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Comment by ApolloFortyNine | Hacker News Reader

I think if SJ went to court and won (though I doubt it'd ever get that far), the precedent would be downright dooming for the entire VA industry. If your voice sounded close to any other major VA, no one would touch you for fear of their liability going through the roof.

It probably could be stretched to musicians as well. Maybe lookalike actors too if we go down that route.

I just can't imagine it'd be a good thing to have your voice be owned by someone else just because they became famous first.

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I disagree with the slippery slope argument here.

Waits won because they were clearly intending to impersonate his voice, while singing his song. Not because a random guy on the radio sounded like him.

Ditto for SJ--there was a clear intent to reproduce her specific voice, based on her role in "Her".

>Ditto for SJ--there was a clear intent to reproduce her specific voice, based on her role in "Her".

Again, there wasn't. An article literally came out today that they had contracted the VA before contacting SJ. [1]

Honestly this argument right here is what the slippery slope argument is all about. If you continue any further, you're just further proving it. They literally didn't even contact SJ before hand.

>while singing his song

You even added this caveat before, its already the slippery slope in action. No song was being sung here.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/05/22/openai-...

Do keep in mind that the supposed soundalike actor they supposedly used for the voice that sounds exactly like SJ is not coming forward at this point to defend their work, and OpenAI refuses to make them available to journalists. It's understandable at this point, but with how duplicitous OpenAI has shown itself to be, I will need proof of their existence beyond just OpenAI saying so.

I'm betting on the actor sounding nothing like SJ at all. Their voice was used as a baseline in the training of the tool, but ultimately it was modified to copy SJ.

If it were me, I would absolutely be unwilling to come forward.

> Do keep in mind that the supposed soundalike actor they supposedly used for the voice that sounds exactly like SJ is not coming forward at this point to defend their work

The potential legal issue is much more about the details of the commercial presentation and marketing of the work by OpenAI than it is about her work itself, beyond whether the work has sufficient similarity to make the particular manner of commercial use a legal issue. There’s nothing for her to defend.

SJ = Scarlett Johansson VA = Voice Actor

Backstory: https://theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/20/chatg...

The funniest thing about the whole affair is that it wouldn't have blown up except for psychological priming. And some people are so blind to this effect that they've formed what's effectively an army on these OpenAI-ScarJo threads.

First, the "Her" reference from OpenAI.

Then ScarJo saying "Hey that sounds like me. Even some of my friends think so."

The voices sound kind of similar in some ways, and dissimilar in other ways. If the voice actor was trying to mimic ScarJo, she didn't do a very good job.

Is a casual reference to the title character exemplifying the same concept, a female-voiced AI, in a movie that won best screenplay at the Academy Awards and Golden Globes, an IP violation? Even if that were the case, it would be a studio matter and not Scarlett's IP.

I am curious why they reached out to ScarJo again 2 days prior, though.

Did they want to use her purely for marketing? That seems doubtful, because they'd have to get movie studio clearance to use "Her" in official marketing.

Did they have a separate model trained on her voice (I wouldn't put this past OpenAI) and were hoping they could get last-minute clearance to use it? This is actually my suspicion. That failed, so they just went with the voice models they already had clearance to use. That's not illegal. It's not even unethical. Anyone can try to train voice models on voice samples they collect. What's a problem is commercial use and representation of likeness.

I don't think a casual reference to Her was a representation that the voice is like ScarJo. It was merely referencing (very effectively) the concept of the movie's always-there [female] AI-voiced AI-chatbot.

That assumes an incredibly slippery slope.

> I just can't imagine it'd be a good thing to have your voice be owned by someone else just because they became famous first.

Are you saying that anyone being able to train generative AI on someone's work or a facsimile to directly compete with them is actually better for commercial artists?

I think what they’re saying is directors of films, commercials, etc. probably at least start with a certain type of voice they’re looking for. And might well communicate that to a casting director by naming some specific actors they’re familiar with.

The country I'm in dubs a lot of usa films. Rambo in another language is hilarious, other actors are played by different VAs so eg schwarzenegger sounds different every film. So sj will be played by many vactresses...In many countries.

This is a great use case. If I were a famous actor, I would require them to take my voice and use AI to translate into another language. They will likely still need another voice actor to have the AI voice follow to get it right. But I would want my voice on every version.

Also, AI to change my lip movement so that it does not look dubbed.

It's seems like the slippery slope argument is saying it would be risky for an AD to say "we need a deep gravelly voice, but more like Donald Sutherland than Robert Loggia. Let's see who we get that has that vibe." I don't see it. What the industry wants to be able to do is say "We want Donald Sutherland but don't want to pay his rates. Let's pay this company that has modeled his voiceover style so we can have our own Donald Sutherland."

I think the Marvin Gaye ruling is concerning, especially because no mere mortal could hope to either launch or defend themselves against such an action. However, I don't think those extremes are a reason to just say "oh well. I guess fair use should apply to nearly all derivative use, even commercially. If that means creativity is only commercially viable for AI companies now, so be it." Professional creative expertise can't be replaced by generative AI, and it's important to or society, but copyright is the only set of guardrails on the only viable market for many creative fields. I'd love to abolish copyright, but first is love to live in a society that could support the millions of people that use it as currency.

> If your voice sounded close to any other major VA, no one would touch you for fear of their liability going through the roof.

That seems to be a leap. It's not at all hard to define a bright line between two people that merely sound the same and inappropriate appropriation. Lots of folks have deep voices similar to James Earl Jones, but if you hire one of them to voice a helmetted character named Tarf Later you'd expect to lose a suit under this statue, right?

The case at hand isn't that Sky sounds like Johansson in the abstract (whose actual voice isn't even all that unique or notable), it's that explicitly evocative of her role in Her, and most damningly that they clearly tried to hire her to do it.

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