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We have correctly and broadly recognized that you can impersonate someone by using someone else's voice. This is the Siri equivalent of hiring a 55 year old teacher who just happens to be named Taylor Swift to endorse your brand of makeup
Here's when a snack company did the same thing to Tom Waits:
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/communications/waits.html
They hired some other female voice actor. They did not instruct her to imitate Scarlett Johansson and they did not mention the movie Her to her. I suppose you would have a point if you could find some internal documents that said something like "we've done auditions with 100 female voice actors and we suggest proceeding with Candidate #73 because she sounds the closest to Scarlett Johansson's voice," but absent that, there's no case. There's just a rush to judgment and condemnation from various nobodies on the internet who have axes to grind with OpenAI for various stupid reasons -- or who are technology "journalists" farming engagement from aforementioned nobodies.
How can we be certain that they didn't give those instructions? If you're resolute in that claim then I'd like to see some evidence or a strong intuition. All we know is that they tried to hire Mrs. Johansson, were unable to, made public references to the film 'Her' with respect to the AI voice, and then hired someone who subjectively the majority of people conflate the voice of with Mrs. Johansson.
If this was a more mundane dispute, say about a restaurant acquiring a hamburger recipe, all of these facts would probably lead us to believe there was an effort to get the goods without due permission. Adding in the prior of this particular company playing very loose with intellectual property rights and ownership pushes it to very likely that they did what everyone here is suspecting them of, and certainly if it was entirely innocuous, they did themselves no favours showing the contrary of our suspicions and made no effort to show anything dispositive in that respect.
How can we be certain that Russell's Teapot doesn't exist?
I guess my objection is that this whole dispute feels like it's in bad faith. A lot of people just hate OpenAI for various reasons (predominantly ideological safetyism and rank envy at how much they've succeeded), are channeling that regrettable ennui into becoming sudden converts to the vital public interest of protecting an obscure IP right in "likeness" on behalf of Hollywood celebrities, and are making whatever assumptions about the facts they need to make to paint OpenAI generally and Sam Altman specifically as a villain on that dubious stage. I just don't buy the notion that the vitality of your objection is genuinely rooted at this object level. It just looks like you're trying to throw stones, and you think that celebrity IP likeness rights are a good stone. But both your motivation to throw stones (rather than make the argument that is at the genuine root of your distaste for OpenAI) and your apparent willingness to pick up a turd and call it a stone are just... unbecoming, I guess.
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