Scarlett Johansson Said No, but OpenAI's Virtual Assistant Sounds Just Like Her | Hacker News Reader

Scarlett Johansson Said No, but OpenAI's Virtual Assistant Sounds Just Like Her

nytimes.com

31 pointsaxiomdata31626 comments

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40421225

An interesting question is how many distinct voices are there? I think there is a good possibility there may be thousands of people who sound like this.

I'm curious how the legal stuff will play out. They definitely did something that feels wrong. On the other hand, some people make their living impersonating famous actors, voice and all.

And what is the range of "similar enough to", specially for human perception, and I don't mean what our senses get, but our brain does. At least with vision there is a lot fill-in-the-blanks and more processes going on all the time.

I don't mean that it is what it really happened, or the real intentions in this, but setting legal precedents for something that may be pretty fuzzy in real life is dangerous.

That would've made a better case if they hadn't tried to hire ScarJo for this.

This looks like: 1. They wanted ScarJo's voice 2. She said 'No' 3. They then proceeded to ask themselves the question you're asking. "How many different voices are there?"

Alternatively they said "well, we didn't use Her voice."

OpenAI met with "Sky" voice actress in San Francisco in June and July, months before first contacting Scarlett Johansson, perhaps "Sky" voice reminded someone at OpenAI of Scarlett Johansson's voice and that's where the idea of contacting the actress was born.

I think if OpenAI never contacted Scarlett Johansson and Sam Altmam never posted "Her" on Twitter, there wouldn't be any controversy because it wouldn't look like they chose "Sky" voice just because it resembles the actress.

It starts off with, "Days before". However, we all know from her actual post, that it was only "2 days before". While 2 days falls under that, 2 days vs say 6 days make it even more damning. Since it's one day short of being able to say "hours" before. Many regular people may first hear about this through the Times, so wish they would have been more precise with the first word.

In case you’re wondering what Sky sounded like, here’s a recording of Sky being asked questions about Scarlett Johansson.

https://youtu.be/1zoLfQ75QvU?si=6iBLrwTFR4nbqIIw

While it doesn’t sound exactly like her, if I heard this without knowing it was AI I’d have thought it was Scarlett Johansson.

Pretty sure that's the Juniper voice. See the live demo for the new sky voice that is allegedly problematic. Fwiw the client is glitchy when changes voices, so it may have displayed as sky.

It doesn't sound like her at all. People are getting primed hard, or we're doing "all white women sound the same" now.

My immediate thought was that this wasn't ScaroJo but they wanted a voice that sounded like her. Which... No kidding, why do we think she was cast in Her in the first place?

Ha. That's not even the right voice (that is Juniper not Sky) which just goes to show how bad people are at this. Especially since Juniper in this clip absolutely sounds nothing like Scarlett Johansson.

How are you so certain? The voice was only changed 2 days ago.

I think you and several other commenters have totally missed the point. In a causal situation, I’m not going to do a side by side comparison or a spectrogram of the voice. If it sounds like her enough and in the right context, here she’s talking about movies she’s been in, I’m going to be fooled as are most people. Whether the voice is exactly the same is largely irrelevant.

I listen to Juniper all the time and I've listened to the clips of Sky and Scarlett Johansson (as "Her") side-by-side. It's pretty easy to be certain.

> Whether the voice is exactly the same is largely irrelevant.

I find that argument extremely disturbing. The facts are we have a voice that was developed months ago, is a real person, and actually sounds nothing like Scarlett Johansson. The actress is not even doing a Scarlett Johansson impression. It's also just one of many selections. And yet, somehow, a crime has been committed?

That's juniper, here's an example of the Sky voice:

https://youtu.be/jsoUBkYxXpw

1) https://web.archive.org/web/20240521162046/https://www.nytim...

This is the least surprising thing I've seen OpenAI do.

It should be possible to find a voice artist for hire that sounds like Scarlett Johansson in "Her" when you can fingerprint voices, model them, and quantify the differences.

That's literally what they did.

You can’t do that.

Hiring a lookalike or soundalike is already settled case law.

OpenAI made it easy for Scarlet Johansson’s lawyers. They referenced the movie Her multiple times.

It’s a slam dunk if one of open aisle employees mentioned sky sounding like scarlet Johansson as a plus.

It doesn’t sound like her enough. Unless they found something very specific it was clearly just another voice actress that sounds close to her.

It sounds like Rashida Jones.

When I heard the demo, I assumed they licensed her voice until I read the press release.

If you listen to her voice in Her and listen to Sky back to back, they are clearly very different. Scarlett has some raspy tones to her voice that are very distinctive and come through even when she is talking like an AI.

I wonder if people just associate the "talking like an AI" thing to Scarlett and it's not actually her voice that seems familiar.

I didn't think it sounded like her either. This is one of those things you can make it sound like her with a little marketing and branding but I didn't think it sounded like her on a blind listen.

Something very specific like Sam Altman asking to use her voice nine months ago and her saying no, and then him asking again *two days* before the 4o demo, and then on the day of the demo him tweeting the single word "her", the name of the movie where she plays an AI voice?

Its just one voice of several choices, right? I think I would pay to not listen to her. I have no idea why so many people are obsessed with her of all people.

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