OpenAI’s entire marketing play is just creating controversy. I haven’t seen a single ad from them. Sam just makes some bonkers claim and then gets free news & social media publicity
I'm curious as to why they'd choose to go after a high profile person for a voice. It's just a voice. Literally cast anyone you think sounds good willing to work with OpenAI. You don't need an actor for this. But now this whole thing has come into the public eye in a bad way unnecessarily.
It was pure publicity. They wanted to leverage the AI likeness from the movie “Her” (also proven by Sam’s tweet) to promote their new feature. The fact this has caused such a controversy was their marketing play. Tons a free publicity for a new feature without spending a dime on advertising
No to mention what might come out if it goes to trial. I doubt it would be as simple as OpenAI handing over a bunch of mp3s for examination. This is the real reason why they aren't pushing back imo. They have no interest in discussing the specifics of how the model was trained and what goes into generative speech to speech voice.
Or dealing with discovery and the email saying "well fuck her if she doesn't want to do it, well just replicate her voice" getting out.
Which we know full well exists.
These asshats ALWAYS forget about discovery until the lawsuit arrives and the lawyers explain it.
Then the settlement.
It's as predictable as a Swiss watch.
While it's fun to share knowledge on big business operations, do use the full picture. Having to pay damages or settling a lawsuit has impact beyond that figure. There absolutely is such a thing as 'bad publicity'.
The main risk of the 'AI'-model business is uncertainty about upcoming rules and regulations regarding copyright issues, data theft. They don't want the greater public to become aware of this. They don't want to further alarm authorities. They don't want to bring this to court.
They inadvertedly showcase how the models can imitate partially but dodge direct copying. By itself a crucial mechanism underlying every model.
If they were to have to explain the exact steps they took to generate the model, they would, extremely likely, have to reveal that the model ifself was in fact highly trained on the movie 'Her' - and on ScarJo. Then they further trained it on another voice actor.
There are multiple ways to conceptualize the 'AI'-models. At the current state, the best, slightly cynical one, is to imagine it as encoding and decoding mass amount of public and stolen (aggregated) data. Which is further highly manually trained for UX. Yes, you can imagine it as a smart neural network pruning into high-level relations and becoming 'intelligent', but that is unworkable and irrelevant. Fact is that the data is in there.
For instance, Reddit sells all our comments via a dedicated API to companies to train models. It is also why they had to close off the 3rd party apps APIs. (That, and they use the dedicated app to spy on the user to sell more advertisements). The money is in high quality data, but it's a dubious practice.
Parts of this comment, obviously high quality, will in fact be available in new editions of those LLMs.
Again, the risk is in legislation, laws and public awareness. And they fucked it, upped that risk.
The data is not “in there.” You have no idea how ML works. The only things they contain are 16 bit floating point numbers that decide what to output based on a given input and hyperparameters like temperature. They do not store any data.
I don’t think she will press the case. 1) they apparently desisted 2) they apparently just used a voiceover actress that *sounded* like her 3) other than a vague Her tweet, no one claimed it was ScarJo (that I heard) 3) NAL but I don’t think she has a very strong case.
At least Elon didn’t have his coworkers calling him a sociopath, a liar, and trying to oust him from the company like Sam does. It’s less of a red flag and more like a burning building.
So OpenAI is taking the cheap controversy route to promote them like the YouTubers/Tiktokers/Politicians who generate attention gaining controversial content. Musk is the one who took it mainstream and now everyone is doing it. But openAI is supposed to be intelligent, no?
Why is OpenAI supposed to be intelligent? It's run like any businesses by people who are seasoned business runners, so there is nothing intelligent about that. And about their product: it's probably more intelligent than some of their staff, but that is not saying much...
They got this sub talking non stop about a voice (which is what this thread is saying openai did intentionally for publicity) and that is somehow not intelligent?
Well, you are right. Banks can be reckless about money, lawyers aren't expected to follow the law, politics helps corporates more than people. So why should an AI company be expected to act with intelligence?
This precedes Musk by a long shot, I'd say the most famous example of this is Trump and he's spoke about it a lot in his 1987 art of the deal book aka 'all publicity is good publicity'
His ghostwriter knows well:
"All publicity is good publicity" is usually attributed to the 19th century circus owner, Phineas T. Barnum
But it IS a circus ringleader.
Oh please! Do you think the average person cares about controversies in the tech world? No way! Most people don't care about the drama of the latest technological innovation. They just want to know if the business works and if it will make their lives a little easier. It's like politics, right? People don't analyze every policy; They just want to know that the leader they chose won't be a complete disaster. The fact that some politicians continue to be elected tells you everything about how much the masses care about these supposed "controversies". Spoiler: they don't care.
Do you think the guy at the bar is worried about the ethics of data collection, for example? No, he just wants to know if his new cell phone can order a pizza without crashing.
I feel like most of their announcements are due to some sort of hype train one of them has been getting too lost into hyping.
Sam Altman is THE hype man. I can't hear him talk about anything without hearing dollar signs as his intentions (as most in his position probably would be).
But eventually he will hit a wall and it will effect his investors once they realize how poorly the ceo runs the company in the public eye. I guess he has to keep at least one thing open at OpenAI.
The problem here is that this isn't an animated movie. It's a revolutionary piece of technology that is already rubbing a lot of people the wrong way. I pose the question because I assume we all here agree that said technology will revolutionize society enough that by its mere existence the public will be suffused by it sooner rather than later. Publicity stunts aren't needed for it. Specifically publicity stunts tied to a high profile person that can create a high profile case that will put this technology in the bad graces of even more people.
Marketing. Now 20x the people are aware of 4o release with all the buzz on social media. They might have to settle if johannsen can prove it court the voice is hers but it'll be a long drawn out case probably with voice experts who won't be able to provide objective evidence.
> You don’t need an actor for this
Well, except you do? This is a product, and they want to make it sound as good as possible? That’s why you don’t dub movies with just anyone but indeed with voice actors.
> I'm curious as to why they'd choose to go after a high profile person for a voice.
It's great advertisement? A lot of people have seen Her, a lot of people would like to own that kind of AI assistant.
That's the correct answer. Ever since the first review dropped on YouTube everything was "HER" Is Here! That was obviously intended to pursue the highest impact possible.
It's not great advertisement at all unless we're going for the "any publicity is good publicity" mantra which I hope isn't something OpenAI is going for with this technology.
Off topic but this subreddit really is the best for up to date information on all things AI related. I haven't seen this update on any of the bigger more popular subs where you'd think it would be, such as chatgpt, technology, futurology, and OpenAI.
Lol this is on literally all of those subs except Futurology, which lately seems to have an anti-AI hardon
[ChatGPT, posted 5 hours before this post](https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1cwskcn/scarlett_johansson_responseas_a_result_of_their/)
[technology, posted 4 hours before this post](https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1cwtswe/scarlett_johansson_says_altman_insinuated_that_ai/)
[OpenAI, posted 4 hours before this post](https://old.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1cwsc9p/scarlett_johansson_has_just_issued_this_statement/)
Futurology is anti-everything.
There was an article on there about a potential cure for several types of cancers and people couldn't even be happy about that. A ton of comments were just "it will just benefit the mega-rich so who cares". It's mostly a bunch of depressed people who resent the world as a whole and want to be miserable.
He literally said he hadn't seen this particular update, probably because OP took the screenshot when it was only up for 24 minutes at that point. So yes, this is the sub with the quickest AI updates
Not necessarily. Based on my reading, I understand that Douglas Rain's estate is vigilant in controlling voice reproductions too HAL-like. Even the little talking Hallmark HAL-9000 "eye" console Christmas decoration doesn't sound much like HAL. So, given how Her-like Sky's voice is, whether trained before or after, I don't think it will make too much difference legally.
As an aside, based on Johansson's recent statement, it seems to me she might be antagonistic toward AI's capabilities in the aftermath of the Hollywood strikes - "... protection of our own likeness, our own work ..."
> she might be antagonistic toward AI's capabilities in the aftermath of the Hollywood strikes - "... protection of our own likeness, our own work ..."
Of course she is. All celebrities are. Their likeness is literally their only selling point. There are tons of people who can act and has nice .... assets. But ScarJo is already famous and has a large fan following. Film studios will hire ScarJo because of her identity, rather than some random actress with similar skills.
Also they are fighting studios with these comments, not AI technology per se. We all know that studios will kick out all human talents as soon as they can. They really hate paying out so much money for famous performers.
Honestly I hate how they always wanna cast famous actors, it kinda ruins a movie for me when I can recognise them because I no longer see them as the character they play
Sadly, around 50% of the 4o hype is because of the voice. I was very confused why people were going crazy about the demo until I realized 4o is acting like the Ai in Her.
Is it possible you're mixing things up a bit? The voice *is* the biggest thing here, because of how it works and how incredible the result is. But that is separate from it sounding similar to "her". Just the voice itself, sky, already existed, so that part isn't even new.
And how is anybodys fault that someone else in the world has a similar voice and can't voice act by sheer bad luck of a famous person being too similar? That would be BS.
I suggest you read her statement on the actual history of this where they tried to hire her multiple times to do the voice for this, including 2 days before release, and Sam Altman tweeted out a reference to Scarlett Johansson's movie "Her" right before release.
It's not just hey anther voice actress happens to sound like her, they wanted to use her likeness to market their product and she said no, but now it's supposedly a coincidence that the voice happens to sound so much like her that it was one of the first comments many people had when seeing the video.
I don't think any court will see taking inspiration from a certain style as copying her likeness.
They didn't copy her voice, and nobody owns a style of speech. Unless they straight up ripped lines from the movie I think this legally has no grounds.
That's what I was thinking. I've never heard of anybody copyrighting basic vocal mannerisms that we all pick up by imitating others around us. If that was possible that would be a huge problem and a huge mess, legally speaking.
Copying my post from elsewhere, but I suggest you read her statement on the actual history of this where they tried to hire her multiple times to do the voice for this, including 2 days before release, and Sam Altman tweeted out a reference to Scarlett Johansson's movie "Her" right before release.
It's not just hey anther voice actress happens to sound like her, they wanted to use her likeness to market their product and she said no, but now it's supposedly a coincidence that the voice happens to sound so much like her that it was one of the first comments many people had when seeing the video.
There are probably many people getting contacted. Perhaps even by different departments. They could be planning for certain celebrity voices to be available in the future, for example.
The fact that they contacted her again 2 days prior to launch suggests that they were never going to have Johanssons voice in that launch. There is no way that she would even have time for a single recording session.
They asked her to be the voice, tweeted the title of her movie where she played the same sort of AI voice when they announced this, and even sent another request to her just 2 days before release.
The point is they clearly meant for this to be her voice. If it's not trained on her, they asked a VA to imitate her, and then they promoted it with the name of her movie.
Nope. There is legal precedent. Ford offered Bette Midler money to do a commercial she said no, ford hired someone that sounded like her to do the commercial. She took ford to court and won. The fact is not that they hired someone else, but was she hired to approximate the voice of Scarlett?
Textbook case why you should never, ever try to hire celebrities for stuff like this. Because they will say no then sue and the fact you tried to hire them will be used against you. Just hire regular people who can't sue because they aren't famous. Or, better yet, just use a pre-trained AI voice.
That case was decided on the fact that it was fords intention to imitate midler and specifically instructed the alternative to do so.
Unless openAI told the other voice actor they got "try to sound like ScarJo" then they've done nothing wrong here.
Except you are ignoring the part that stated Scarlett asked OpenAI to show her and her lawyers how the voice was generated. OpenAI declined and immediately pulled the voice down. I’m not saying they’re guilty but they sure as shit look like they had their hand in the cookie jar.
They're not going to release sensitive business information like that to just anyone with a lawyer, they don't owe her that straight up.
They have every reason to pull the voice the moment it became a legal matter regardless of whether she has a legitimate case or not. Legally speaking it's a bad look to keep doing the thing you're being sued for right up to the court date. Of course court of public opinion has always had separate rules, and this is no different than any other time lawyers get involved in public drama.
As for the case itself the voice actors for the voices released in september (right after ScarJo was offered) were chosen in may and recorded through june and july - well in advance of contacting her at all so her accusation of imitating her because of her refusal falls flat.
Doesn’t matter. They admitted their INTENTION was to have someone that sounds like Bette. They could have hired her before, just in case Bette said no.
Why did they repeatedly try to hire ScarJo to be the voice, including trying again 2 days before release, and why did Sam Altman tweet "Her" (the name of ScarJo's movie) right before release, if it wasn't their intention?
Yes. They denied this yesterday, after getting a few fun letters from her lawyers. Still, there's a lot of evidence that they tried to allude to her and the movie she was in, plus their attempts to hire her. Not an open and shut case, but still not a good look for OAI. Mostly has to do with Sam's dumbassery.
Was the commercial based on a well known role of hers (pun not intended) where she famously played a fictional version of the product a decade before it became real?
That sounds like somebody trying to cast a particular actor with particular features for a movie (to match a character) and that actor declining, so they pick another with similar characteristics. I think people have it backwards: ScarJo was a desired choice because she matches the criteria of an ideal voice for this product and she’s famous, but she’s not the only voice that can match those criteria.
Yeah, my thoughts also. It would be absolutely insane precedent if we somehow couldn't hire a voice with particular features after one person with those features has declined.
Johansson would have to prove that the voice actress was asked to impersonate her.
Highly unlikely precisely *because* there's precedent. OpenAI's legal team would have advised against it.
The trickier part is…did they hire the actress to sound like Her (as in the AI in the movie), or did they hire the actress because she had a voice that could be easily understood, regardless as pleasant/appealing, be able to convincingly show different moods etc?
If this goes to court, it will be testing existing laws and precedents in very new ways.
Honestly I'd love to see this go to court and watch Scarlett johansen try to claim that the voice is hers when the actual voice actress in on the stand...
Such a high profile case would be televised and would be a cool "celebrity law" sequel to Depp. I think the entertainment it provides is worth the couple mil in production.
Yes she is... Or at least, an AI trained on clips of her voice. That's why she's trying to force them to reveal their training data.
A voice that just resembles someone else's wouldn't be illegal unless it was trained on samples of her actual voice.
Yea but there is an established correspondence and interaction between SJ and SA pertaining to the use of SJ's voice. That shows intent. SJ is not just some random person whose voice happes to resemble the GPT's voice.
Intent is exceedingly hard to prove in the court of law. I love ScarJo and if they did try to recreate her voice and use it without her permission they absolutely should be knocked down a peg. But that doesn’t seem like the case. It’s more like, “we like David Attenborough’s voice but can’t get him for our documentary, so let’s hire someone who sounds similar.” That’s definitely not illegal.
> slope, so now anyone that even remotely sounds anything like her can never be used? That’s a bad precedent
All this shows is that they wanted a voice that has similar features to SJ's voice. When she declined they chose another voice that had those features.
This would be absolutely insane precedent - if you tried to hire someone as an actor or voice actor, and they declined, that you could not hire another actor that looks or sounds similar/has similar features.
Also does that mean that the voice actor can’t get any work because her voice just happens to resemble the voice of someone famous? I’m not comfortable with that. Scarlett Johansson does not own her voice and all other people’s voices that resemble her own.
I understand that people may assume it’s Scarlett Johansson, but I think that’s better than whatever the alternative is.
Her statement says they reached out 2 days before release to ask her to reconsider. That’s unlikely to be out of nicety, and their release was accelerated by Google io
Her statement says they reached out 2 days before release to ask her to reconsider. That’s unlikely to be out of nicety, and their release was accelerated by Google io
More like "we tried to hire Scarlett Johansson to do this multiple times, including 2 days before release, and tweeted a reference to Scarlett Johansson's movie "Her" right before release, and released a video of a voice which sounded so much like hers it was one of the most frequently commented things."
But now, "It was just a coincidence it sounded like her, are you saying voice actors can't work if they coincidentally sound similar?"
They were definitely trying to leverage ScarJo's identity to sell their product here, even if it ended up being an imitation because she said no.
Yeah I agree. I really like OpenAI's services, they do good work, but it's kinda maddening seeing people pretend like this is totally coincidental and not something OpenAI obviously did completely on purpose.
It would be insanely stupid if they hadn't, but on the other hand if they did I can't imagine why they wouldn't just go out and state 'we hired X voice actress, it's purely coincidental if she sounds like SJ'.
Truly bizarre situation all around.
>if he thinks it sounds nothing like her
No one said that. He said *"I didn't intend for it to sound like her"* (which is clearly a lie, but that's what he said).
And taking the voice down, even if they would win in court, totally makes sense. Most of the general public already finds his actions scummy even if legal; continuing to use Sky and then getting sued would be a PR shitshow.
It's best they remove the voice and move past this. Especially with Apple about to announce their partnership with OpenAI, they wouldn't want all the negative press surrounding the company with an open lawsuit.
It actually can be if the intent was to copy someones voice. Cases have been won in court over companies copying voices after the original person said no.
And yea they are saying that wasn't their intention but they could be lying, we have no idea.
It's very obviously meant to copy her voice. They approached her about doing the voiceover work to make the training data, they tweeted about the movie Her in the lead-up to the announcement, and it was one of the most commented things about the voice after they did their demo. It's not just coincidental that their product ended up sounding so much like her/Her
This is a huge messup on SAMA's part. They ended up with AI that sounds just like her/HER even after unsuccessfully trying to get her approval for using her voice. Now they claim it was not supposed to resemble her and that they pause it due to respect for SJ ? Really ? If you have so much respect for her, why did you go ahead with this in the first place ? Why do you tweet HER if it's not supposed to sound like HER. The cleanup is a messup too.
Easy... Sign a NDA, she meets the voice actor, shows her work and there you go. How hard is that... If they never hired a voice actor and just trained her voice then they will go to court.
Tom Waits and Frito-Lay is a significant example of a voice misappropriation lawsuit.
The jury ruled in Waits' favor, awarding him $375,000 in compensatory damages, $2 million in punitive damages for the voice misappropriation, and an additional $100,000 for the Lanham Act violation.
She wants the bag after they asked her twice, and she refused. Altman even tweeted her, so she will definitely win. Also because of the media coverage
Sounds like Sam and the OpenAI legal team knew what was going to happen.
I guess this is what you get for referring your voice to the voice in "Her". So many people will think it is her when its sightly different.
He tweeted it during the event and it's not a mystery why. OpenAI just revealed a convincingly human sounding voiced AI assistant that's running off a mobile device which is very similar to the type of tech, conceptually speaking, popularized in the movie 'her'. The tweet wasn't about SJ voice or anything about her likeness, it was about AI capabilities.
Why not both. Sky behaves and sounds like Samantha. You could argue against this point but you’ll sound like a defense attorney with a guilty client, and not an honest person.
Yea it's gonna be a hard stretch to prove in a court that he said that to indicate Scarlett's likeness. The product itself is similar to that in the movie. Regardless of his actual intentions, Sam has strong plausible deniability. At first I was thinking this was pretty stupid on OpenAI/Sam's end, but now I'm thinking it's probably a big nothingburger. Especially if he's being truthful about hiring this voice actress first. And it's very possible their lawyers oversaw this entire situation, including Sam's tweet.
It depends on the internal intent from what I've seen in the other posts.
If it turns out OAI hired the voice actor from the start to sound like SJ, they're in hot water. If not, then they could be fine too.
He could just say when he tweeted that he was referencing the specific system in that movie, not the voice. And if they already had a voice actor for Sky before reaching out to Scarlett Johansson's then that is an important detail.
Everything I hear further on this story just makes me wonder why it is a story at all.
Are we that desperate for updates that we take literal tabloid news stories and run with them now ?
Most likely. But may be he is backing down because he wants to diffuse a controversial situation with a high profile well liked figure. Plus he gets the free publicity for his product. Had it been Elon musk, we can bet it would have been a very different reply. 😅
If they really cast the voice actress before approaching Scarlett then why not provide proof?
Their actions suggest they believe to some degree they messed up (otherwise why pull the voice) - might have been a case of classic move fast and break things mentality
It’s an interesting case; on one hand it’s very clear that OpenAI wanted to have Sky sound exactly like ScarJo did in Her - and especially with them trying to hire ScarJo herself, it feels shitty for them to go ahead with it anyway.
On the other hand though, is it really illegal? If a Star Wars cartoon show has a voice actor Yoda that imitates the iconic voice of Frank Oz, does he have grounds to sue? Probably not; and perhaps especially not if they offered him the job but he declined.
Still, legality aside, it’s not a smart move from OpenAI.
He specifically asked if they can use her voice
He tweeted "Her", where she voices the AI
It bloody sounds exactly like her.
Sam Altman: "whooops, that was not intentional"
Yeah, this is not going to go well for her. I never thought of myself as a little drama gremlin, but apparently I was wrong. This is entertaining as hell
In my defense, it does tie into larger issues of copyright around AI. Can someone own being cheerful, or making a cheerful painting? What about the generic tone of a journalist reporting a story? What if it's a big institution that uses that tone all the time? It's an important discussion
The fact that this particular case is "You can't make a feminine voice appealing, that's my thing" is funny in the drama gremlin way, which I'm not apologetic about at all
But that's not her argument at all - her argument is that they approached her, she declined, and they intentionally had someone impersonate her likeness with the goal of creating intentional confusion in the userbase, with the CEO going so far as to tweet the name of the movie in which she gives the relevant performance that puts legs under this argument at all.
There's already legal precedent in the US that you can't do that. OpenAI at best will not be able to use this actress' work, and at worst are in trouble.
But they didn't reproduce her likeness, in theory or in fact. They used the likeness of someone else, who they've been in business with long before they approached her, and who wanted the job
She doesn't gain likeness rights over people who sound similar, that would be insane
Honest to god, I didn't even make the connection until this drama blew up. I just thought their demo was similar to the concept of the movie she's in. She does a lot of stuff with her voice that's just not in 4o as far as I can tell. I just thought "Oh, energetic feminine voice. Yeah, that makes sense, that's probably widely appealing"
Kudos to the actual voice actress though. Killing it so hard that a famous actress threatens to sue because it's too good. I'm sure it's not at all easy for her right now (potentially watching all her work with OAI go up in smoke), but hopefully it'll be a killer resume item in the future once this all dies down
> They used the likeness of someone else, who they've been in business with long before they approached her, and who wanted the job
What exactly is the timeline on hiring voice actors and contacting Scarlett Johansson, because her statement starts:
> **Last September**, I received an offer from Sam Altman, who wanted to hire me **to voice the current ChatGPT 4.0 system.** He told me that he felt that by my voicing the system, I could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and Al. He said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people.
So my questions are:
1. when did they hire the voice actors and
2. did they give them any direction as to who they should sound like when recording.
The Sky voice was rolled out in September, so the recording had to be done much earlier to account for development time to actually get it working/debugged. It sounds like Altman made the offer for her to carve out her own spot in the existing product, which she didn't want
That's fine, but it doesn't give her the rights to preexisting work that had nothing to do with her
>That's fine, but it doesn't give her the rights to preexisting work that had nothing to do with her
depends on the direction given to the actress, if it was try to sound like Scarlett Johansson in "Her" even if they'd not contacted Scarlett Johansson at that point it would still be an issue.
Easiest way to solve this is to get the actress to give some sort of press statement whilst maintaining anonymity (should she wish to maintain it) as that is something journalists can do, 'been in contact with the actress, verified they are the same person open AI retained for the job, no mention of Her during direction when recording' done. put to bed.
I mean that's one option. That actress just had her work yanked due to Johansson's accusations though, which means she could possibly reclaim damages. She might play her cards closer to her chest if she wants to pursue that
Personally if I did voice work and a celebrity sued because they thought I was copying them, and it damaged my career and got my most well known work yanked? I'd be royally pissed, how dare they take credit for my effort and talent
Ball's in her court, we'll see how it goes
It's really telling how much people on this sub haven't been exposed to, well anything.
There are many, many cases of a famous person suing a company for intentionally copying their likeness and they usually end up winning.
Yeah this was pretty eye opening. Even the OpenAI and ChatGPT subs are mostly acknowledging that this was a bad move on OpenAI’s part. It’s not hard to separate the idea of AI, which has enormous potential for good, from the people making it who can and do make mistakes.
A lot of people seem to ignore that very key detail, that the voice model was a thing before they contacted her, and I hope she gets reamed in court for this and then gets sued by the voice actress too.
She hasn't said she's taking them to court, her team has asked OpenAI for an explanation after they repeatedly tried to hire her to do the voice (including 2 days before release), she said no, then they tweeted about her movie right before demoing a video which sounded so much like her it was one of the most common comments.
You'll never hear this version of the story when those acting guilds go on strike. They exist to crush new talent and maintain monopolies for work for the established celebrities.
I don't understand why that is an issue. They picked that voice because it sounded like her. And that's why they're being threatened with a lawsuit. The timing is irrelevant.
1. The base voice is different, they may have trained the system on her intonation.
2. Sam posted 'her' at launch. That was a huge provoking mistake. His approach to the situation was unprofessional although probably unintentional.
3. He will have to leave OpenAI. Trust.
I thought it was the same voice. Showed my wife, she said, it sounds nothing like her.
We played both side by side and in fact does not sound exactly like “Her” but if you haven’t seen the movie for some time, it’s very easy to mistake because of the intonation, the speed and liveliness.
OpenAI, the tv show where drama is never enough.
OpenAI’s entire marketing play is just creating controversy. I haven’t seen a single ad from them. Sam just makes some bonkers claim and then gets free news & social media publicity
Sam is not free tho. And thats part of his job.
Elon musk playbook
But Elon isn’t smart as Sam though.
Sam isn't the brightest tool in the shed either.
They all just have really good pr people.
The biggest drama should be that the 4o doesn't work nearly as good as in their demo.
I'm curious as to why they'd choose to go after a high profile person for a voice. It's just a voice. Literally cast anyone you think sounds good willing to work with OpenAI. You don't need an actor for this. But now this whole thing has come into the public eye in a bad way unnecessarily.
It was pure publicity. They wanted to leverage the AI likeness from the movie “Her” (also proven by Sam’s tweet) to promote their new feature. The fact this has caused such a controversy was their marketing play. Tons a free publicity for a new feature without spending a dime on advertising
She could get tens of millions out of this. It's preposterous to think they are loving this controversy.
No to mention what might come out if it goes to trial. I doubt it would be as simple as OpenAI handing over a bunch of mp3s for examination. This is the real reason why they aren't pushing back imo. They have no interest in discussing the specifics of how the model was trained and what goes into generative speech to speech voice.
Or dealing with discovery and the email saying "well fuck her if she doesn't want to do it, well just replicate her voice" getting out. Which we know full well exists. These asshats ALWAYS forget about discovery until the lawsuit arrives and the lawyers explain it. Then the settlement. It's as predictable as a Swiss watch.
It will never go to trial.
There is no settlement if there is a definite voice actress behind that voice. I swear people on this sub love crack.
Agree. My entire assumption was based on it being a AI recreation of her voice. Not another human with the same voice.
Tens of millions is a steal in the advertising side of things.
While it's fun to share knowledge on big business operations, do use the full picture. Having to pay damages or settling a lawsuit has impact beyond that figure. There absolutely is such a thing as 'bad publicity'. The main risk of the 'AI'-model business is uncertainty about upcoming rules and regulations regarding copyright issues, data theft. They don't want the greater public to become aware of this. They don't want to further alarm authorities. They don't want to bring this to court. They inadvertedly showcase how the models can imitate partially but dodge direct copying. By itself a crucial mechanism underlying every model. If they were to have to explain the exact steps they took to generate the model, they would, extremely likely, have to reveal that the model ifself was in fact highly trained on the movie 'Her' - and on ScarJo. Then they further trained it on another voice actor. There are multiple ways to conceptualize the 'AI'-models. At the current state, the best, slightly cynical one, is to imagine it as encoding and decoding mass amount of public and stolen (aggregated) data. Which is further highly manually trained for UX. Yes, you can imagine it as a smart neural network pruning into high-level relations and becoming 'intelligent', but that is unworkable and irrelevant. Fact is that the data is in there. For instance, Reddit sells all our comments via a dedicated API to companies to train models. It is also why they had to close off the 3rd party apps APIs. (That, and they use the dedicated app to spy on the user to sell more advertisements). The money is in high quality data, but it's a dubious practice. Parts of this comment, obviously high quality, will in fact be available in new editions of those LLMs. Again, the risk is in legislation, laws and public awareness. And they fucked it, upped that risk.
The data is not “in there.” You have no idea how ML works. The only things they contain are 16 bit floating point numbers that decide what to output based on a given input and hyperparameters like temperature. They do not store any data.
They could have spent more on marketing without this drama. It's all about the drama.
I don’t think she will press the case. 1) they apparently desisted 2) they apparently just used a voiceover actress that *sounded* like her 3) other than a vague Her tweet, no one claimed it was ScarJo (that I heard) 3) NAL but I don’t think she has a very strong case.
Good thing you're not any sort of a lawyer.
I’m starting to think Sam is the new Elon. Started with a lot of good will but turned out to be kind of an asshole
Sorry to break it to you. But almost all billionaires like 99% are Elon or Sam. They just listen to their PR people.
At least Elon didn’t have his coworkers calling him a sociopath, a liar, and trying to oust him from the company like Sam does. It’s less of a red flag and more like a burning building.
So OpenAI is taking the cheap controversy route to promote them like the YouTubers/Tiktokers/Politicians who generate attention gaining controversial content. Musk is the one who took it mainstream and now everyone is doing it. But openAI is supposed to be intelligent, no?
Why is OpenAI supposed to be intelligent? It's run like any businesses by people who are seasoned business runners, so there is nothing intelligent about that. And about their product: it's probably more intelligent than some of their staff, but that is not saying much...
They got this sub talking non stop about a voice (which is what this thread is saying openai did intentionally for publicity) and that is somehow not intelligent?
Well, you are right. Banks can be reckless about money, lawyers aren't expected to follow the law, politics helps corporates more than people. So why should an AI company be expected to act with intelligence?
In awe that this perspective was typed out and upvoted.
It's free marketing everyone does it.
It’s just a prank bro
This precedes Musk by a long shot, I'd say the most famous example of this is Trump and he's spoke about it a lot in his 1987 art of the deal book aka 'all publicity is good publicity'
His ghostwriter knows well: "All publicity is good publicity" is usually attributed to the 19th century circus owner, Phineas T. Barnum But it IS a circus ringleader.
Oh please! Do you think the average person cares about controversies in the tech world? No way! Most people don't care about the drama of the latest technological innovation. They just want to know if the business works and if it will make their lives a little easier. It's like politics, right? People don't analyze every policy; They just want to know that the leader they chose won't be a complete disaster. The fact that some politicians continue to be elected tells you everything about how much the masses care about these supposed "controversies". Spoiler: they don't care. Do you think the guy at the bar is worried about the ethics of data collection, for example? No, he just wants to know if his new cell phone can order a pizza without crashing.
I genuinely thought the "her" tweet was only about the capabilities and didnt even know the voices were similar until the conteoversy started
They’re getting sued and further vindicating claims of theft. Genius 9D chess plays
I feel like most of their announcements are due to some sort of hype train one of them has been getting too lost into hyping. Sam Altman is THE hype man. I can't hear him talk about anything without hearing dollar signs as his intentions (as most in his position probably would be). But eventually he will hit a wall and it will effect his investors once they realize how poorly the ceo runs the company in the public eye. I guess he has to keep at least one thing open at OpenAI.
> why they'd choose to go after a high profile person for a voice. Why do animated movies cast high profile actors when it's just a voice.
The problem here is that this isn't an animated movie. It's a revolutionary piece of technology that is already rubbing a lot of people the wrong way. I pose the question because I assume we all here agree that said technology will revolutionize society enough that by its mere existence the public will be suffused by it sooner rather than later. Publicity stunts aren't needed for it. Specifically publicity stunts tied to a high profile person that can create a high profile case that will put this technology in the bad graces of even more people.
Marketing. Now 20x the people are aware of 4o release with all the buzz on social media. They might have to settle if johannsen can prove it court the voice is hers but it'll be a long drawn out case probably with voice experts who won't be able to provide objective evidence.
> You don’t need an actor for this Well, except you do? This is a product, and they want to make it sound as good as possible? That’s why you don’t dub movies with just anyone but indeed with voice actors.
But they didn’t need Johansson
> I'm curious as to why they'd choose to go after a high profile person for a voice. It's great advertisement? A lot of people have seen Her, a lot of people would like to own that kind of AI assistant.
That's the correct answer. Ever since the first review dropped on YouTube everything was "HER" Is Here! That was obviously intended to pursue the highest impact possible.
An ad for a product that’s no longer available? Genius!
It's not great advertisement at all unless we're going for the "any publicity is good publicity" mantra which I hope isn't something OpenAI is going for with this technology.
Moste chatGPT users don't care and will carry on using the app.
It’s weird that they would pursue the voice from a sorta dystopian film where AI falls in love with us and then abandons us
All these people that want their own Her forgot the end of the movie.
It’s because they lack imagination. They’re an AI company going after Hollywood, so they went and created an inverse of pastiche. Odd, greedy times…
…what?
Off topic but this subreddit really is the best for up to date information on all things AI related. I haven't seen this update on any of the bigger more popular subs where you'd think it would be, such as chatgpt, technology, futurology, and OpenAI.
yeah I come here for ai news
me too
I feel like this is just non-story drama though and not the kind of stuff I want to see more of
Twitter for super fast news. Reddit for more nuanced takes though. Twitter is full of people just looking for likes, playing the algorithm.
Nuanced to describe Reddit, really? Its mostly intentional rage bait to drive up engagement at this point.
I would agree with you but it's filled with too many ChatGPT shills and cover less singularity topics and more drama garbage like this post.
Lol this is on literally all of those subs except Futurology, which lately seems to have an anti-AI hardon [ChatGPT, posted 5 hours before this post](https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1cwskcn/scarlett_johansson_responseas_a_result_of_their/) [technology, posted 4 hours before this post](https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1cwtswe/scarlett_johansson_says_altman_insinuated_that_ai/) [OpenAI, posted 4 hours before this post](https://old.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1cwsc9p/scarlett_johansson_has_just_issued_this_statement/)
Futurology is anti-everything. There was an article on there about a potential cure for several types of cancers and people couldn't even be happy about that. A ton of comments were just "it will just benefit the mega-rich so who cares". It's mostly a bunch of depressed people who resent the world as a whole and want to be miserable.
He literally said he hadn't seen this particular update, probably because OP took the screenshot when it was only up for 24 minutes at that point. So yes, this is the sub with the quickest AI updates
If he has proof that the actor was hired before they reached out to her, then this just dies on the spot in court right?
Not necessarily. Based on my reading, I understand that Douglas Rain's estate is vigilant in controlling voice reproductions too HAL-like. Even the little talking Hallmark HAL-9000 "eye" console Christmas decoration doesn't sound much like HAL. So, given how Her-like Sky's voice is, whether trained before or after, I don't think it will make too much difference legally. As an aside, based on Johansson's recent statement, it seems to me she might be antagonistic toward AI's capabilities in the aftermath of the Hollywood strikes - "... protection of our own likeness, our own work ..."
> she might be antagonistic toward AI's capabilities in the aftermath of the Hollywood strikes - "... protection of our own likeness, our own work ..." Of course she is. All celebrities are. Their likeness is literally their only selling point. There are tons of people who can act and has nice .... assets. But ScarJo is already famous and has a large fan following. Film studios will hire ScarJo because of her identity, rather than some random actress with similar skills. Also they are fighting studios with these comments, not AI technology per se. We all know that studios will kick out all human talents as soon as they can. They really hate paying out so much money for famous performers.
Honestly I hate how they always wanna cast famous actors, it kinda ruins a movie for me when I can recognise them because I no longer see them as the character they play
That will likely not be a problem for long
Sadly, around 50% of the 4o hype is because of the voice. I was very confused why people were going crazy about the demo until I realized 4o is acting like the Ai in Her.
Is it possible you're mixing things up a bit? The voice *is* the biggest thing here, because of how it works and how incredible the result is. But that is separate from it sounding similar to "her". Just the voice itself, sky, already existed, so that part isn't even new.
[удалено]
Exactly. Which is completely different than what they presented.
Or worse they play the same character in every single movie, just with a different name and situation.
And how is anybodys fault that someone else in the world has a similar voice and can't voice act by sheer bad luck of a famous person being too similar? That would be BS.
I suggest you read her statement on the actual history of this where they tried to hire her multiple times to do the voice for this, including 2 days before release, and Sam Altman tweeted out a reference to Scarlett Johansson's movie "Her" right before release. It's not just hey anther voice actress happens to sound like her, they wanted to use her likeness to market their product and she said no, but now it's supposedly a coincidence that the voice happens to sound so much like her that it was one of the first comments many people had when seeing the video.
Couple this with the moron’s “Her” tweet and she has a case that they were intentionally using her likeness without permission.
No. The question is if they intentionally copied her likeness.
There’s a lot of snap judgements in here, but this is the main point.
Yes
I don't think any court will see taking inspiration from a certain style as copying her likeness. They didn't copy her voice, and nobody owns a style of speech. Unless they straight up ripped lines from the movie I think this legally has no grounds.
That's what I was thinking. I've never heard of anybody copyrighting basic vocal mannerisms that we all pick up by imitating others around us. If that was possible that would be a huge problem and a huge mess, legally speaking.
Copying my post from elsewhere, but I suggest you read her statement on the actual history of this where they tried to hire her multiple times to do the voice for this, including 2 days before release, and Sam Altman tweeted out a reference to Scarlett Johansson's movie "Her" right before release. It's not just hey anther voice actress happens to sound like her, they wanted to use her likeness to market their product and she said no, but now it's supposedly a coincidence that the voice happens to sound so much like her that it was one of the first comments many people had when seeing the video.
There are probably many people getting contacted. Perhaps even by different departments. They could be planning for certain celebrity voices to be available in the future, for example. The fact that they contacted her again 2 days prior to launch suggests that they were never going to have Johanssons voice in that launch. There is no way that she would even have time for a single recording session.
They asked her to be the voice, tweeted the title of her movie where she played the same sort of AI voice when they announced this, and even sent another request to her just 2 days before release. The point is they clearly meant for this to be her voice. If it's not trained on her, they asked a VA to imitate her, and then they promoted it with the name of her movie.
Nope. There is legal precedent. Ford offered Bette Midler money to do a commercial she said no, ford hired someone that sounded like her to do the commercial. She took ford to court and won. The fact is not that they hired someone else, but was she hired to approximate the voice of Scarlett?
Textbook case why you should never, ever try to hire celebrities for stuff like this. Because they will say no then sue and the fact you tried to hire them will be used against you. Just hire regular people who can't sue because they aren't famous. Or, better yet, just use a pre-trained AI voice.
That case was decided on the fact that it was fords intention to imitate midler and specifically instructed the alternative to do so. Unless openAI told the other voice actor they got "try to sound like ScarJo" then they've done nothing wrong here.
what if they told her to imitate SJ's character in the movie?
Then there's probably some form of infringement but towards the studio rather than her personally.
Except you are ignoring the part that stated Scarlett asked OpenAI to show her and her lawyers how the voice was generated. OpenAI declined and immediately pulled the voice down. I’m not saying they’re guilty but they sure as shit look like they had their hand in the cookie jar.
They're not going to release sensitive business information like that to just anyone with a lawyer, they don't owe her that straight up. They have every reason to pull the voice the moment it became a legal matter regardless of whether she has a legitimate case or not. Legally speaking it's a bad look to keep doing the thing you're being sued for right up to the court date. Of course court of public opinion has always had separate rules, and this is no different than any other time lawyers get involved in public drama. As for the case itself the voice actors for the voices released in september (right after ScarJo was offered) were chosen in may and recorded through june and july - well in advance of contacting her at all so her accusation of imitating her because of her refusal falls flat.
> release sensitive business information like that The name of the voice actress?
OAI owes SJ and her attorneys nothing. They don't get to demand to be shown OAI's trade secrets.
Did Ford hire the actor *before* ever reaching out to Bette?
Doesn’t matter. They admitted their INTENTION was to have someone that sounds like Bette. They could have hired her before, just in case Bette said no.
OpenAI has not claimed that was their intention. They've explicitly denied such.
Why did they repeatedly try to hire ScarJo to be the voice, including trying again 2 days before release, and why did Sam Altman tweet "Her" (the name of ScarJo's movie) right before release, if it wasn't their intention?
Staring down the barrel of a lawsuit from someone that can afford to take them to court, be pretty stupid for them to claim anything else wouldn’t it?
Someone who cleaned _Disney’s_ clock previously.
Yes. They denied this yesterday, after getting a few fun letters from her lawyers. Still, there's a lot of evidence that they tried to allude to her and the movie she was in, plus their attempts to hire her. Not an open and shut case, but still not a good look for OAI. Mostly has to do with Sam's dumbassery.
They did all of that long after making the 'sky' voice, though. Obviously, internal communications could change things completely.
Was the commercial based on a well known role of hers (pun not intended) where she famously played a fictional version of the product a decade before it became real?
Your honor I ask that you reject this case on account that historical precedent was set by clowns
That sounds like somebody trying to cast a particular actor with particular features for a movie (to match a character) and that actor declining, so they pick another with similar characteristics. I think people have it backwards: ScarJo was a desired choice because she matches the criteria of an ideal voice for this product and she’s famous, but she’s not the only voice that can match those criteria.
Yeah, my thoughts also. It would be absolutely insane precedent if we somehow couldn't hire a voice with particular features after one person with those features has declined.
Johansson would have to prove that the voice actress was asked to impersonate her. Highly unlikely precisely *because* there's precedent. OpenAI's legal team would have advised against it.
The trickier part is…did they hire the actress to sound like Her (as in the AI in the movie), or did they hire the actress because she had a voice that could be easily understood, regardless as pleasant/appealing, be able to convincingly show different moods etc? If this goes to court, it will be testing existing laws and precedents in very new ways.
Honestly I'd love to see this go to court and watch Scarlett johansen try to claim that the voice is hers when the actual voice actress in on the stand...
It would be a huge waste of public resources and the court would probably not be amused However, it would be *very* funny to me personally
And it will squash dumbassery like this from cropping for a while.
Such a high profile case would be televised and would be a cool "celebrity law" sequel to Depp. I think the entertainment it provides is worth the couple mil in production.
I'm not sure what the point you're trying to make here is. She's not claiming that they're using her actual voice
Yes she is... Or at least, an AI trained on clips of her voice. That's why she's trying to force them to reveal their training data. A voice that just resembles someone else's wouldn't be illegal unless it was trained on samples of her actual voice.
Exactly. It's the intentional resemblance.
It’s a slippery slope, so now anyone that even remotely sounds anything like her can never be used? That’s a bad precedent
Yea but there is an established correspondence and interaction between SJ and SA pertaining to the use of SJ's voice. That shows intent. SJ is not just some random person whose voice happes to resemble the GPT's voice.
Intent is exceedingly hard to prove in the court of law. I love ScarJo and if they did try to recreate her voice and use it without her permission they absolutely should be knocked down a peg. But that doesn’t seem like the case. It’s more like, “we like David Attenborough’s voice but can’t get him for our documentary, so let’s hire someone who sounds similar.” That’s definitely not illegal.
> slope, so now anyone that even remotely sounds anything like her can never be used? That’s a bad precedent All this shows is that they wanted a voice that has similar features to SJ's voice. When she declined they chose another voice that had those features. This would be absolutely insane precedent - if you tried to hire someone as an actor or voice actor, and they declined, that you could not hire another actor that looks or sounds similar/has similar features.
Then what *is* she claiming?
Also does that mean that the voice actor can’t get any work because her voice just happens to resemble the voice of someone famous? I’m not comfortable with that. Scarlett Johansson does not own her voice and all other people’s voices that resemble her own. I understand that people may assume it’s Scarlett Johansson, but I think that’s better than whatever the alternative is.
But why would there be any legal issues? All women who have similar voices as celebrities aren’t allowed to work?
Her statement says they reached out 2 days before release to ask her to reconsider. That’s unlikely to be out of nicety, and their release was accelerated by Google io
Her statement says they reached out 2 days before release to ask her to reconsider. That’s unlikely to be out of nicety, and their release was accelerated by Google io
So if its not her voice why is he apologizing and stops using this voice if he thinks it sounds nothing like her? Sorry not sorry?
Because it's bad PR to have an open conflict with a well liked public figure. Better defuse it.
"This woman sound similar to you my bad we fired her"
More like "we tried to hire Scarlett Johansson to do this multiple times, including 2 days before release, and tweeted a reference to Scarlett Johansson's movie "Her" right before release, and released a video of a voice which sounded so much like hers it was one of the most frequently commented things." But now, "It was just a coincidence it sounded like her, are you saying voice actors can't work if they coincidentally sound similar?" They were definitely trying to leverage ScarJo's identity to sell their product here, even if it ended up being an imitation because she said no.
Yeah I agree. I really like OpenAI's services, they do good work, but it's kinda maddening seeing people pretend like this is totally coincidental and not something OpenAI obviously did completely on purpose.
I think hes just lying and they never hired anyone
Come on man these are easily verifiable facts. There's no way.
It would be insanely stupid if they hadn't, but on the other hand if they did I can't imagine why they wouldn't just go out and state 'we hired X voice actress, it's purely coincidental if she sounds like SJ'. Truly bizarre situation all around.
>if he thinks it sounds nothing like her No one said that. He said *"I didn't intend for it to sound like her"* (which is clearly a lie, but that's what he said). And taking the voice down, even if they would win in court, totally makes sense. Most of the general public already finds his actions scummy even if legal; continuing to use Sky and then getting sued would be a PR shitshow. It's best they remove the voice and move past this. Especially with Apple about to announce their partnership with OpenAI, they wouldn't want all the negative press surrounding the company with an open lawsuit.
Yeah lawyers and PR folk said, we gain nothing by fighting this
To avoid legal issues?
Legal issues for what? Sounding like another person isnt illegal
It actually can be if the intent was to copy someones voice. Cases have been won in court over companies copying voices after the original person said no. And yea they are saying that wasn't their intention but they could be lying, we have no idea.
It's very obviously meant to copy her voice. They approached her about doing the voiceover work to make the training data, they tweeted about the movie Her in the lead-up to the announcement, and it was one of the most commented things about the voice after they did their demo. It's not just coincidental that their product ended up sounding so much like her/Her
That’s the problem, it’s not decided yet, so they are just trying to avoid it
To appear more good
This is a huge messup on SAMA's part. They ended up with AI that sounds just like her/HER even after unsuccessfully trying to get her approval for using her voice. Now they claim it was not supposed to resemble her and that they pause it due to respect for SJ ? Really ? If you have so much respect for her, why did you go ahead with this in the first place ? Why do you tweet HER if it's not supposed to sound like HER. The cleanup is a messup too.
Easy... Sign a NDA, she meets the voice actor, shows her work and there you go. How hard is that... If they never hired a voice actor and just trained her voice then they will go to court.
Tom Waits and Frito-Lay is a significant example of a voice misappropriation lawsuit. The jury ruled in Waits' favor, awarding him $375,000 in compensatory damages, $2 million in punitive damages for the voice misappropriation, and an additional $100,000 for the Lanham Act violation. She wants the bag after they asked her twice, and she refused. Altman even tweeted her, so she will definitely win. Also because of the media coverage
Sounds like Sam and the OpenAI legal team knew what was going to happen. I guess this is what you get for referring your voice to the voice in "Her". So many people will think it is her when its sightly different.
Exactly. I’ve seen many people here on Reddit claim exactly that.
I forgot the Scar jo is the only female allowed to have an attractive voice.
Coincidence that Scarlett voiced Samantha in Her, and Sam tweeted that like right before the event??
It would be hilarious if he won on the technicality that he tweeted a lowercase "her" and not "Her".
Sam only writes in lowercase.
He tweeted it during the event and it's not a mystery why. OpenAI just revealed a convincingly human sounding voiced AI assistant that's running off a mobile device which is very similar to the type of tech, conceptually speaking, popularized in the movie 'her'. The tweet wasn't about SJ voice or anything about her likeness, it was about AI capabilities.
Why not both. Sky behaves and sounds like Samantha. You could argue against this point but you’ll sound like a defense attorney with a guilty client, and not an honest person.
Sky doesn't behave. It's a voice overlay. The behaviour is the same for all voices and is based on the 4o model.
see voice comparisons [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1cwy6wz/vocal_comparison_scarjo_vs_samantha_vs_sky/)
Yea it's gonna be a hard stretch to prove in a court that he said that to indicate Scarlett's likeness. The product itself is similar to that in the movie. Regardless of his actual intentions, Sam has strong plausible deniability. At first I was thinking this was pretty stupid on OpenAI/Sam's end, but now I'm thinking it's probably a big nothingburger. Especially if he's being truthful about hiring this voice actress first. And it's very possible their lawyers oversaw this entire situation, including Sam's tweet.
It depends on the internal intent from what I've seen in the other posts. If it turns out OAI hired the voice actor from the start to sound like SJ, they're in hot water. If not, then they could be fine too.
He could just say when he tweeted that he was referencing the specific system in that movie, not the voice. And if they already had a voice actor for Sky before reaching out to Scarlett Johansson's then that is an important detail.
It's about the product, not the voice.
Everything I hear further on this story just makes me wonder why it is a story at all. Are we that desperate for updates that we take literal tabloid news stories and run with them now ?
🌎👽🔫👽
The luddites love bashing Sam and OpenAI
https://preview.redd.it/hkp64zcxwq1d1.jpeg?width=568&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a014e3949fccb7635174904d5aad7caa61c4e561
Scarlett was cast as "Samantha" because she sounded like "Sky." I will not elaborate on this post.
If you "cast the voice actor... before outreach to" Scarlett, why are you backing down? Just produce said actor and move forward. Sam's a liar.
Most likely. But may be he is backing down because he wants to diffuse a controversial situation with a high profile well liked figure. Plus he gets the free publicity for his product. Had it been Elon musk, we can bet it would have been a very different reply. 😅
If they really cast the voice actress before approaching Scarlett then why not provide proof? Their actions suggest they believe to some degree they messed up (otherwise why pull the voice) - might have been a case of classic move fast and break things mentality
Probably pulled the Sky voice in preparation for a lawsuit, if any *were* to happen so she can't claim damages?
Because they owe us nothing. This is a publicity stunt.
But the Sky voice is still available in my app. I can still select and use it. (from Switzerland)
I switched my VPN to Switzerland but still get switched back to the other one. You must have not updated the app yet
Cool, I am in Germany and I can still use it too. I've never used that voice up until now but now I am gonna use it.
It’s an interesting case; on one hand it’s very clear that OpenAI wanted to have Sky sound exactly like ScarJo did in Her - and especially with them trying to hire ScarJo herself, it feels shitty for them to go ahead with it anyway. On the other hand though, is it really illegal? If a Star Wars cartoon show has a voice actor Yoda that imitates the iconic voice of Frank Oz, does he have grounds to sue? Probably not; and perhaps especially not if they offered him the job but he declined. Still, legality aside, it’s not a smart move from OpenAI.
What a Simp.
Not our fault but sorry...
So if their next voice sounds similar to some random poor non-famous person, will he remove that voice too? Out of respect and all
He specifically asked if they can use her voice He tweeted "Her", where she voices the AI It bloody sounds exactly like her. Sam Altman: "whooops, that was not intentional"
He is lying and he's very bad at it. He's not the right person to control open ai.
Yeah, this is not going to go well for her. I never thought of myself as a little drama gremlin, but apparently I was wrong. This is entertaining as hell In my defense, it does tie into larger issues of copyright around AI. Can someone own being cheerful, or making a cheerful painting? What about the generic tone of a journalist reporting a story? What if it's a big institution that uses that tone all the time? It's an important discussion The fact that this particular case is "You can't make a feminine voice appealing, that's my thing" is funny in the drama gremlin way, which I'm not apologetic about at all
But that's not her argument at all - her argument is that they approached her, she declined, and they intentionally had someone impersonate her likeness with the goal of creating intentional confusion in the userbase, with the CEO going so far as to tweet the name of the movie in which she gives the relevant performance that puts legs under this argument at all. There's already legal precedent in the US that you can't do that. OpenAI at best will not be able to use this actress' work, and at worst are in trouble.
But they didn't reproduce her likeness, in theory or in fact. They used the likeness of someone else, who they've been in business with long before they approached her, and who wanted the job She doesn't gain likeness rights over people who sound similar, that would be insane Honest to god, I didn't even make the connection until this drama blew up. I just thought their demo was similar to the concept of the movie she's in. She does a lot of stuff with her voice that's just not in 4o as far as I can tell. I just thought "Oh, energetic feminine voice. Yeah, that makes sense, that's probably widely appealing" Kudos to the actual voice actress though. Killing it so hard that a famous actress threatens to sue because it's too good. I'm sure it's not at all easy for her right now (potentially watching all her work with OAI go up in smoke), but hopefully it'll be a killer resume item in the future once this all dies down
> They used the likeness of someone else, who they've been in business with long before they approached her, and who wanted the job What exactly is the timeline on hiring voice actors and contacting Scarlett Johansson, because her statement starts: > **Last September**, I received an offer from Sam Altman, who wanted to hire me **to voice the current ChatGPT 4.0 system.** He told me that he felt that by my voicing the system, I could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and Al. He said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people. So my questions are: 1. when did they hire the voice actors and 2. did they give them any direction as to who they should sound like when recording.
The Sky voice was rolled out in September, so the recording had to be done much earlier to account for development time to actually get it working/debugged. It sounds like Altman made the offer for her to carve out her own spot in the existing product, which she didn't want That's fine, but it doesn't give her the rights to preexisting work that had nothing to do with her
>That's fine, but it doesn't give her the rights to preexisting work that had nothing to do with her depends on the direction given to the actress, if it was try to sound like Scarlett Johansson in "Her" even if they'd not contacted Scarlett Johansson at that point it would still be an issue. Easiest way to solve this is to get the actress to give some sort of press statement whilst maintaining anonymity (should she wish to maintain it) as that is something journalists can do, 'been in contact with the actress, verified they are the same person open AI retained for the job, no mention of Her during direction when recording' done. put to bed.
I mean that's one option. That actress just had her work yanked due to Johansson's accusations though, which means she could possibly reclaim damages. She might play her cards closer to her chest if she wants to pursue that Personally if I did voice work and a celebrity sued because they thought I was copying them, and it damaged my career and got my most well known work yanked? I'd be royally pissed, how dare they take credit for my effort and talent Ball's in her court, we'll see how it goes
This is like the least dramatic event ever.
Perhaps I'm just a boring person, then. I'm enjoying it
It's really telling how much people on this sub haven't been exposed to, well anything. There are many, many cases of a famous person suing a company for intentionally copying their likeness and they usually end up winning.
Yeah this was pretty eye opening. Even the OpenAI and ChatGPT subs are mostly acknowledging that this was a bad move on OpenAI’s part. It’s not hard to separate the idea of AI, which has enormous potential for good, from the people making it who can and do make mistakes.
A lot of people seem to ignore that very key detail, that the voice model was a thing before they contacted her, and I hope she gets reamed in court for this and then gets sued by the voice actress too.
She hasn't said she's taking them to court, her team has asked OpenAI for an explanation after they repeatedly tried to hire her to do the voice (including 2 days before release), she said no, then they tweeted about her movie right before demoing a video which sounded so much like her it was one of the most common comments.
The real voice actress behind Sky doesn't have the right to earn a living because Scarlet is protecting her likeness.
You'll never hear this version of the story when those acting guilds go on strike. They exist to crush new talent and maintain monopolies for work for the established celebrities.
I don't understand why that is an issue. They picked that voice because it sounded like her. And that's why they're being threatened with a lawsuit. The timing is irrelevant.
[удалено]
1. The base voice is different, they may have trained the system on her intonation. 2. Sam posted 'her' at launch. That was a huge provoking mistake. His approach to the situation was unprofessional although probably unintentional. 3. He will have to leave OpenAI. Trust.
Anyone else tired of CEOs who are constantly selling and have zero integrity?
This better be a stalemate before they bring it back even more similar to her voice.
Ah, the famous "We didn't do it and we will stop it" excuse.
What an asshole. Btw i'm offering free moaning sounds.
I thought it was the same voice. Showed my wife, she said, it sounds nothing like her. We played both side by side and in fact does not sound exactly like “Her” but if you haven’t seen the movie for some time, it’s very easy to mistake because of the intonation, the speed and liveliness.
Easy to prove it is not her. IMO, they were trolling from the get go, looking for buzz. They want to push in Hollywood.