Comment by Y_Y | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Y_Y | Hacker News Reader

sama is a chancer, no doubt, but I take issue with this article's angle.

Clearly they wanted something reminiscend of the film "Her". Since Scarlett Johansson didn't want to do they voice they hired someone else. The voice they used is that of their voice actor, not Scarlett Johansson. She owns her own voice, but I don't think she has any rights to voices that merely sound like hers, when they're not being used to fraudently imply that she's involved.

So movies are really influential on culture, and I think there should be broad scope for "taking inspiration" as long as it stops short of plagiarism. Think how many works you've seen that are obviously heavily inspired by e.g. 2001: A Space Odyssey. I don't think the vibe of "I'm sorry Dave, I can't let you do that" as belonging to the voice actor Douglas Rain, or Kubrick or Clark. And that's what a good thing! Producing cultural works must feed the production of future works and I'd like to permit all but the most blantant ripoffs.

There’s a thing in intellectual property called “passing off” - if your logo and branding is so similar to McDonalds that consumers are likely to think that your product comes from McDonalds, then you’re in breach and will be sued.

Regardless of whether they hired a different actress for the voice model, enough consumers would be convinced “ohhh it’s the same as ScarJo in Her!” which should point to there being an issue with ScarJo’s image rights and likeness, and although the law right now doesn’t explicitly cover AI voice modelling, as soon as this is tested in court it would likely set a precedent. Unless ScarJo lost that case, which seems unlikely.

Think about the voice actor they hired (presuming they did so). Does she not have the right to use her own voice for money merely because she sounds like another, more famous persons?

She certainly does.

However, the company hiring her might not have the right to use her voice with the intent purpose of passing that voice off as that of the other person.

She is completely unfettered in any roles that do not have that intent.

> However, the company hiring her might not have the right to use her voice with the intent purpose of passing that voice off as that of the other person.

Please cite statute.

Generally speaking malicious intent only does not an illegal act make. Last I checked a voice is rightly not a trademarkable thing (it's a quality, not a definable entity).

Yeah but it’s not just intent, they released a product after the intent.

Case law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

Thanks.

Wow, damn, that's such a crazy ruling. How distinct is distinct enough? How famous is famous enough? I'm surprised Ford's lawyers didn't press the issue further up the courts.

No, it's a pretty straight-forward and understandable ruling. Intent matters, the law is fuzzy.

Nobody said intent doesn't matter.

> However, the company hiring her might not have the right to use her voice with the intent purpose of passing that voice off as that of the other person.

Aren't they very explicitly not doing that? They're saying it isn't her.

This is the question a court would be deciding. OpenAI claims it’s not on purpose, but I think there’s enough doubt to investigate

Is that why Sam Altman tweeted "her"?

They've lost any argument of coincidence, with just that one tweet…

I mean, SamA tweeted "Her", as in a reference to the movie "Her" which very famously features Scarlett Johansson's voice. So by not saying precisely who provided the voice actor for the "Sky" voice and ensuring it was either the same as or very similar to Scarlett Johansson, it was obviously going to understood by the users of the app to be Scarlett Johansson herself.

That is, OpenAI was going to end up capitalising from Scarlett Johansson's voice, fame, and notoriety whether it is her exact voice or not, and without her permission.

It would be like me promoting a new AI movie featuring an AI generated character very similar in build and looks to Dwayne The Rock Johnson and promoting the movie by saying "Do you smell what we're cooking?" and then claiming it had nothing to do with The Rock and was just modelled on someone who happened to look like him.

But do we really want to encourage people to build fame, rather than build things that have value?

Part of the value of a voice assistant is the voice itself and if OpenAI simply copied that voice from someone, did they really create this value?

Also, the value of a voice comes from (at least partly anyway), the huge amount of work, practice, skill, experience, from training that voice, experience in acting (and voice acting), and the recognition that resulted from all this experience and skill. Her voice wouldn't have "value" if she hadn't trained in acting, auditioned, honed her skills over many years. But OpenAI gets to use all that earned and worked for value for free?

This for me is similar to a writer honing his craft for a lifetime, 1000s of hours of work and labour, then someone training a model using his corpus to write plays and sell them without crediting him or paying him. It's trivial to make a model to imitate a writer, it's not trivial to become that writer to produce that work in the first place, so the writer needs to be both credited and compensated.

> But OpenAI gets to use all that earned and worked for value for free?

They paid the voice actor right? The accusation isn't that they trained on ScarJos voice, it's that they paid a voice actor that sounds like her.

The only thing in the list you gave is recognition that's different.

> The accusation isn't that they trained on ScarJos voice, it's that they paid a voice actor that sounds like her.

Johansson's accusation did not specify the method. OpenAI claimed they hired another actor and the similarity was unintentional. The 2nd claim seems unlikely. Some disbelieve both claims.

Yes of course she does. She’s demonstrably copying a certain actress playing the role of an AI here though, but yeah this is one of the points that would have to be duked out in court. Likely as part of the “coincidence” defence.

Sure, she has a right to use her voice. An AI reproducing her voice is not her voice, though.

It would depend on whether she got the job for having a good voice or for having a voice that is associated with a famous person. Would her voice have the same value if it was not sounding like another famous person's voice? That's up to the courts to decide.

How do you legally define that two voices sound alike? "I know it when I hear it?"

Algorithmically? How much of a similarity score is too much? How much vocabulary must you compare? Suppose two voices sound entirely identical, but one voice has Canadian aboot. Is that sufficient difference?

You can maybe see why the courts wouldn't want to touch this with a 1 kilometer pole

I can assure you, many Elvis impersonators can make a living without having any similarities at all.

The same way every other IP lawsuit goes does. Same as all the “your song is too similar to mine” lawsuits. The two things are presented, with other evidence, and judge or jury decides.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_subject_to_plagi...

It’s not up to the courts whether they touch things with a 1km pole or a 1 inch one. The courts have to deal with whatever ends up in them.

Given the courts regularly deal with murder via decapitation or incest, I’m sure “The Case of the Attractive Actress’ Voice” would be a nice day out for them.

This isn't how the legal system works. It's very fuzzy.

That’s why he have courts and judges.

Courts touched this 36 years ago.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

Intent matters. There's enough evidence out there pointing out to OpenAI's intention to copy Scarlett Johansson's character in "Her". The voice actress could read literally the same lines with the same intonation for (say) Facebook and, as long as she wasn't coached to sound like Scarlett Johansson, it would be fine.

What law is being broken here?

Suppose you turn down a job offer as a programmer. Can you be pissed at me if I offer the job to someone whose code looks like yours based on scraping GitHub?

I think this is the relevant case law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

Basically your voice is part of your likeness.

"Impersonation of a voice, or similarly distinctive feature, must be granted permission by the original artist for a public impersonation, even for copyrighted materials."

Quoting that as a relevant case law is completely ridiculous.

Did you even look at the Ford commercial? https://youtu.be/hxShNrpdVRs

Having someone sing in the exact same style as another singer is totally different from what OpenAI did with their voice AI (having a female actor speak in a flirty tone).

It makes sense with music but you're setting a really dangerous precedent if you can't even hire a voice actor who sounds similar for speaking.

You've shifted the goal posts.

Search for videos showing voice actors at work - it's their job to talk in all kinds of voices, accents, intonation patterns and more. I'm sure that the person doing voice acting could also do it in a way that wouldn't sound like ScarJo.

If they get sued (and I think they will), then it will be interesting to know how said actress was coached. Was she specifically asked to sound like Scarlett Johansson in Her?

> Does she not have the right to use her own voice for money merely because she sounds like another, more famous persons?

Of course she can. She just can't fool consumers into thinking that she is SJ.

The problem here is not that the voice sounds identical to SJ, it's that the consumers are led to believe they that is SJ's voice.

Not when it’s an exact imitation of the movie her, in a product that looks exactly like the product in that movie, where the company using the recording is actively trying to convince its customers its scarlet and everyone in the world is convinced its scarlet.

That’s misleading and blatantly illegal.

Someone stole from a bank and your argument is “are you saying it’s illegal withdraw money from a bank with vigor?”

Yeah and especially in combination with the additional inquiry directly before release and the her tweet… looks awfully deliberate

> The voice they used is that of their voice actor, not Scarlett Johansson.

If this is the case, why did they pull it?

And why ask Scarlett again, just a few days before release?

Someone from OpenAI wrote on Twitter that pulling this voice was in the works for a month already. Must be true, it was on the Internet.

Prepare the rollback/fallback pre-mortem, not surprised

You're seeing a pattern of bad faith "beg forgiveness instead of asking permission" and they got their hand caught in the cookie jar when someone insisted they didn't want part. Reddit, Stack Overflow, etc were just happy to roll over and accept the check after the fact.

Stopping behaviour is not an automatic admission of guilt.

And we're not in a court of justice here, where that distinction would be extremely important.

This is all about public opinion, and they have communication managers and PR strategists. If they didn't train this voice on Scarlett Johansson, they would have had so much better of a response by not taking it offline and instead insisting it is not trained on her. The entire discourse right now would be very different. And you can't shift this back later, burned is burned.

The way I see it, there's 3 options:

· they did train it on Scarlett's voice

· they don't know if they trained it on Scarlett's voice

· their PR/communications people don't know what they're doing

I don't think #2 is any better than #1. If it's #3… idk, better companies have been ruined by poor PR.

> And why ask Scarlett again, just a few days before release?

For one, because it's obviously better to have the exact voice rather than an imitation. For two, because it avoids exactly this kind of sticky situation: even if you believe you have a legal and moral right to do something, it's always nice to have the question completely air-tight.

Also, remember that OpenAI isn't a single person, but a large organization with different people and viewpoints. Not unlikely somebody in the organization foresaw the potential for this kind of reaction, knew they couldn't convince the right people to pull the voice completely, but thought they could maybe convince people to reach out again.

I mean, suppose they had a Darth Vader-y voice for some reason and had approached James Earl Jones to do it, and Jones had said no. Is it really so terrible to have someone else try to imitate the Darth Vader character? Jones, along with Lucas, made Darth Vader a cultural phenomenon; I don't think Jones should have the right to dictate forevermore all references to that phenomenon. The same goes for Scarlett Johansson and the author / director of 'Her'.

> Also, remember that OpenAI isn't a single person, but a large organization with different people and viewpoints.

This falls flat since the CEO tweeted "her" when the version featuring her voice clone was released. The CEO was bragging about this feature; the company was aligned behind it until the blowback went public.

I think you missed my point. Did Sam Altman personally think, a few days before the release, "Hmm, maybe I'd better call Scarlett again, just to be sure"? Or did someone else in the org propose that, to which Sam didn't object?

According to Johansson, Altman personally reached out to her. He didn't just "not object" here, he's the guy taking the actions. Nor is he a lackey who just does what he's told; he's the actual CEO. Unless you're saying OpenAI is a big organization with lots of Sam Altmen, I'm not sure that the point you're trying to make applies here.

https://www.npr.org/2024/05/20/1252495087/openai-pulls-ai-vo...

> OpenAI is a big organization with lots of Sam Altmen

Hopefully you meant this as a joke, but this nightmare isn't so unrealistic! Put Sam's voice on top of gpt-5o and spin up fifty of them to start cold calling starlets, why not?

It's like a joke, but isn't funny.

Disney would sue them for that, no?

If it sounds too alike intentionally, it’s basically an impersonation of a character, which falls under copyright.

Someone else was sharing case law about this.

Why isn’t anyone stopping for a minute to think what happens in that darn movie? Why is it even ok to want your AI to sound like the AI from her? Why are the people leading AI and tech today so shallow when it comes to cultural depictions of their role? Unless they would actually like to be the villain.

Because they’re not as creative as they think they are.

I've seen this take quite a lot around Twitter recently, which is confusing to me. Do you read Her as a "AI assistants are bad" story? I thought it was a much more subtle exploration of what our world would be like if such things existed, rather than outright condemning it, but it seems like lots of people saw only horror start to finish.

"AI assistants are bad" isn't the take. The thing making people feel icky/uncomfortable about Her - and about the 4o demos - is not the idea of Samantha but the idea of Theodore. It's about nerds' idealized AI versions of womanhood. Tirelessly flirty, giggly servants who they can interrupt and talk over as they please, that come without the inconvenient features of personhood.

Exactly!

This observation is so widespread it now has a handy shorthand in the form of a meme, the "Torment Nexus":

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus

Extending the thought, I would argue that this indicates the urgent need for more utopian speculative fiction, since it appears that as a society we tend to "steer where we're looking" even if it's straight into a pole. Cautionary tales clearly do not work - we need aspirational tales!

Unfortunately that’s hard to write in a way that’s interesting, or at least that’s my interpretation. Maybe it would read too much like political and economic theory. And then in the cases where it is done it either leads to things like ‘get away from capitalism’ which many ppl wouldn’t like or just not discussing it much like Star Trek where supposedly there is no money but it’s not really explained how. (And I assume if it were more explicitly socialist start trek would have become as big)

Iain Banks managed to walk the “utopian but doesn’t become a dry political treatise” line pretty well.

Ironically, his works are favorites of several leaders in the torment-nexus-creation space.

My understanding of Star Trek is that it's a post-scarcity utopia. The narrative interest comes from the strife of non-utopian societies.

I just started into "The Island" which reads like the counterpoint to "Brave New World" also written by Huxley. Saying we need it is not enough, because it doesn't get cited even though it exists.

gestures broadly at Star Trek

This is the thing that is so wild to me. Outside of tech, everyone I encounter in day-to-day life intuitively understands that tech dudes inventing AI voices to flirt with them is not awesome or cool.

At this point, I have to assume that being out-of-touch is deliberate branding from OpenAI. Maybe to appeal to equally out-of-touch investors.

It’s the tech (investor) bro appeal

Don't forget Frank Herbert is rolling in his grave, too. Dune's first two books could be called 'Paul is bad' and 'I guess I wasn't clear the first time'.

> but I don't think she has any rights to voices that merely sound like hers

She might!

https://mcpherson-llp.com/articles/voice-misappropriation-in...

Good point and good reference. I see that in the first case Better Miller won a case against Ford motor company who had a "sound-alike" sing one of her songs for a commercial when she refused. The other cases are similar and my reading of the article is that the cases hinged on 1) a deliverate and explicit imitation of the famous voice concerned and 2) the voice in question being quite distinct, such that it would be very unlikely to approximate it by coincidence. In the case at hand here I think a strong argument could be made either way I both of these points and reasonable people will certainly differ.

I agreed with your argument before the latest revelations, so now I want a judge to order OpenAI to get clean, did they do use any second of Scarlet voice ?

Because they could be lying, they could have used a different actress and also mixed some Scarlet voice into the mix.

> but I don't think she has any rights to voices that merely sound like hers, when they're not being used to fraudently imply that she's involved.

IANAL but it's actually not that simple. There are laws and precedents around soundalikes.

I think the cultural defense for this is really lame. Was there really cultural value in evoking "Her"? Because outside of the narcissistic male nerd culture of laughing at your own jokes, and fixating on your own cleverness, there doesn't seem to be. No one outside of this bubble actually thinks it's super cool and culturally valuable for tech companies to attempt reinvent - seemingly without a trace of irony or self-awareness - the cautionary tales and trappings of dystopian sci-fi.

From what I have seen, the demos struck the average person as cringey and left women in particular with a deep sense of revulsion.

This so much

Just to say, I think the demo is lame too, and the film was fine but no Black Mirror. I still think there's cultural value, even if it's not the kind of culture that appeals to me.

Isn't this the 'look and feel' argument?

Especially if you then post references bragging that your thing either is, or is basically the same as, that other thing.

But the clone of her voice IS being used to fraudulently imply that she's involved.

https://x.com/sama/status/1790075827666796666?lang=en

"her" -Sam Altman

No party to this matter has claimed it us a clone of her voice.

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