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Comment by spiralk | Hacker News Reader

Sky does not really sound like SJ though if you listen side by side. According to OAI's timeline, they intended to have Sky in addition to SJ. OAIs voice models including Sky predate the GPT4o voice assistant. Also:

"In a statement from the Sky actress provided by her agent, she wrote that at times the backlash “feels personal being that it’s just my natural voice and I’ve never been compared to her by the people who do know me closely.”"

It did not seem like an issue before and the Sky voice was public many months before GPT4o. I don't believe SJ can claim to own all young, attractive woman voices whether they are used as a voice assistant or not. It seems like the issue is being blown out of proportion. It does make a good story. The public perception of AI right now is generally negative and people are looking for reasons to disparage AI companies. Maybe there are good reasons sometimes, but this one is not it.

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> It seems like the issue is being blown out of proportion.

It kinda feels like its on purpose. Someone in a previous thread mentioned that this might have been a cynical marketing ploy and I'm warming up to the theory. After they recorded the Sky VA, they figured out a whole marketing campaign with SJ to promote the voice feature. After she turned them down (twice), they released with just enough crumbs referencing the movie to goad SJ into committing a first degree Streisand.

With the slow roll out, everyone would have forgotten about the feature the day after the announcement but now it's been in the news for a week, constantly reminding everyone of what's coming up.

In addition they have prepared for a full court case before hand, with all their ducks in a row in theory. I am not a lawyer so I am not sure if the law works this way but this might help them defend their case and set a precedence.

That sounds plausible actually. The controversy has given OAI free marketing.

Calling it a Streisand on behalf of SJ is wrong though. She wanted it to be a topic of discussion and succeeds with it.

Are we really at a point where tech companies will bait lawsuits just to get more PR? Clearly they need to be smited down to remember why old school companies go out of their way to avoid such possibilities of lawsuits

I'm also curious, legally speaking, is it an issue even if Sky's actress does sound like Scarlett? What if OpenAI admits they intentionally chose someone who sounded like Scarlett? Does it matter whether she was using her natural speaking voice or intentionally mimicking Scarlett's voice and mannerisms?

This seems similar to the latest season of Rick and Morty. Whether justified or not in that particular case, it rubs me the wrong way a bit in principle to think that a production can fire someone only to hire someone else to do a near-perfect copy of their likeness. If (as in the OpenAI case) they'd gone further and trained an AI on the impressions of Justin's voice, would that have been considered an AI impersonation of Justin with extra steps?

All of which is to say, this seems like a pretty interesting legal question to me, and potentially broader than just AI.

The fired actor would have already signed away any claim to the character's likeness. The likeness the company cares about is that of the character, not of the actor portraying the character. The actor never owned the character, so the actor shouldn't be miffed that someone else gets the part for future performances.

That's probably the case. Having said that, there are also a lot of one-off side characters which use Justin's distinctive voice style, although I can't remember specifically whether that was the case in the latest season, and I'm not aware that detailed information about their internal agreements is public knowledge either way. I was speaking more about the general principle, not strictly that particular situation. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like there are some interesting overlapping legal and moral dilemmas in all of the discussions about both situations, regardless of what the specific facts of the OpenAI and R&M cases may be.

Yes, I can see a plausible argument that a character is so intertwined with a well-known real-life persona that a company can't replicate a character without borrowing some of the persona's value. One might also make the case that the actor developed so much depth in an initially thin character that they deserve more credit than just acting the part.

I don't personally subscribe to the notion that the recent legal invention of intellectual property is a moral right. Capitalism has been doing just fine as a productivity motivator. We don't need to capitalize expression of ideas, let alone pure ideas. I accept the tradeoff of the temporary monopolies of copyright and patent, and I appreciate that trademark and trade secrets disincentivize bad behavior. But I have no desire to try to find new boxes to store new kinds of intellectual property, like Scarlett Johansson's right to monopolize performances of a character in an app that remind people of her performance of a character in a movie. Such a kind of property right is not necessary.

See Midler vs Ford, Glover vs Universal or Stefani vs Activision for prior cases in this area. Courts usually side with the person being imitated.

"SJ can't own all female AI voices" is attacking a straw man version of the complaint, which is much narrower. The question is whether OpenAI deliberately fostered the impression of an association between their product and her performance, which she had so far refused.

To your point, there have many female assistant voices on the market, including Sky -- but what might have tripped the line of impersonation was the context this particular one was presented and marketed. I don't know where exactly that line should be, but you can certainly reject this kind of marketing without stifling anybody's legitimate career.

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