> If it turns out to be true though, what they did is a bit scummy, but not dishonest ~and not illegal~, unless you believe that people who sound similar to Scarlett Johansson don't have the same rights to their voice as Johansson does to hers.

I am so sick of reading this shallow dismissal.

It’s a classic bad faith argument where the offender tries to undermine the victims rights by claiming: “in fact I’m really just defending this other persons rights!”

It’s an intentionally obtuse strawman to say “people who sound similar to”.

It’s more than just Johansson’s voice. It’s meant to evoke the character she played in a film.

A performance that she developed and provided for a role for a project she worked on.

You may be unable or unwilling to appreciate that as work, or even hard work, but it is, and this skeezy company knows it too because they were so taken by that performance that they wanted to use it in their product.

I’ll frame it in a way people on this site can understand.

If you steal my code, but have some third party copy it while changing function and variable names(unfortunately exactly what these llms are also doing) and I complain about you doing that, and you say “O, so I guess anyone who writes python doesn’t have the same rights to their own work as you now?!”