.

You seem to be misunderstanding the legalities at work here: reaching out to her multiple times beforehand, along with tweets intended to underline the similarity to her work on Her, demonstrates intention. If they didn’t think they needed permission, why ask for permission multiple times and then yank it when she noticed? Answer: because they knew they needed permission, after working so hard to associate with Her,…

> If they didn’t think they needed permission, why ask for permission multiple times and then yank it when she noticed?

One very easy explanation is that they trained Sky using another voice (this is the claim and no reason to doubt it is true) wanting to replicate the stye of the voice in "Her", but would have preferred to use SJ's real voice for the PR impact that could have.

Yanking it could also easily be a pre-emptive response to avoid further PR drama.

You will obvious decide you don't believe those explanations, but to many of us they're quite plausible, in fact I'd even suggest likely.

(And none of this precludes Sam Altman and OpenAI being dodgy anyway)

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

#919

Post by munksbeer »

ncallaway wrote: post #491
avarun wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They clearly thought it was close enough that they asked for permission, twice. You seem to be misunderstanding the situation here. They wanted ScarJo to voice their voice assistant, and she refused twice. They also independently created a voice assistant which sounds very similar to her. That doesn't mean they thought they had to ask permission for the similar voice assistant.

> You seem to be misunderstanding the situation here. They wanted ScarJo to voice their voice assistant, and she refused twice. They also independently created a voice assistant which sounds very similar to her. And promoted it using a tweet naming the movie that Johansson performed in, for the role that prompted them to ask her in the first place. You have to be almost deliberately naive to not see that the were att…

This is a genuine question. If it turns out they trained Sky on someone else's voice to similarly replicate the style of the voice in "Her", would you be ok with that? If it was proven that the voice was just similar, to SJ's would that be ok?

My view is, of course it is ok. SJ doesn't own the right to a particular style of voice.

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

#920

Post by azinman2 »

safety1st wrote: post #755
azinman2 wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not wrong. Lots and lots of examples of that being true.

There is something to it. Someone has to identify the intersection between what the engineering can do and what the market actually wants, then articulate that to a broad enough audience. Engineers constantly undervalue this very fuzzy and very human centric part of the work. I don't think the issue is that Vision doesn't matter. I think the issue is Sam doesn't have it. Like Gates and Jobs had clear, well defined vi…

I don’t know enough about him or his vision. It doesn’t seem he’s as clear as say Jobs in the past. But I do look at all the amazing things openai has done in a short period of time, and that the employees overwhelmingly backed him with the whole board chaos issue. He also has fundraised a lot money for the company. It appears he’s doing more right than wrong, and openai pulled everyone else’s pants down.
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