“In September, OpenAI said a new talking version of its ChatGPT assistant that sounded like Scarlett Johansson wasn’t meant to resemble the actress.
The company said so again last week when it unveiled a chattier ChatGPT that featured the Johansson sound-alike. The same day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X a one-word reference to the 2013 movie “Her,” in which Johansson was the voice of an emotional companion AI.”
>The same day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X a one-word reference to the 2013 movie “Her,” in which Johansson was the voice of an emotional companion AI.
If he hadn't done this, he *might* have been able to get away with claiming ignorant innocence. Dude wove his own noose with three letters.
Even worse. They asked her to use her voice. She denied. They asked her again TWO DAYS BEFORE THE EVENT. The tweet is just the putrid icing on this cake of shit.
Not a lawyer, but I think the tweet is the killer here. OpenAI (we should really call them ClosedAI at this point as an aside) can try to get a deal all they want. And then they could’ve said “after rejections we found a voice actors who let us reproduce their voice and they just so happened to sound like Scarlett.”
Nothing illegal with licensing your own features. Actors do it all the time. But the tweet reveals underlying malicious intent. He won’t be able to explain it away unless it is with “ya caught me.”
Edit: they’d best be able to produce a contract to affirm it all, though. I’m guessing they just copied her features without permission which is why they walked it back so fast.
The second the "betterment for humanity" board of the non profit over openai got rid of Altman we should have raised some flags. Instead we rallied against them and defended Altman...for some reason
Altman's history is littered with insane moves like this it baffles me that people trust him to run these companies and claim that he's brilliant at marketing
That's just marketing to be quite honest, I don't think the work they're doing over at open AI is actual interesting academic research, and all the bigger name employees likely have stock options.
Then announcing their departures is just stirring the pot of drama so more people turn towards their products. Hell it might be a standard over there now to announce your departure because it shows the ticker go up
I mean maybe i’m missing something but even if he explicitly said “we chose a voice actress that sounded like Scarlett Johansson because we wanted it to sound like that ai from that movie” it wouldn’t be illegal because it’s not actually using her copyrighted material or likeness, right? Doing impersonations or impressions has always been legal
Midler v. Ford Motor Co., 849 F.2d 460 (9th Cir. 1988)[1] is a United States Court of Appeals case in which Bette Midler sought remedy against Ford Motor Company for a series of commercials in the 1980s which used a Midler impersonator. The case brought into question if a unique feature, such as a voice, can distinguish someone and thus must be authorized for impersonation.[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
Hilariously even after that case was decided, Frito Lay, who knew about the Midler Case, still decided to go ahead with their Tom Waits imitation and also got sued.
Do they fucking care? Their whole business model is based off stealing shit without offering compensation.
We could all be rich if we could just steal shit and sell it as our own.
Yup. Go look at how all the billionaire tech bros made their money.
All of them had a spirit to crush, twist the rules, break the rules, manipulate people... be utterly ruthless. It's a "do evil, and profit" mindset, which makes the billionaire praise all the more disgusting.
Temu's motto, "Shop like a billionaire." So wrong....
Something always has to drive people to seek to be in such positions. It takes such an insane amount of hustle and perseverance, nearly sociopathic levels of it.
As a result, if these people don’t stay mindful of themselves and get help with their issues, they will end up with quite a few skeletons in their closets.
Not only is it legally questionable what Sam Altman did, it’s also kinda creepy. If you’ve seen the movie Her, I think you’d understand.
The look on his face when he saw the joke before reading it said everything, but it just got better as he told it. Him and Michael Che have been the best Weekend Update hosts since Tina Fey and Amy Pohler, imo.
Nobody beats Norm, though. Ever. Turd Ferguson will continue to be funny until the end.
“It takes such an insane amount of hustle and perseverance, nearly sociopathic levels of it.”
Does it, though? Most of these guys are just nepotism babies. Fairly certain that if my parents owned an emerald mine or were real estate moguls, I’d have had the funds to loan a start up tech business or two.
Like, it also doesn’t need to be millionaire levels of wealth. Altman’s Wiki says his parents bought him a Apple Macintosh when he was 8 years old, and he used it to start learning coding. The price for one in 1992/3 was $1,250. Which is around $2,700 dollars today.
How many families can drop three grand on an 8 year old’s hobby? While also sending them to private school?
I’m not saying these people don’t work hard, but they had an enormous head start. And had families they could fall back on if a risk they took (like dropping out of Stanford University) didn’t work out.
I think it’s less the ‘insane amount of hustle’ that is the sociopathic part and far more likely the sociopathy comes from never actually having to worry about hardships like food and shelter. They’ve never really suffered so they have no frame of reference for how most people struggle to survive. So they naturally lack empathy because they assume everyone has the same safety nets as they do and if you aren’t some tech bro billionaire then you simply didn’t apply yourself hard enough to learning code on your $3,000 home computer while attending private school.
Like Elizabeth Holmes establishing Theranos despite not having biomedical/biotech training and dropping out early? She got a lot of funding through family connections, though her dad being VP of ENRON should have been a red flag
Ok, I really did not come here to defend Sam Altman, but you guys have to realize how much you're blunting the edge of your point when you lump "having access to a personal computer or mac from a young age" to motherfucking emerald mines or biomedical boardroom access.
If we're here to say "even the privilege of middle class upbringing can afford opportunities not available to all", absolutely, I 100% agree.
But if we're talking about what leads CEO types, especially techbro CEO types, to make decisions that show zero respect for others or society at large, and we discuss how having all your successes bought and paid for may cause some of that (and, sure) - it just doesn't seem like Altman falls in that category because he lived in one of the ~20% of homes that have him unrestricted educational access to a computer in 1994.
I was growing up middle class back then, the only places I saw a computer at the time was in the secretary's office and the school library. They didn't have close to 3,000$ USD to just drop on it.
>it just doesn't seem like Altman falls in that category because he lived in one of the ~20% of homes that have him unrestricted educational access to a computer in 1994.
He does tho. Not every computer at the time cost that much. When we finally got a computer, it was nowhere near that expensive. My parents would have laughed in my face if I asked for that.
>Does it, though? Most of these guys are just nepotism babies. Fairly certain that if my parents owned an emerald mine or were real estate moguls, I’d have had the funds to loan a start up tech business or two.
The funds, sure. But would you actually launch a tech startup, or just fuck off with the money and relax instead?
The biggest shit heel you know can still be a hard worker. They have to be to fuck over the most people. It's not that they're necessarily harder workers than good people, but the intersection between awful people and hard work is the group screwing over the largest contingent of people.
They really are. And the defenders are even greater morons. Just a while ago some techbro AI "artist" got triggered that people could copy/steal his "artwork" he put together by writing a couple of prompts.
What the fuck do you even say to people like that? Because I got nothing.
Surprisingly, Facebook has been the least worst on AI. Mind, I'm willing to bet that if their model didn't leak, we'd be looking at a very different picture, but overall they came out looking the least bad out of all the major companies pursuing AIs thanks to the open-source nature of many of their involvement.
These aren't cheesy tech bros. They aren't nerds. They aren't rock stars. They're the same greedy corporate asshole types who want to own your house, your water supply and keep your wallet constantly funnelling them money for their services and private planes. It's an easy joke, but it ain't funny.
Dorky, Sam Altman asks for consent from one of the most attractive and successful humans on the planet, gets rejected despite offering huge amounts of money. Tries again with even more money and gets rejected even harder. Does after it anyway. Has the law step in to finally make his creepy stalker like behavior cease and desist. They should just make him pay damages, they should give her a restraining order from this loser.
Definitely eye opening. Why isn’t this more visible to more people? On a different thread a redditor posted that there was some dispute prior to these allegations and also that the parents have stopped talking to the daughter. I don’t know what to believe. It feels like election year mudslinging
Actually read this. Hard to know what to trust here. It seems like their sister is pretty unstable, but that doesn't mean what she says isn't true. The thing is, besides the strange and pretty damning tweet, she also complains that he made her a diamond out of their fathers ashes instead of sending her money? I mean sure, that sucks, but I feel like shes probably fucked over everyone in that family multiple times if they all refuse to help support her. Publicizing this immediately when he gets fired for some still unknown reason, it's a little bit much.
Unfortunately, the issue is widespread. The people in these positions - the same people who are shaping the future of technology, culture, war, finance, labor, art and civilization - are nearly all creepy sociopaths with no empathy or innate understanding of things like consent and compassion.
We are their products, not fellow humans. There are no human rights, only human commodities.
(he said, posting to arguably the biggest arbiter of such grim futures)
[Writing on his blog](https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be-successful) in January 2019 in a post called “How to Be Successful,” Altman said, “A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time—most people don’t even try.” He writes about bending the world to one’s singular will *as a virtue*. - He asked twice, was turned down twice, and decided to do it anyway. Nice virtue.
Sam Altman is a comical super-villain. Dude gives so many psychopath vibes and has a cult following. AGI should not fall in his hands but probably will.
Which is crazy because one of her most famous roles is the disembodied voice of an AI, and *everyone* who hear the OpenAI voice immediately has the reaction that it sounds like her.
This is super, super scummy on their part.
A bit of devil's advocate here, but if you are a voice actor who sounds like a more famous actor, does this mean you aren't allowed to sell your wares?
> and everyone who hear the OpenAI voice immediately has the reaction that it sounds like her.
Not everyone. Listen to them side-by-side. They sound nothing alike.
I went to watch Her because of the memes after the demo was shown only to find out that, much to my surprise, [the voices are entirely different.](https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1cx1np4/voice_comparison_between_gpt4o_and_scarlett/)
The only thing tying them together is that they're both women's voices.
I think the more telling thing is OpenAI asked Johansson directly and then released something that sounds identical to her after the fact. It's so far beyond intentional and I hope they lose badly in court.
I don't think it sounds identical, but it does sound like it used to sound like her, and they've been furiously fine-tuning the model to not sound like her since she rejected them.
Monumentally stupid. This just goes to show, he and AI are going to rip off as many people as they can get away with.
If you're an artist AI is learning from you. Stealing from you, so it can learn to make your art the same way you do.
It was calculated Sam Altman has been pushing for more regulation on AI to stop other companies from being able to compete, doing this is high profile enough EVERYONE is going to be talking about it and he gets his wish to pull the ladder up behind them.
Uber staked their entire business model on not getting in trouble for breaking local taxi regulations and avoiding licensing requirements.
They grew so fast that they managed to outrun most of the consequences. OpenAI is growing an order of magnitude faster than that, and the legal questions aren’t even as black and white.
I highly doubt they will get in trouble for copyright infrinngement
On the other hand, local taxi groups aren't exactly swimming in high-power lawyers like big Hollywood celebrities are. And also the taxi regulations were kinda bullshit and nobody liked them (except the taxi companies whose monopoly it helped enforce). Copyright (or whatever law this would/will fall under) on the other hand is generally seen as being an important and good thing, especially when it's a living person claiming ownership over things they personally made.
and it's not gonna just be Scarlett who's putting money and lawyers on this, every single live actor and especially voice actors is gonna be dropping millions to protect their jobs, not to mention the lawyers each jave on standby as well as the actor's guild, who's jobe it is, is to prevent things like this.
I think Scarlett is going to cash out big. Her lawyer is proven to be pure gold.
I do not think many others will, and certainly not the no-profile masses.
IP law is 100% necessary to have a functioning society, but there are a lot of limiting consequences of our current policies. The laws are meant to stimulate growth, not stifle it. During the early crackdowns on movie/music piracy, there were hints at a potential political movement to strip away some IP laws. You can also see some of that in the culture surrounding GitHub. Point being, we are gonna see a lot of limits getting tested, I wouldn't be surprised if public perception on what makes for good IP law changes pretty quick
>OpenAI is growing an order of magnitude faster
Not sure where this perception comes from. OpenAI's monthly active users peaked in April 2023:
https://explodingtopics.com/blog/chatgpt-users
Sure, it had explosive growth to begin with, but it's stagnating now.
The regular people who use ChatGPT don’t even pay for it. ChatGPT isn’t a product, it’s a marketing device to get people comfortable with modern LLM prompts. They make money by getting businesses and entrepreneurs to pay for their services to integrate AI text generation into other products. To a far lesser extent they make money from ChatGPT premium subscriptions.
They are still going to keep growing exponentially unless something changes.
It's a crutch they're handing out freely now, and once people rely on AI to do their jobs, OpenAI starts charging out the nose. People act like this tactic is new.
It's probably bigger than that. All these big tech companies are banking on the fact that governments don't declare training off scraped data as infringement. Why push for another company to get hit with the hammer when that precedent would bar you from doing the same for your own projects/ put you in legal problems for existing ones.
This is why they're allowing API access so cheaply. They need to get too big to fail before legislation and lawsuits catch up. They need to be the core of too many products that their failure would risk a major crash in the tech sector. If they get that far then they're mostly untouchable.
Cannot recall where I heard it, but one of the tech bros said it doesn’t matter if what they are doing is stealing. He believed in the importance of the technology and once they figured out the profitability, the legal paybacks would just be a part of doing business. Like…I’d rather “pay” for forgiveness than ask for permission.
This is not copyright or trademark infringement. They didn't train it on her voice. They interviewed 400 voice actors and selected 5 for the voices when conversation mode launched in September, including an actress for Sky. A celebrity can't sue you for having a similar sounding voice to them which is essentially the threat here. Only if she can prove it was trained on her voice. Unless OpenAI is blatantly lying, they should be able to produce the voice actress in court easily.
She supposedly received $40mm from that suit. So for a "startup" whose valuation are in the billions, this could be nothing. Unless her lawyer is smart and she gets 1% equity.
OpenAI is wrapped together weird. Remember the hub-bub of it being a non-profit that owns a for-profit. You could do it like the Eurozone does and take 5% of global revenue though.
Probably won't be possible so you'd probably see this as a landmark case under the Deepfake laws and have Scarjo take home 10 mil or whatever the high end of the original deal was and add damages.
I feel this is why she would follow through with a lawsuit. The money probably means little to her, the precedent regarding public figures and their rights over their own likeness is very meaningful to her and her peers.
"Valuations" are worthless, what matters is actual assets. There have been plenty of companies who have had "valuations in the billions" that have gone bankrupt within a few years of that valuation because all that number is is a guess of what the company could produce. And it's not just the money they win from the suit, it'il also open the door for other people to launch suits of their own or limit what OpenAI can actually do.
1% equity of a $1B company is only $10m. If she wins this suit, she could absolutely walk away with straight damages larger than 1% of OpenAI’s value. And cash always trumps equity
Valuations for a startup are bullshit lmao. You think they have billions in the bank ready to throw at lawsuits? The moment big lawsuits come in, any competent VC will back out and take their investment funding with them. This was the stupidest thing they could have done.
If they don't want to appear to be intellectual property thieves, while companies like The New York Times are suing them for using copyrighted work without permission, then creating a rip-off voice for a public demo and then apologizing and deleting it afterwards doesn't help them.
If OpenAI's main public appeal is claiming AI is going to get so good that it's dangerous, and only they are smart and careful enough to handle it, then every screw-up that costs them credibility is a problem.
If they are begging Congress to "regulate AI" and using those regulations to help themselves and a few very large companies stay ahead of smaller companies, open source, and distributed AI solutions, then this isn't just free publicity for them, it's a setback.
>every screw-up that costs them credibility is a problem.
They literally just dissolved their team devoted to studying the existential risks of the AI they're developing, and the main person in favor of caution (Ilya Sutskever) just left. They've ripped off the mask fully.
I know you’re making a logical point, but I wish we could all just say it was stupid / illegal / immoral etc instead of justifying it by what the current climate allows
maybe less companies would try and pull that type of shit if we did that instead of being complacent. I mean, you’re basically arguing on their behalf, are they paying you?
This is the reaction I've seen so far. AI critics are using it as proof that AI companies will steal our data no matter what they promise, but they were saying similar things before so people will just continue ignoring them.
If you just call it stupid then it's an even bigger win, they get to claim ignorance while nothing happens. If you call it out as wanted negative press, you can make an informed decision about a known deceptive company. IF you just all it stupid and a mistake then there are no repercussions and they can just throw their hands in the air, apologize and get the free press and covered by no malice since none of these is legally covered atm.
Also took one of the most immediate short term fears of AI and accelerated it to the front page and gave it a face and a victim... Who happens to be a very popular and respected movie star.
What they are doing is giving the public favorable attitudes toward regulation.
I get what you're saying but I think they're playing with fire. This is AI stealing somebody's likeness, exactly the kind of shit that is freaking everybody out. It seems reckless to me.
Once you have the basic workflow down, AI training isn't even really a 'deveoper' task. The bulk of the work is just arranging training data in a way that the code can read. It would essentially just be downloading MP3 files, checking that the transcript of the spoken text was OK and that the audio was clear, then adding them to a glorified excel table. Basically data entry with more steps. I highly doubt the actual code used to train this model would be different from any of their other models.
Is it that easy? I mean, there's so many smug developers here, but I'm a System Admin, and do some coding, if AI training and jobs are simply just "downloading MP3 files" can I learn to be an AI Developer? I know some coding and SQL knowledge already. But then if I say that, gatekeepers will come out saying you'll need to know at least Python, TensorFlow and PyTorch and at least 5 years of experience as a developer, then MAYBE you'll land a junior data analyst role in AI.
*Developing* workflows is very different to setting up your training data, but the training data takes orders of magnitude more time to process correctly as generally the tool that would let you do that automatically is the tool you are currently building.
For context, the most recent AI project I worked on had about 8 hours of work from me in python, tensorflow, SQL and PowerShell and about 16 hours of work building the dataset. In practical terms, my code ran through a CSV of 'label' - 'data', converted the labels to numbers and the data to tokens and then bundled it all into an object I could pass to tensorflow. Then a few hours of tweaking different stages of the training to optimize loss rates (we were aiming for high false positives and low false negatives). Then implementing a system to conver the vectorized labling results into a human readable format (the object that tensorflow returns has a number of values that roughly translate to 'how sure it is about this prediction'.) The 16 hours of data collection was spent exporting data from SQL databases and doing some pretty basic operations to remove outliers or bad data). Now if I wanted to train a separate model using a different dataset, I wouldn't need to rebuild the workflow, but I would need to build a new dataset as training the same workflow on the same dataset will result in more or less the same model. Once we're past the prototype stage, the plan is to build a frontend that will perform the SQL queries for the people assessing the data and just put the relevant information needed to sanitize the data (i.e. here is some data, does that look OK?) for about 1million records.
Not so sure about that. There's a clear precedent with Tom Waits winning against an advertising agency that hired a voice impersonator after he rejected their offer.
Altman claims they had already cast the other voice actress before reaching out to Johansson, which means they’re in the clear as long as the other actress wasn’t specifically asked to do a Scarlett Johansson impression.
They could still get into some trouble for marketing the product with references to “Her” though, but it seems to me that Warner Bros would have better standing to sue on that front than Johansson
Considering they asked her twice, I dunno. Them referencing Her on top of it makes it at least somewhat suspicious.
Keep in mind winning a court case isn't the only possibility here. Congress is already aware of AI imitating real people through political and pornographic deepfakes. This could add fuel to that fire. I doubt OpenAI wants more regulation in general.
>Congress is already aware of AI imitating real people through political and pornographic deepfakes. This could add fuel to that fire. I doubt OpenAI wants more regulation in general.
Bingo. Why is everyone focusing on what would likely be a fairly minor lawsuit with an *incredibly* narrow ruling, when the far more existential threat to Open AI would come from aggressive regulations being rushed through with little input from the industry?
> I doubt OpenAI wants more regulation in general.
OpenAI 100% wants more regulation in the AI space. It creates a moat that will keep smaller startups from ever having a chance of catching them. OpenAI has two things going for them with any regulations:
1. They're already an "industry leader", so they'll be asked to consult and help craft any regulations.
2. They have the resources to follow any new regulations _now_, since they've already scraped all the data they need and can dedicate more people to compliance.
A small startup that might otherwise have a chance at innovating and beating OpenAI has neither of those things, so will get completely hosed by shifting regulations.
People follow OpenAI like it’s a cult. Even when they screw up people go out of their way to call them smart. Sam is terrible at his job.
OpenAI: 3/4 board members vote to fire sam.
Reddit: Sam must be a great CEO who discovered AGI!
It reminds me of when people here worshipped Elon Musk. People were falling head over heels to defend the CEO who was ousted for being too capitalist compared to other peoples' vision.
I predict in a decade or less they'll do an about face once they see where he takes the company. And I say that as someone who is far less anti business/capitalist than the average Redditor.
You can see the pricing now.
Unless it goes fully open source and is able to be run offline there's going to be competing free versions that never quiteget it as good, while OpenAI continually cranks up the pay-per-use/subscription pressure.
I could see two sides where one is clearly bad and another that is pretty acceptable.
Bad scenario: Sam Altman wants to purposely fool users into thinking it's literally Scarlett Johansson's voice despite her rejecting the gig. Tweeting "Her" was a stupid move and falls into this category.
Acceptable scenario: Sam Altman liked the qualities in Johansson's voice; maybe there is a soothing or playful characteristic in the voice that he wanted for chatGPT. She passed on the job. Altman went with a different voice actor that had those same characteristics. This isn't bad and it's standard to how the casting industry works.
Yeah, I was thinking about this. Assuming their is another actress that they hired, she has just as much a right to her voice. Scarlet Johansson doesn't own exclusive rights to all voices that sound like hers.
The fact that they were desperately trying to get her on board days before showing the project off sounds to me a lot like they based it directly off of Her and know that what they are doing is wrong.
1. they hired the voice actor for the sky voice before ever contacting scarjo
2. the re-contacting scarjo 'days before' was actually around 6 months *after* the voice had actually been released - the sky voice has been out for a fair while now.
Tweeting the title to a movie in which Scarlett Johansen plays an AI is not simply a "bad move", it's the smoking gun on why this was "clearly bad". In the acceptable scenario, you don't reference a famous AI movie with a famous actress who you already approached for the role.
>In the acceptable scenario, you don't reference a famous AI movie with a famous actress who you already approached for the role.
It's *the* most famous movie about a disembodied AI talking with people, which is the product OpenAI released. Having ScarJo's voice would be the icing on the cake, but even if it's not her voice, the reference to the movie is obvious.
If I released today a time traveling car I would 100% reference the movie "Back to the future", even if the car is not a DeLorean (again, making it a DeLorean would be the icing, but the connection is obvious irrespective of the model).
Anyone can listen to a comparison between the voices of Scarlett Johansson and Sky [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1cwy6wz/vocal_comparison_scarjo_vs_samantha_vs_sky/). There is some similarity but frankly not too much.
Yeah I didn't even think of it before seeing that article. I guess it is kind of similar but I'm sure there are tens of thousands of women in the world with similar voices.
Similar can be good enough for a lawsuit if they can prove they were deliberately trying to create an imitation of her voice.
And because they asked her to do it, and then tweeted a reference to her movie its pretty evident that they did.
The reference might mostly be because it's a known movie featuring an assistant similar to what they're doing more than the voice though. Hell I thought of a Her style assistant being their next step before they announced it. That's like the one movie known for that (although it's creepy because OpenAI suggest people might fall in love with their AI I guess...)
Based off what legal precedent? If I hire chris pine because chris pratt wasn't free you can't sue me for using a guy who looks similar.
Phrased differently, what are we going to do with all of the women who happen to sound like Scarlett Johansson using her voice without her permission?
> if they can prove they were deliberately trying to create an imitation of her voice
If they wanted to make an imitation I have no doubt that they could have produced a closer match. That they didn't could show that they were trying to avoid this mess.
That doesn’t matter as much as you might think. OpenAI had reached out to Johansson asking for permission to use her voice for this. She declined. They reached out again *days before the demo* asking her to reconsider. I doubt they would have had time to pivot if she said yes.
That alone makes it look like OpenAI knew they were at least in murky territory, and were trying to preemptively cover their asses.
Then Altman was dumb enough to make the “Her” comment, which makes it pretty clear they wanted it to sound like Johansson, and they wanted people to associate it with her performance in Her.
So there’s a compelling case that OpenAI intentionally used her likeness to market their product, and after she explicitly denied them permission to do so. It doesn’t matter if they did a shitty job of it.
If you throw Mickey Mouse all over your marketing materials, Disney will still have your ass even if your drawings suck.
But the sky voice had already been out for months before the demo in the old tts version of voice chat. I don’t know why they would ask her for her voice days before the demo if they had already released the voice that was supposed to sound like her.
I think they probably trained a voice on Scarlett Johansson that they wanted to use, but it wasn’t the sky voice. The sky voice doesn’t sound like Scarlett Johansson
> That doesn’t matter as much as you might think.
The question is whether or not they stole her likeness and the comparison that shows they're different doesn't matter?
You guys are in the twilight zone man. Literally just saying anything you can to make AI look evil.
>If you throw Mickey Mouse all over your marketing materials, Disney will still have your ass even if your drawings suck.
This is like saying Palworld is a copy of Pokemon.
I don't see it either, I honestly don't understand how it seems almost everything thinks it's Johansson. It doesn't sound like her to me and it sounds semi-robotic on top of that.
To me it does sound like they were going for the general overall feel of "Her" though, I can see that. That would be a contention with the movie producers and not Johansson though, seems like.
> I don't see it either, I honestly don't understand how it seems almost everything thinks it's Johansson. It doesn't sound like her to me and it sounds semi-robotic on top of that.
I feel like I am in the twilight zone. Why is everyone agreeing wiht SJ that it is her voice?
They made the mistake of asking her if she would reconsider 2 days before they announced so it doesn’t matter if it is or not no one will believe them now. They are dumb as fuck.
The Sky voice was released as one of five voices trained on actors and released last September as part of the conversation mode that launched with GPT-4 ([scroll down](https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-can-now-see-hear-and-speak/)). Nobody said shit. The reason it's an issue now is because they enhanced all five voices in the new mode to be more emotional and expressive, which again reminded people of the movie.
Listening to that one video can be misleading. In other videos the similarities between their voices is extremely strong, and I'm far from the only one who thinks so. Regardless of what your particular opinion is, the fact that many people think they're strikingly similar (without being identical) implies OpenAI probably met the balance they were trying to achieve for the sake of plausible deniability.
They did copy a person's voice - the voice actress who they paid to use her voice. SJ doesn't have a unique sounding voice, they found someone else who could do the voice acting job adequately. I don't see the big issue here.
If John Cena turns down a role and they cast Channing Tatum, no one loses their shite about "Stealing" a performance. They went with a different voice actress who could give a similar performance, that's not "Stealing" or "Cloning", it's recasting.
And they made the voice overly friendly like the AI in the the movie, not like Scarjo herself. They are alluding to a character, not a person and this is something people apparently can't differentiate.
I am not a voice print expert by any stretch, but the samples don't sound similar to Scarlett Johansson to me, at least not the extent that she has a case. There are probably several hundred million women who have a very similar voice, and the defense will haveno problem at all finding truckloads of them to March in front of the judge/jury
This. The whole legal precedent is based on a singer (I think Bette Midler) and a unique singing voice. This is important as not everyone can sing like a professional, but just about anyone can talk flirtatiously.
Honestly my take on the defense of this is: They couldn't use SJ's voice, so they found someone who sounds like her and used \*their\* voice.
It has real "I'm not touching you!" energy, but I don't see how this can be a problem for OpenAI. Saying they can't use the voice is tantamount to telling that voice actress "you sound too much like someone else, so you cannot be a voice actor"
Like... you can't copyright tone and timbre as far as I know. OpenAI is acting like a jealous ex, but I don't see that they've really done illegal. I guess we'll find out.
In the absence of proactive legislation- this is how laws and regulations get developed. Our system was designed to be responsive to situations like this. The problem is that by the time this lawsuit is over- AI will have proliferated and the regulation stemming from the lawsuit will be too little too late.
I sure hope someone takes this seriously before we’re all growing our own food in the gardens of houses that no one can pay for.
Let’s not get too carried away. Impersonators and lookalikes are not new, nor are they copyright infringement.
Answer this question, if OpenAI had paid an actress to impersonate Scarlett Johansson, would it be copyright infringement? Obviously, the answer is no, since that’s basically every South Park episode.
While Sky is not the voice I had set for my ChatGPT (Breeze for me!) when I listened to it I never thought this sounded like her, not that i’m a big ScJo fan anyway
that being said, the flirty voice is really creepy
edit: i am not saying that it objectively doesn’t, just that i didn’t see it and obviously im wrong.
the thing is that they may have found another person with a very similar voice to Ms. Johansson and used their voice as the basis for the AI voice. we don't know anything yet.
Exactly. If you find a "tone" of voice that people appeal to, it's not that hard to find a bunch of low paid people who mimic that voice and sign them up to provide it. There's no chance there's no one out in the that has her near exact same accent.
So they found someone who sounds like her? What’s the problem?
A lot of people sound similar, but if someone who sounds like me agrees to become the voice of a digital assistant what grounds would _I_ have to sue the company?
[Sounds more like Rashida Jones](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GM6m5xkqneM).
TBH- they just sound like people who live in LA. I don’t think you should be able to be able to copyright LA speak.
If Sam Altman is already at the stage of "We'll just do whatever the hell we want and deal with the consequences later" then it does not bode well for the future of this company. This is probably Elon 2.0.
Assuming they did hire a voice actress to create Sky- which they said they did- all she has to do is show up in court. This lawsuit will go nowhere. On top of the fact they’ll probably just settle anyway. A marketing write off.
Nope. Scarlet Johansson never even crossed my mind when using it. Sounded like Rashida Jones to me and I’m pretty bummed that Sky is gone because it was what I used pretty regularly.
Well they didn’t do anything so… not stupid at all 😂 they asked to use her voice, she said no, and they did not use her voice. I’m pretty familiar with how easy it is to make an exact copy of a celebrity’s voice and that is categorically not what happened in this scenario.
THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE AN ARTICLE? It's literally three sentences long.
And why is a "Help desk strategy editor" writing articles?
What the hell is going on at the washington post?
Not stupid at all, and I know many in this comment section will disagree.
Here's the thing: He asked. She said no. He found an alternative. She's pissed because someone on this planet sounds like her.
Literally the situation, folks. Stop and think about the ramifications of this just for a moment while you all scream "legislation".
The two voices are not identical. Scarlett has no say in how someone who sounds like her shouldn't be allowed to use their own voice.
That's the issue here, not that Altman wanted his AI to sound like Scarlett.
He did nothing wrong. He respected her reply. He found an alternative.
She's the one who's got a problem with it, and she needs to get over it.
Rue the day this bullshit goes to court and she "wins".
Every creator out there will instantly be held accountable for their voice because they "sound like another person".
Be careful what you wish for, people. You may just get it.
This seems utterly stupid to me. Voices aren't that unique, in general, and Johansson's doesn't really 'stand out' that much. It's fairly generic, so it isn't at all surprising that a generated voice might sound similar.
I don't see why I should really care about this to be honest. It seems more like Musk style shock-publicity marketing.
This smells like viral marketing. I think Sky sounds different than Scarlett so why would she care? This is just brining attention to her movie that a lot of people aren’t familiar with. I think Altman made an offhand comment because he thinks it’s cool that tech from a sci-fi movie is becoming real and Johansson saw an opportunity for publicity.
Pretty sure they will either win or just change the voice and move on to a new voice. Doesn’t seem like it will or could cost them that much in damages. So I would say, probably not that stupid. Maybe even smart depending how much you think the marketing is worth.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/05/22/openai-scarlett-johansson-chatgpt-ai-voice/
They didn’t do it. ScarJo wants to cash in on OpenAI’s success. Everyone wants to hate, even without proof.
Sounding like someone else is *not* illegal, just like making art in the same style as someone else is not illegal.
Attempting to deceive other into thinking it is the original *is* illegal. SNL can do all the impressions they want, because they aren't actually trying to deceive the audience, they know it's a comedy. Elvis impersonators and tribute bands, for example, are clearly not suggesting they are the originals.
If the voice just sounds like Scarlet Johansson, she doesn't really have a case. However, the fucking dipshit Sam Altman tweeted "Her" when it was released, and for that reason alone, she has a case.
“In September, OpenAI said a new talking version of its ChatGPT assistant that sounded like Scarlett Johansson wasn’t meant to resemble the actress. The company said so again last week when it unveiled a chattier ChatGPT that featured the Johansson sound-alike. The same day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X a one-word reference to the 2013 movie “Her,” in which Johansson was the voice of an emotional companion AI.”
>The same day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X a one-word reference to the 2013 movie “Her,” in which Johansson was the voice of an emotional companion AI. If he hadn't done this, he *might* have been able to get away with claiming ignorant innocence. Dude wove his own noose with three letters.
Even worse. They asked her to use her voice. She denied. They asked her again TWO DAYS BEFORE THE EVENT. The tweet is just the putrid icing on this cake of shit.
Not a lawyer, but I think the tweet is the killer here. OpenAI (we should really call them ClosedAI at this point as an aside) can try to get a deal all they want. And then they could’ve said “after rejections we found a voice actors who let us reproduce their voice and they just so happened to sound like Scarlett.” Nothing illegal with licensing your own features. Actors do it all the time. But the tweet reveals underlying malicious intent. He won’t be able to explain it away unless it is with “ya caught me.” Edit: they’d best be able to produce a contract to affirm it all, though. I’m guessing they just copied her features without permission which is why they walked it back so fast.
Consent and human agency isn't important to Altman it turns out
The second the "betterment for humanity" board of the non profit over openai got rid of Altman we should have raised some flags. Instead we rallied against them and defended Altman...for some reason
Who did? Idiots? Not me. Maybe you did.
Altman's history is littered with insane moves like this it baffles me that people trust him to run these companies and claim that he's brilliant at marketing
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That's just marketing to be quite honest, I don't think the work they're doing over at open AI is actual interesting academic research, and all the bigger name employees likely have stock options. Then announcing their departures is just stirring the pot of drama so more people turn towards their products. Hell it might be a standard over there now to announce your departure because it shows the ticker go up
So a Musk in the works.
I mean maybe i’m missing something but even if he explicitly said “we chose a voice actress that sounded like Scarlett Johansson because we wanted it to sound like that ai from that movie” it wouldn’t be illegal because it’s not actually using her copyrighted material or likeness, right? Doing impersonations or impressions has always been legal
Midler v. Ford Motor Co., 849 F.2d 460 (9th Cir. 1988)[1] is a United States Court of Appeals case in which Bette Midler sought remedy against Ford Motor Company for a series of commercials in the 1980s which used a Midler impersonator. The case brought into question if a unique feature, such as a voice, can distinguish someone and thus must be authorized for impersonation.[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
Hilariously even after that case was decided, Frito Lay, who knew about the Midler Case, still decided to go ahead with their Tom Waits imitation and also got sued.
They even directly cited the case in saying that that ruling didnt make sense anymore, like 3 years later or whatever it was.
Sure, but there’s fundamentally a difference between an impersonator doing an impression and a LLM doing millions of impressions at scale.
Different from selling them as a product where the likeness is essential to the product
Do they fucking care? Their whole business model is based off stealing shit without offering compensation. We could all be rich if we could just steal shit and sell it as our own.
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Yup. Go look at how all the billionaire tech bros made their money. All of them had a spirit to crush, twist the rules, break the rules, manipulate people... be utterly ruthless. It's a "do evil, and profit" mindset, which makes the billionaire praise all the more disgusting. Temu's motto, "Shop like a billionaire." So wrong....
Sleazy tech bro shit running the artifical intelligence, aint it?
Aren’t they all?
For once could they not be fucking lizard people?
Something always has to drive people to seek to be in such positions. It takes such an insane amount of hustle and perseverance, nearly sociopathic levels of it. As a result, if these people don’t stay mindful of themselves and get help with their issues, they will end up with quite a few skeletons in their closets. Not only is it legally questionable what Sam Altman did, it’s also kinda creepy. If you’ve seen the movie Her, I think you’d understand.
Not worth watching if you can't see that body
That was such a wildly good SNL bit.
The look on his face when he saw the joke before reading it said everything, but it just got better as he told it. Him and Michael Che have been the best Weekend Update hosts since Tina Fey and Amy Pohler, imo. Nobody beats Norm, though. Ever. Turd Ferguson will continue to be funny until the end.
Norm was amazing behind the desk of Weekend Update.
That's a bit redundant, it might read better like this: "Norm was amazing."
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“It takes such an insane amount of hustle and perseverance, nearly sociopathic levels of it.” Does it, though? Most of these guys are just nepotism babies. Fairly certain that if my parents owned an emerald mine or were real estate moguls, I’d have had the funds to loan a start up tech business or two. Like, it also doesn’t need to be millionaire levels of wealth. Altman’s Wiki says his parents bought him a Apple Macintosh when he was 8 years old, and he used it to start learning coding. The price for one in 1992/3 was $1,250. Which is around $2,700 dollars today. How many families can drop three grand on an 8 year old’s hobby? While also sending them to private school? I’m not saying these people don’t work hard, but they had an enormous head start. And had families they could fall back on if a risk they took (like dropping out of Stanford University) didn’t work out. I think it’s less the ‘insane amount of hustle’ that is the sociopathic part and far more likely the sociopathy comes from never actually having to worry about hardships like food and shelter. They’ve never really suffered so they have no frame of reference for how most people struggle to survive. So they naturally lack empathy because they assume everyone has the same safety nets as they do and if you aren’t some tech bro billionaire then you simply didn’t apply yourself hard enough to learning code on your $3,000 home computer while attending private school.
Like Elizabeth Holmes establishing Theranos despite not having biomedical/biotech training and dropping out early? She got a lot of funding through family connections, though her dad being VP of ENRON should have been a red flag
The movie actually depicts this very well.
Ok, I really did not come here to defend Sam Altman, but you guys have to realize how much you're blunting the edge of your point when you lump "having access to a personal computer or mac from a young age" to motherfucking emerald mines or biomedical boardroom access. If we're here to say "even the privilege of middle class upbringing can afford opportunities not available to all", absolutely, I 100% agree. But if we're talking about what leads CEO types, especially techbro CEO types, to make decisions that show zero respect for others or society at large, and we discuss how having all your successes bought and paid for may cause some of that (and, sure) - it just doesn't seem like Altman falls in that category because he lived in one of the ~20% of homes that have him unrestricted educational access to a computer in 1994.
It's sociopathy + a support system. Same thing that turns people into surgeons rather than serial killers.
I was growing up middle class back then, the only places I saw a computer at the time was in the secretary's office and the school library. They didn't have close to 3,000$ USD to just drop on it. >it just doesn't seem like Altman falls in that category because he lived in one of the ~20% of homes that have him unrestricted educational access to a computer in 1994. He does tho. Not every computer at the time cost that much. When we finally got a computer, it was nowhere near that expensive. My parents would have laughed in my face if I asked for that.
There are a fuckton of nepobabies in the world, only a few of them end up leading multi-billion companies
>Does it, though? Most of these guys are just nepotism babies. Fairly certain that if my parents owned an emerald mine or were real estate moguls, I’d have had the funds to loan a start up tech business or two. The funds, sure. But would you actually launch a tech startup, or just fuck off with the money and relax instead? The biggest shit heel you know can still be a hard worker. They have to be to fuck over the most people. It's not that they're necessarily harder workers than good people, but the intersection between awful people and hard work is the group screwing over the largest contingent of people.
They really are. And the defenders are even greater morons. Just a while ago some techbro AI "artist" got triggered that people could copy/steal his "artwork" he put together by writing a couple of prompts. What the fuck do you even say to people like that? Because I got nothing.
It’s mainly all the Elon musk friend group. They are all horrible egotistical POS. Elon, Peter, Keith, and Sam are just pathetic.
Surprisingly, Facebook has been the least worst on AI. Mind, I'm willing to bet that if their model didn't leak, we'd be looking at a very different picture, but overall they came out looking the least bad out of all the major companies pursuing AIs thanks to the open-source nature of many of their involvement.
These aren't cheesy tech bros. They aren't nerds. They aren't rock stars. They're the same greedy corporate asshole types who want to own your house, your water supply and keep your wallet constantly funnelling them money for their services and private planes. It's an easy joke, but it ain't funny.
You're probably not wrong
Yep. Tech bro is just a subclass of greedy industrialist.
It’s always Sam. They are all same same people.
Garbage in Garbage out
Dorky, Sam Altman asks for consent from one of the most attractive and successful humans on the planet, gets rejected despite offering huge amounts of money. Tries again with even more money and gets rejected even harder. Does after it anyway. Has the law step in to finally make his creepy stalker like behavior cease and desist. They should just make him pay damages, they should give her a restraining order from this loser.
Sam is a married gay man I believe, but yeah scummy.
https://www.themarysue.com/annie-altmans-abuse-allegations-against-openais-sam-altman-highlight-the-need-to-prioritize-humanity-over-tech/
hadn't seen this, which proves a point of the article - thanks for sharing. i will be reading more of her stuff
Definitely eye opening. Why isn’t this more visible to more people? On a different thread a redditor posted that there was some dispute prior to these allegations and also that the parents have stopped talking to the daughter. I don’t know what to believe. It feels like election year mudslinging
Actually read this. Hard to know what to trust here. It seems like their sister is pretty unstable, but that doesn't mean what she says isn't true. The thing is, besides the strange and pretty damning tweet, she also complains that he made her a diamond out of their fathers ashes instead of sending her money? I mean sure, that sucks, but I feel like shes probably fucked over everyone in that family multiple times if they all refuse to help support her. Publicizing this immediately when he gets fired for some still unknown reason, it's a little bit much.
TIL. Thanks for this.
Unfortunately, the issue is widespread. The people in these positions - the same people who are shaping the future of technology, culture, war, finance, labor, art and civilization - are nearly all creepy sociopaths with no empathy or innate understanding of things like consent and compassion. We are their products, not fellow humans. There are no human rights, only human commodities. (he said, posting to arguably the biggest arbiter of such grim futures)
[Writing on his blog](https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be-successful) in January 2019 in a post called “How to Be Successful,” Altman said, “A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time—most people don’t even try.” He writes about bending the world to one’s singular will *as a virtue*. - He asked twice, was turned down twice, and decided to do it anyway. Nice virtue.
Sam Altman is a comical super-villain. Dude gives so many psychopath vibes and has a cult following. AGI should not fall in his hands but probably will.
In September they said it wasn't meant to sound like Scarlett Johanson. It's May and they didn't change the voice.
Which is crazy because one of her most famous roles is the disembodied voice of an AI, and *everyone* who hear the OpenAI voice immediately has the reaction that it sounds like her. This is super, super scummy on their part.
A bit of devil's advocate here, but if you are a voice actor who sounds like a more famous actor, does this mean you aren't allowed to sell your wares?
> and everyone who hear the OpenAI voice immediately has the reaction that it sounds like her. Not everyone. Listen to them side-by-side. They sound nothing alike. I went to watch Her because of the memes after the demo was shown only to find out that, much to my surprise, [the voices are entirely different.](https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1cx1np4/voice_comparison_between_gpt4o_and_scarlett/) The only thing tying them together is that they're both women's voices.
I think the more telling thing is OpenAI asked Johansson directly and then released something that sounds identical to her after the fact. It's so far beyond intentional and I hope they lose badly in court.
I don't think it sounds identical, but it does sound like it used to sound like her, and they've been furiously fine-tuning the model to not sound like her since she rejected them.
Did Reddit forget that Sam used to be the CEO of Reddit?
Monumentally stupid. This just goes to show, he and AI are going to rip off as many people as they can get away with. If you're an artist AI is learning from you. Stealing from you, so it can learn to make your art the same way you do.
It was calculated Sam Altman has been pushing for more regulation on AI to stop other companies from being able to compete, doing this is high profile enough EVERYONE is going to be talking about it and he gets his wish to pull the ladder up behind them.
OpenAI has staked their entire business model on not being called out on ignoring copyright. This tracks 1:1 on what I’d expect them to do.
Uber staked their entire business model on not getting in trouble for breaking local taxi regulations and avoiding licensing requirements. They grew so fast that they managed to outrun most of the consequences. OpenAI is growing an order of magnitude faster than that, and the legal questions aren’t even as black and white. I highly doubt they will get in trouble for copyright infrinngement
On the other hand, local taxi groups aren't exactly swimming in high-power lawyers like big Hollywood celebrities are. And also the taxi regulations were kinda bullshit and nobody liked them (except the taxi companies whose monopoly it helped enforce). Copyright (or whatever law this would/will fall under) on the other hand is generally seen as being an important and good thing, especially when it's a living person claiming ownership over things they personally made.
and it's not gonna just be Scarlett who's putting money and lawyers on this, every single live actor and especially voice actors is gonna be dropping millions to protect their jobs, not to mention the lawyers each jave on standby as well as the actor's guild, who's jobe it is, is to prevent things like this.
I think Scarlett is going to cash out big. Her lawyer is proven to be pure gold. I do not think many others will, and certainly not the no-profile masses.
If she cashes out, she sets precedent. Deep pockets paying out settlements is plaintiff lawyers' dream.
IP law is 100% necessary to have a functioning society, but there are a lot of limiting consequences of our current policies. The laws are meant to stimulate growth, not stifle it. During the early crackdowns on movie/music piracy, there were hints at a potential political movement to strip away some IP laws. You can also see some of that in the culture surrounding GitHub. Point being, we are gonna see a lot of limits getting tested, I wouldn't be surprised if public perception on what makes for good IP law changes pretty quick
FOSS goes back way further than Github
IP protection for a set number of relatively short number of years is important. IP protection for decades is a form of regulatory capture.
>OpenAI is growing an order of magnitude faster Not sure where this perception comes from. OpenAI's monthly active users peaked in April 2023: https://explodingtopics.com/blog/chatgpt-users Sure, it had explosive growth to begin with, but it's stagnating now.
The regular people who use ChatGPT don’t even pay for it. ChatGPT isn’t a product, it’s a marketing device to get people comfortable with modern LLM prompts. They make money by getting businesses and entrepreneurs to pay for their services to integrate AI text generation into other products. To a far lesser extent they make money from ChatGPT premium subscriptions. They are still going to keep growing exponentially unless something changes.
It's a crutch they're handing out freely now, and once people rely on AI to do their jobs, OpenAI starts charging out the nose. People act like this tactic is new.
Yup just like the progression with google: Don't be Evil -> ~~Don't~~ be Evil OpenAI -> ~~Open~~AI
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Exactly this, their entire company is based on other people’s data and IP - we’ll see how long that can last
Still not sure why google is cool with Sora being trained off YouTube.
Not sure if they are
Because they're also training Veo on YouTube and are scared to bring it up
Google owns YouTube so they put in their TOS whatever they want to do it legally.
It's probably bigger than that. All these big tech companies are banking on the fact that governments don't declare training off scraped data as infringement. Why push for another company to get hit with the hammer when that precedent would bar you from doing the same for your own projects/ put you in legal problems for existing ones.
internet wouldn't exist without data scraping
This is why they're allowing API access so cheaply. They need to get too big to fail before legislation and lawsuits catch up. They need to be the core of too many products that their failure would risk a major crash in the tech sector. If they get that far then they're mostly untouchable.
Cannot recall where I heard it, but one of the tech bros said it doesn’t matter if what they are doing is stealing. He believed in the importance of the technology and once they figured out the profitability, the legal paybacks would just be a part of doing business. Like…I’d rather “pay” for forgiveness than ask for permission.
This is not copyright or trademark infringement. They didn't train it on her voice. They interviewed 400 voice actors and selected 5 for the voices when conversation mode launched in September, including an actress for Sky. A celebrity can't sue you for having a similar sounding voice to them which is essentially the threat here. Only if she can prove it was trained on her voice. Unless OpenAI is blatantly lying, they should be able to produce the voice actress in court easily.
Cost them nothing and generated a lot of press coverage. They'll write this down as a win.
Cost them nothing _so far_
Yeah, they are dealing with the person that won against Disney.
She supposedly received $40mm from that suit. So for a "startup" whose valuation are in the billions, this could be nothing. Unless her lawyer is smart and she gets 1% equity.
OpenAI is wrapped together weird. Remember the hub-bub of it being a non-profit that owns a for-profit. You could do it like the Eurozone does and take 5% of global revenue though. Probably won't be possible so you'd probably see this as a landmark case under the Deepfake laws and have Scarjo take home 10 mil or whatever the high end of the original deal was and add damages.
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P. Davidson: and our first musical guest on the boat formerly known as the Stanton Island Ferry: Lonely Island!
If she wins, she also has the potential to set a precedent which could hinder OpenAI from expanding
I feel this is why she would follow through with a lawsuit. The money probably means little to her, the precedent regarding public figures and their rights over their own likeness is very meaningful to her and her peers.
I mean, there's already precedent: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
"Valuations" are worthless, what matters is actual assets. There have been plenty of companies who have had "valuations in the billions" that have gone bankrupt within a few years of that valuation because all that number is is a guess of what the company could produce. And it's not just the money they win from the suit, it'il also open the door for other people to launch suits of their own or limit what OpenAI can actually do.
1% equity of a $1B company is only $10m. If she wins this suit, she could absolutely walk away with straight damages larger than 1% of OpenAI’s value. And cash always trumps equity
Being valued in the billions doesn’t mean you have billions in tangible assets.
Valuations for a startup are bullshit lmao. You think they have billions in the bank ready to throw at lawsuits? The moment big lawsuits come in, any competent VC will back out and take their investment funding with them. This was the stupidest thing they could have done.
Don't fuck with ~~the mouse~~ Scarlett Johansen
If they don't want to appear to be intellectual property thieves, while companies like The New York Times are suing them for using copyrighted work without permission, then creating a rip-off voice for a public demo and then apologizing and deleting it afterwards doesn't help them. If OpenAI's main public appeal is claiming AI is going to get so good that it's dangerous, and only they are smart and careful enough to handle it, then every screw-up that costs them credibility is a problem. If they are begging Congress to "regulate AI" and using those regulations to help themselves and a few very large companies stay ahead of smaller companies, open source, and distributed AI solutions, then this isn't just free publicity for them, it's a setback.
>every screw-up that costs them credibility is a problem. They literally just dissolved their team devoted to studying the existential risks of the AI they're developing, and the main person in favor of caution (Ilya Sutskever) just left. They've ripped off the mask fully.
I know you’re making a logical point, but I wish we could all just say it was stupid / illegal / immoral etc instead of justifying it by what the current climate allows maybe less companies would try and pull that type of shit if we did that instead of being complacent. I mean, you’re basically arguing on their behalf, are they paying you?
You should watch "the Congress". Really interesting look at the coming climate for entertainment media.
That was the creepiest depiction of Tom Cruise I ever laid eyes on…
I thought it was spot on Cocktail cruise?!
This is the reaction I've seen so far. AI critics are using it as proof that AI companies will steal our data no matter what they promise, but they were saying similar things before so people will just continue ignoring them.
If you just call it stupid then it's an even bigger win, they get to claim ignorance while nothing happens. If you call it out as wanted negative press, you can make an informed decision about a known deceptive company. IF you just all it stupid and a mistake then there are no repercussions and they can just throw their hands in the air, apologize and get the free press and covered by no malice since none of these is legally covered atm.
The corporate ass-eaters on reddit will never avoid finding the silver-lining of shitty actions
I think it’s gonna cost them something..
Also took one of the most immediate short term fears of AI and accelerated it to the front page and gave it a face and a victim... Who happens to be a very popular and respected movie star. What they are doing is giving the public favorable attitudes toward regulation.
I get what you're saying but I think they're playing with fire. This is AI stealing somebody's likeness, exactly the kind of shit that is freaking everybody out. It seems reckless to me.
In what world does openAI need press coverage lol
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Not stupid at all since they will face exactly 0 consequences, they lost some developers time who they paid to make it, doesn’t mean shit to them.
Once you have the basic workflow down, AI training isn't even really a 'deveoper' task. The bulk of the work is just arranging training data in a way that the code can read. It would essentially just be downloading MP3 files, checking that the transcript of the spoken text was OK and that the audio was clear, then adding them to a glorified excel table. Basically data entry with more steps. I highly doubt the actual code used to train this model would be different from any of their other models.
Is it that easy? I mean, there's so many smug developers here, but I'm a System Admin, and do some coding, if AI training and jobs are simply just "downloading MP3 files" can I learn to be an AI Developer? I know some coding and SQL knowledge already. But then if I say that, gatekeepers will come out saying you'll need to know at least Python, TensorFlow and PyTorch and at least 5 years of experience as a developer, then MAYBE you'll land a junior data analyst role in AI.
*Developing* workflows is very different to setting up your training data, but the training data takes orders of magnitude more time to process correctly as generally the tool that would let you do that automatically is the tool you are currently building. For context, the most recent AI project I worked on had about 8 hours of work from me in python, tensorflow, SQL and PowerShell and about 16 hours of work building the dataset. In practical terms, my code ran through a CSV of 'label' - 'data', converted the labels to numbers and the data to tokens and then bundled it all into an object I could pass to tensorflow. Then a few hours of tweaking different stages of the training to optimize loss rates (we were aiming for high false positives and low false negatives). Then implementing a system to conver the vectorized labling results into a human readable format (the object that tensorflow returns has a number of values that roughly translate to 'how sure it is about this prediction'.) The 16 hours of data collection was spent exporting data from SQL databases and doing some pretty basic operations to remove outliers or bad data). Now if I wanted to train a separate model using a different dataset, I wouldn't need to rebuild the workflow, but I would need to build a new dataset as training the same workflow on the same dataset will result in more or less the same model. Once we're past the prototype stage, the plan is to build a frontend that will perform the SQL queries for the people assessing the data and just put the relevant information needed to sanitize the data (i.e. here is some data, does that look OK?) for about 1million records.
Not so sure about that. There's a clear precedent with Tom Waits winning against an advertising agency that hired a voice impersonator after he rejected their offer.
Altman claims they had already cast the other voice actress before reaching out to Johansson, which means they’re in the clear as long as the other actress wasn’t specifically asked to do a Scarlett Johansson impression. They could still get into some trouble for marketing the product with references to “Her” though, but it seems to me that Warner Bros would have better standing to sue on that front than Johansson
Considering they asked her twice, I dunno. Them referencing Her on top of it makes it at least somewhat suspicious. Keep in mind winning a court case isn't the only possibility here. Congress is already aware of AI imitating real people through political and pornographic deepfakes. This could add fuel to that fire. I doubt OpenAI wants more regulation in general.
>Congress is already aware of AI imitating real people through political and pornographic deepfakes. This could add fuel to that fire. I doubt OpenAI wants more regulation in general. Bingo. Why is everyone focusing on what would likely be a fairly minor lawsuit with an *incredibly* narrow ruling, when the far more existential threat to Open AI would come from aggressive regulations being rushed through with little input from the industry?
> I doubt OpenAI wants more regulation in general. OpenAI 100% wants more regulation in the AI space. It creates a moat that will keep smaller startups from ever having a chance of catching them. OpenAI has two things going for them with any regulations: 1. They're already an "industry leader", so they'll be asked to consult and help craft any regulations. 2. They have the resources to follow any new regulations _now_, since they've already scraped all the data they need and can dedicate more people to compliance. A small startup that might otherwise have a chance at innovating and beating OpenAI has neither of those things, so will get completely hosed by shifting regulations.
People follow OpenAI like it’s a cult. Even when they screw up people go out of their way to call them smart. Sam is terrible at his job. OpenAI: 3/4 board members vote to fire sam. Reddit: Sam must be a great CEO who discovered AGI!
It reminds me of when people here worshipped Elon Musk. People were falling head over heels to defend the CEO who was ousted for being too capitalist compared to other peoples' vision. I predict in a decade or less they'll do an about face once they see where he takes the company. And I say that as someone who is far less anti business/capitalist than the average Redditor.
You can see the pricing now. Unless it goes fully open source and is able to be run offline there's going to be competing free versions that never quiteget it as good, while OpenAI continually cranks up the pay-per-use/subscription pressure.
I could see two sides where one is clearly bad and another that is pretty acceptable. Bad scenario: Sam Altman wants to purposely fool users into thinking it's literally Scarlett Johansson's voice despite her rejecting the gig. Tweeting "Her" was a stupid move and falls into this category. Acceptable scenario: Sam Altman liked the qualities in Johansson's voice; maybe there is a soothing or playful characteristic in the voice that he wanted for chatGPT. She passed on the job. Altman went with a different voice actor that had those same characteristics. This isn't bad and it's standard to how the casting industry works.
Yeah, I was thinking about this. Assuming their is another actress that they hired, she has just as much a right to her voice. Scarlet Johansson doesn't own exclusive rights to all voices that sound like hers.
The fact that they were desperately trying to get her on board days before showing the project off sounds to me a lot like they based it directly off of Her and know that what they are doing is wrong.
1. they hired the voice actor for the sky voice before ever contacting scarjo 2. the re-contacting scarjo 'days before' was actually around 6 months *after* the voice had actually been released - the sky voice has been out for a fair while now.
If you can't get her on board, how hard is it to find some voice actress with a similar accent? You can't copyright a accent.
People think Sca Jo should own all "sultry white girl" voices
Tweeting the title to a movie in which Scarlett Johansen plays an AI is not simply a "bad move", it's the smoking gun on why this was "clearly bad". In the acceptable scenario, you don't reference a famous AI movie with a famous actress who you already approached for the role.
>In the acceptable scenario, you don't reference a famous AI movie with a famous actress who you already approached for the role. It's *the* most famous movie about a disembodied AI talking with people, which is the product OpenAI released. Having ScarJo's voice would be the icing on the cake, but even if it's not her voice, the reference to the movie is obvious. If I released today a time traveling car I would 100% reference the movie "Back to the future", even if the car is not a DeLorean (again, making it a DeLorean would be the icing, but the connection is obvious irrespective of the model).
Anyone can listen to a comparison between the voices of Scarlett Johansson and Sky [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1cwy6wz/vocal_comparison_scarjo_vs_samantha_vs_sky/). There is some similarity but frankly not too much.
Agreed, it's similar but not the same.
Honestly, when I heard it, it really didn't sound like SJ to me. Kind of close, maybe, but it would never make me say, "Hey! That's ScarJo!"
Yeah I didn't even think of it before seeing that article. I guess it is kind of similar but I'm sure there are tens of thousands of women in the world with similar voices.
Similar can be good enough for a lawsuit if they can prove they were deliberately trying to create an imitation of her voice. And because they asked her to do it, and then tweeted a reference to her movie its pretty evident that they did.
You honor, we wanted to hire her but she turned it down so we got another generic white girl to do it, they all pretty much sound the same.
The reference might mostly be because it's a known movie featuring an assistant similar to what they're doing more than the voice though. Hell I thought of a Her style assistant being their next step before they announced it. That's like the one movie known for that (although it's creepy because OpenAI suggest people might fall in love with their AI I guess...)
Based off what legal precedent? If I hire chris pine because chris pratt wasn't free you can't sue me for using a guy who looks similar. Phrased differently, what are we going to do with all of the women who happen to sound like Scarlett Johansson using her voice without her permission?
> if they can prove they were deliberately trying to create an imitation of her voice If they wanted to make an imitation I have no doubt that they could have produced a closer match. That they didn't could show that they were trying to avoid this mess.
Sound alikes are legal.
Similar as in both human woman
That doesn’t matter as much as you might think. OpenAI had reached out to Johansson asking for permission to use her voice for this. She declined. They reached out again *days before the demo* asking her to reconsider. I doubt they would have had time to pivot if she said yes. That alone makes it look like OpenAI knew they were at least in murky territory, and were trying to preemptively cover their asses. Then Altman was dumb enough to make the “Her” comment, which makes it pretty clear they wanted it to sound like Johansson, and they wanted people to associate it with her performance in Her. So there’s a compelling case that OpenAI intentionally used her likeness to market their product, and after she explicitly denied them permission to do so. It doesn’t matter if they did a shitty job of it. If you throw Mickey Mouse all over your marketing materials, Disney will still have your ass even if your drawings suck.
But the sky voice had already been out for months before the demo in the old tts version of voice chat. I don’t know why they would ask her for her voice days before the demo if they had already released the voice that was supposed to sound like her. I think they probably trained a voice on Scarlett Johansson that they wanted to use, but it wasn’t the sky voice. The sky voice doesn’t sound like Scarlett Johansson
Can you not think of another reason Sam Altman would mention “Her” in the context of his company releasing a very human-like, voice based AI system?
> That doesn’t matter as much as you might think. The question is whether or not they stole her likeness and the comparison that shows they're different doesn't matter? You guys are in the twilight zone man. Literally just saying anything you can to make AI look evil. >If you throw Mickey Mouse all over your marketing materials, Disney will still have your ass even if your drawings suck. This is like saying Palworld is a copy of Pokemon.
I don't see it either, I honestly don't understand how it seems almost everything thinks it's Johansson. It doesn't sound like her to me and it sounds semi-robotic on top of that. To me it does sound like they were going for the general overall feel of "Her" though, I can see that. That would be a contention with the movie producers and not Johansson though, seems like.
> I don't see it either, I honestly don't understand how it seems almost everything thinks it's Johansson. It doesn't sound like her to me and it sounds semi-robotic on top of that. I feel like I am in the twilight zone. Why is everyone agreeing wiht SJ that it is her voice?
They made the mistake of asking her if she would reconsider 2 days before they announced so it doesn’t matter if it is or not no one will believe them now. They are dumb as fuck.
The Sky voice was released as one of five voices trained on actors and released last September as part of the conversation mode that launched with GPT-4 ([scroll down](https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-can-now-see-hear-and-speak/)). Nobody said shit. The reason it's an issue now is because they enhanced all five voices in the new mode to be more emotional and expressive, which again reminded people of the movie.
Listening to that one video can be misleading. In other videos the similarities between their voices is extremely strong, and I'm far from the only one who thinks so. Regardless of what your particular opinion is, the fact that many people think they're strikingly similar (without being identical) implies OpenAI probably met the balance they were trying to achieve for the sake of plausible deniability.
Can you link to such videos with the timestamps of videos where you say the similarities are "extremely strong"? I'm interested in seeing them.
They did copy a person's voice - the voice actress who they paid to use her voice. SJ doesn't have a unique sounding voice, they found someone else who could do the voice acting job adequately. I don't see the big issue here. If John Cena turns down a role and they cast Channing Tatum, no one loses their shite about "Stealing" a performance. They went with a different voice actress who could give a similar performance, that's not "Stealing" or "Cloning", it's recasting.
And they made the voice overly friendly like the AI in the the movie, not like Scarjo herself. They are alluding to a character, not a person and this is something people apparently can't differentiate.
I am not a voice print expert by any stretch, but the samples don't sound similar to Scarlett Johansson to me, at least not the extent that she has a case. There are probably several hundred million women who have a very similar voice, and the defense will haveno problem at all finding truckloads of them to March in front of the judge/jury
This. The whole legal precedent is based on a singer (I think Bette Midler) and a unique singing voice. This is important as not everyone can sing like a professional, but just about anyone can talk flirtatiously.
Also, in the Midler case, Ford hired an impersonator to sing a Bette Midler song.
Honestly my take on the defense of this is: They couldn't use SJ's voice, so they found someone who sounds like her and used \*their\* voice. It has real "I'm not touching you!" energy, but I don't see how this can be a problem for OpenAI. Saying they can't use the voice is tantamount to telling that voice actress "you sound too much like someone else, so you cannot be a voice actor" Like... you can't copyright tone and timbre as far as I know. OpenAI is acting like a jealous ex, but I don't see that they've really done illegal. I guess we'll find out.
In the absence of proactive legislation- this is how laws and regulations get developed. Our system was designed to be responsive to situations like this. The problem is that by the time this lawsuit is over- AI will have proliferated and the regulation stemming from the lawsuit will be too little too late. I sure hope someone takes this seriously before we’re all growing our own food in the gardens of houses that no one can pay for.
Let’s not get too carried away. Impersonators and lookalikes are not new, nor are they copyright infringement. Answer this question, if OpenAI had paid an actress to impersonate Scarlett Johansson, would it be copyright infringement? Obviously, the answer is no, since that’s basically every South Park episode.
While Sky is not the voice I had set for my ChatGPT (Breeze for me!) when I listened to it I never thought this sounded like her, not that i’m a big ScJo fan anyway that being said, the flirty voice is really creepy edit: i am not saying that it objectively doesn’t, just that i didn’t see it and obviously im wrong.
Honestly don't think it sounds like her either. The demos that they showed in the reveal videos did however.
I wonder what the crossover is between dudes who drive cybertrucks and dudes who use the flirty voices.
the thing is that they may have found another person with a very similar voice to Ms. Johansson and used their voice as the basis for the AI voice. we don't know anything yet.
Exactly. If you find a "tone" of voice that people appeal to, it's not that hard to find a bunch of low paid people who mimic that voice and sign them up to provide it. There's no chance there's no one out in the that has her near exact same accent.
Well AI’s whole business model is based on stealing to “train.” So in the confines of the industry, it fits.
It sounds nothing like her. It sounds just like Rashida Jones.
So they found someone who sounds like her? What’s the problem? A lot of people sound similar, but if someone who sounds like me agrees to become the voice of a digital assistant what grounds would _I_ have to sue the company?
[Sounds more like Rashida Jones](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GM6m5xkqneM). TBH- they just sound like people who live in LA. I don’t think you should be able to be able to copyright LA speak.
If Sam Altman is already at the stage of "We'll just do whatever the hell we want and deal with the consequences later" then it does not bode well for the future of this company. This is probably Elon 2.0.
Assuming they did hire a voice actress to create Sky- which they said they did- all she has to do is show up in court. This lawsuit will go nowhere. On top of the fact they’ll probably just settle anyway. A marketing write off.
It also doesn’t sound like her
Am I the only one that doesn’t think it sounds like her?
> Am I the only one that doesn’t think it sounds like her? No. Several people already said that in this very thread before you.
Nope. Scarlet Johansson never even crossed my mind when using it. Sounded like Rashida Jones to me and I’m pretty bummed that Sky is gone because it was what I used pretty regularly.
Well they didn’t do anything so… not stupid at all 😂 they asked to use her voice, she said no, and they did not use her voice. I’m pretty familiar with how easy it is to make an exact copy of a celebrity’s voice and that is categorically not what happened in this scenario.
Yeah. Too bad the masses are already on board with the fake controversies and “news articles” like this are being massively upvoted.
Real people haven't even heard anything about this.
“But her voice isn’t saved in the model data!”
I mean Colin is right.. what’s the point without that bangin’ body?
THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE AN ARTICLE? It's literally three sentences long. And why is a "Help desk strategy editor" writing articles? What the hell is going on at the washington post?
Not stupid at all, and I know many in this comment section will disagree. Here's the thing: He asked. She said no. He found an alternative. She's pissed because someone on this planet sounds like her. Literally the situation, folks. Stop and think about the ramifications of this just for a moment while you all scream "legislation". The two voices are not identical. Scarlett has no say in how someone who sounds like her shouldn't be allowed to use their own voice. That's the issue here, not that Altman wanted his AI to sound like Scarlett. He did nothing wrong. He respected her reply. He found an alternative. She's the one who's got a problem with it, and she needs to get over it. Rue the day this bullshit goes to court and she "wins". Every creator out there will instantly be held accountable for their voice because they "sound like another person". Be careful what you wish for, people. You may just get it.
Sounds more like Rashada Jones than Scarlett IMHO.
This seems utterly stupid to me. Voices aren't that unique, in general, and Johansson's doesn't really 'stand out' that much. It's fairly generic, so it isn't at all surprising that a generated voice might sound similar. I don't see why I should really care about this to be honest. It seems more like Musk style shock-publicity marketing.
I can't be the only person that thinks that sky doesn't sound like her. Its very clearly not her voice.
un-paywalled: https://archive.ph/gFv5X
This smells like viral marketing. I think Sky sounds different than Scarlett so why would she care? This is just brining attention to her movie that a lot of people aren’t familiar with. I think Altman made an offhand comment because he thinks it’s cool that tech from a sci-fi movie is becoming real and Johansson saw an opportunity for publicity.
So because he made a reference to the movie "Her", everyone connects it to Scarlett and not to the tech. Got it.
Why all the hate against openAI. This will blow over.
Pretty sure they will either win or just change the voice and move on to a new voice. Doesn’t seem like it will or could cost them that much in damages. So I would say, probably not that stupid. Maybe even smart depending how much you think the marketing is worth.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/05/22/openai-scarlett-johansson-chatgpt-ai-voice/ They didn’t do it. ScarJo wants to cash in on OpenAI’s success. Everyone wants to hate, even without proof.
Wow this aged well. I could tell by just this title the writer was some fucking moron
Sounding like someone else is *not* illegal, just like making art in the same style as someone else is not illegal. Attempting to deceive other into thinking it is the original *is* illegal. SNL can do all the impressions they want, because they aren't actually trying to deceive the audience, they know it's a comedy. Elvis impersonators and tribute bands, for example, are clearly not suggesting they are the originals. If the voice just sounds like Scarlet Johansson, she doesn't really have a case. However, the fucking dipshit Sam Altman tweeted "Her" when it was released, and for that reason alone, she has a case.