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Does this really sound that much like Scarlett Johansson? Even after Sama made that tweet this still didn’t occur to me. It just sounded like a generic, friendly female voice to me, and I think the “Her” tweet was just a reference to the plot of the movie, not the voice.
This whole kerfuffle seems annoying, and also seems like Scarlett Johansson reaching for a way to include herself.
They offered her a job, she refused, and then they got somebody else to do the same thing. Now she’s mad. This is not interesting.
Maybe the angle here is that since AI duplications are so easy and good now that we’ll enter a sort of guilty until proven innocent phase where everybody assumes they are more important than they might actually be.
No the company is not “deep faking” you, you just aren’t actually unique.
I think there are too many indicators in this case pointing in the opposite direction.
On the other hand, if OpenAI had used a voice similar to that of John Huston, who previously had no connection with AI, and who is not a currently active celebrity profiting off of their known assets, it would seem like a fun, quirky choice. There might even be debates over whether the AI was based on Huston or Daniel Plainview, whose voice was modeled on Huston. I don't think Anjelica Huston would be suing them, unless they had asked the Huston estate and had been refused.
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This really gets to the root of the visceral reaction some people have towards most of generative AI. People view their artwork, their voice, their face, as some of the most personally identifying "what makes me be me" features. The idea that there are literally other people that look and sound just like you, or even worse that a computer can emulate it believably, flies in the face of how some people see themselves.
Kindof understandable, many were told from an early age that they were a one of a kind special little guy, and finding out that it was all a polite fantasy would probably be quite jarring.
To be fair, art and voice AI was literally trained on existing examples of the respective media. I don't think the criticism comes from a place of "the AI makes me feel worthless," it comes more from "the AI is basically carbon-copying my style."
i feel like you are just steelmanning this position rather than actually making those claims, so i'll spare you my layman's understanding of how training data is not used in a currently copyright protected fashion.
What i have a big problem with though is people who become possessive over a "style". You can't own a style, not in visual auditory or any other sense of art. Also injecting "worthless" into the discussion goes beyond what i was saying, i was saying that finding out the singularity of your identity is less all-encompassing than one originally imagined can harm the ego.
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ScarJo claims (in my linked tweet above) that it sounded so much like her that her friends and family couldn't tell the difference.
So... I think either yes or she is lying.
Or engaging in motivated reasoning, or misunderstanding how unique individual voices actually are, or probably a bunch of other possible explanations.
Where how unique it is might matter for California's statutory right of publicity, the state's common-law right is far more expansive. I'll point to White v. Samsung, where this was close enough to trigger California's common-law right of publicity.
((Look at the decision itself for even more expansive stuff: "Here's Johnny" alone was apparently enough for the 6th Circuit to find infringement of right of publicity.))
It's an absolute mess of a standard, and celebrities have marinated in it so long that it's water to them.
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It occurred to everyone else on the internet (including me but I was primed). If a ton of people hear ScarJo and then it turns out they literally offered the job to Johansson, I'm inclined to believe she's reasonable in thinking there was something there.
Almost no one is. Amber Heard had a body double do the sex scenes for a movie, I guess you could say that that makes her not unique - people could get their titillation from someone else with the same body.
But I don't think it's delusions of grandeur to think that part of the value (in this case the titillation) in such a scene is specifically that it's Heard. There's a reason they took the legal risk of doing this. Which is why stars negotiate for the right to control even fake nudity - it can have an impact on their image. Some people just are more important than others, or they wouldn't be speaking to Sam Altman and basically being offered an ambassador role in one of the hottest AI companies.
Johansson wouldn't be unreasonable imo in thinking the appeal has something to do with her. Whether or not she has a legal right is another thing.
I’m not disputing that it could sound like her, and I think if I had been primed to it like you, I might have made the connection as well.
My point is that SJ is not a voice actor, and isn’t doing a specific “character” or something the way that Fran Drescher or Gilbert Gotfried are.
Her voice is generic. It’s why there aren’t SJ impersonators the way there are for Donald Trump, for instance, who has a very distinct way of speaking. Searching for a SJ voice impersonator returns 0 results for me on YouTube at least.
And by the way I say this as somebody who likes a lot of the movies she has been in and sought them out. Girl With the Pearl Earring, The Island, Her, Lost in Translation; these were all movies I loved and largely sought out because she was in them. She wasn’t being hired for her voice.
Really? She was hired for the movie Her because of her voice. She came in to replace another actress (Samantha Morton) because her voice didn't work. SJ might not be primarily a voice actor, but her voice is distinctive enough to be considered an upgrade from Morton's voice.
Sydney Sweeney is getting a lot of work right now.
If Elon decides that Grok needs to have a visual avatar, and wants to hire SS to model for it (because she is very attractive), but she declines, and he goes with a different blonde woman with enormous...eyes...should SS be able to sue for this?
In your case, the replacement would at lease be a different real life human being with their own body. If Elon instead made a digital avatar based off of SS's body cast, should she have the right to sue?
Yes. But that is not what OpenAI did. They hired a completely different real human being a trained an AI model on her voice.
I might stand corrected. I thought the whole problem was that they trained the AI on ScarJo's voice
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True.
In general maybe, but I think she was specifically brought in on Her to replace Samantha Morton - herself a great actor - because the existing actor wasn't working. If she was there for promotional/greenlighting reasons (which I'm sure played a role in films like Ghost in the Shell, Lucy, etc.) you'd assume she'd get cast from the start because her profile is incomparable.
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