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?
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?
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."
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.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_subject_to_plagi...
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.
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.
Aren't they very explicitly not doing that? They're saying it isn't her.
They've lost any argument of coincidence, with just that one tweet…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?”