Hacker News Reader

Comment by kolinko | Hacker News Reader

They didn’t steal her voice, they paid someone with a similar voice. It’s still not nice, but not stealing.

How do you know that? The timeline of events makes it seem fairly clear that they were in fact using her voice. If it was just a soundalike, why suddenly take it down?

Didn't they also ask for permission from her two days before releasing the voice? Why ask permission if it was not her voice?

They refused to provide documentation of how the voice was trained.

To avoid negative PR and legal risk stemming from confusion

A technical audit would clear that up.

Because the most obvious thing for OpenAI do would be training the voice on Scarlett Johansson's available body of work, from movies, audiobooks, podcasts etc. Why bother hiring a voice actor?

Maybe because you still have to annotate the parts where she speaks.

That's what Whisper's for

Hang on, are you actually suggesting that the hard part for OpenAI is data labeling? Are you arguing from ignorance, or arguing in bad faith?

Well, in general the value is in the data and the silicon.

Anyone can come up with DL networks these days.

Bad faith, then.

They passed off Sky as Johansson’s voice though. It’s highly misleading and passing off is a kind of theft of her persona.

It sounds nothing like johansson, like nothing at all.

https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1cx1np4/voice_...

This whole controversy makes no sense and is obvious that the media is looking for something to attack openai with.

Sounds like they just shifted the voice with some Fast Fourier transforms - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/63339608/change-the-melo...

Indeed. I was looking for a sample this morning and it’s just nonsense. Sounds like a polite American voice actor female. Johansson has many mannerisms and a different accent. Sounds nothing like her.

To my ears it sounds similar but not identical - I can tell which is which.

Apparently they selected the actress from auditions in early 2023, a while before the Johansson timeline.

Of course the OpenAI folk would likely have seen Her and may have selected someone sounding like that.

If you read that thread you will see a link to the sky voice outside of the demo voice which is much closer. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RcgV2u9Kxh0

Using an impersonator is still stealing. There was this Ford case

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

Image rights are complex and separate from stealing.

If they deliberately used an actress that looks like her in an advert. A bit of makeup, a latex mask, digital touch up, full deep fake; at some point most people can no longer tell the difference.

They absolutely stole her voice. I don't know if you're being intentionally naive or you really are this way, but either way you need to stop it.

If you think it sounds similar you need your ears cleaned.

That's weird, because her friends and family thought it sounded like her too.

That's weird, because I didn't know it's impossible for 2 humans from the same country to sound anything alike. (or, what makes a fundamental characteristic of a person? Does it change over time? Can they change it deliberately or is this something that can't change? This whole debate is somewhat pointless without definitions)

You're gaslighting. Sam's "her" tweet was a deliberate reference to Scarlett Johansson's likeness, in marketing the release of this feature. OpenAI approached Johansson directly to obtain permission to use her likeness. Your attempt to make me question the nature of reality itself is pathetic in light of the actions taken by Sam Altman.

Gaslighting is not my intent. I don't believe people should be able to control singular words or letters, I don't believe that any one human is so unique or distinct that one single trait can define them, and I don't believe that humans are all that unique even in the aggregate. If we want to discuss what it means to "use someone's voice", then by all means, let's define our terms and have a productive conversation. They got rebuffed, so they used someone else. If they didn't and still used a voice clone of her utterances, then she has legal recourse. Probably the reason they tried again was to head this situation off at the pass, thus saving the world all the bullshit that has spawned, including this thread. I'm sorry your understanding of the nature of reality itself is so shallow that Sam Altman can nudge it(I recommend staying far away from drugs!). But then again, this whole discussion is about people who I will never meet nor care to meet at all(including you, dear reader!), so from my perspective I may as well be talking about imaginary beings.

Do less acid, read more about legal precedent. Should you ever find yourself in court, let a sober lawyer do the talking.

What does legal precedent have to do in an era of corrupt courts? Or, what if precedent was decided incorrectly initially? There are all kinds of ways whereby legal opinions shift over time. This isn't even analogous to the Bette case, where the song could be claimed to be "anchoring" one's perspective to the famous singer. So, I guess we'll see in the coming days. I'll have popcorn and this thread on speed dial.

If this goes to court (it almost certainly won't, OpenAI has enough money to 100x Johansson's net worth without blinking, unless she's principled enough to establish legal precedent) then we'd see on the order of years, not days.

Finally! We find points of agreement! I knew it was possible

Reply on news.ycombinator.com