At first, they denied it—“OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati said the company did not pattern any ChatGPT voices on Johansson’s sultry computer voice in the movie,” but Altman and other OpenAI guys had let the cat out the bag on Twitter
They’re not just deliberately using her voice; they’re deliberately lying about it and bragging about what really happened in public. They’ll pay some nuisance settlement that’s a small fraction of their profit.
That’s how they treat an a list actress. Imagine how they treat everyone else. You don’t get a settlement. You just get fucked.
You see this in action anytime people go “no no you just don’t understand how this works” as a way of sidestepping the overall issue. They try to bury you in the minutiae of it, and what’s “technically” possible without acknowledging that A) what’s possible will increase over time and B) the issue is not technology, it’s the intention of it and the motivations of the people behind it.
It’s like trying to deconstruct the concept of a gun, talking about all its potential mechanical malfunctions, its capacity limits, the fact you have to aim it, and so on, all as a way of trying to downplay the danger of it being pointed directly at you.
They would not keep doing it if it did not keep working.
There are a great many similarities to this and all of Trump’s many & varied trials - when the rewards (of rape, bribery, extortion, blackmail, assassination, and so many other things) FAR outweigh the risks, it would be the height of stupidity to expect that nobody would ever even so much as dream of taking advantage.
And by stupidity, I suppose I mean Mitch McConnell, who more than any other singular individual that we can see decides e.g. which and whether judges can be appointed to their seats, and which and whether government programs may get funded - e.g. watchdog organizations that used to prosecute law-breaking behaviors, way back in ye olden times. (Mitch’s partner in this is not worth mentioning bc that role is played by a rotating cast of characters - now it’s Mike Johnson, before it was Kevin McCarthy, maybe next it will be Matt Gaetz, who da fuq knows.)
Every time we hear about another tech bro that gets a slap on the risk, while e.g. a black person gets shot just for walking/running/jogging/working/breathing/sleeping, we should remind ourselves: this is on purpose (or at least deemed “acceptable losses”, “collateral damage”). Those laws were supposed to be ours (Of/For/By The People) to make as we wished, and were, before this country was taken over from the inside by a silent coup, more than a decade prior to January 6. Now, an increasingly smaller minority runs the entire nation - e.g. less than a handful ousted McCarthy - and we seem to have collectively decided that we will do nothing about it.
Even conservatives should be against this, bc getting your way is not the same thing as doing things properly, and maintaining a stable democracy system of governance (who am I kidding, we’ve been a plutocracy since basically the beginning) is something that is required for us all to continue to exist. Example scenario: I am a father and two of my teenage children are having a birthday celebration, with both of their hearts desires set on sushi, and my wife wanted Chinese food but is okay with sushi. However, I don’t like sushi, hence we are all going for barbecue (despite one of the birthday teens being vegetarian except fish), and that’s final - sound familiar? Winning an argument is not the same as “winning” at life.
TLDR: expect more of this kind of “tech bro” nonsense over time rather than less, bc we have more foundational issues that are leaking out to cause / allow them.
Sorry this is a lot of words - I think sometimes we oversimplify so wanted to keep all these details, this time.
In a very realistic sense that has happened already.
First, the actual smart ones (or those who listen to smart advisors, same difference) - I’m talking about the likes of Zuckerberg and Bezos - have adapted to get ahead no matter who wins the election. These will utilize whatever advantage their robot/lizard brains can concoct. We hear about these, but they have successfully managed to train society to not think about them all that much, especially in conjunction to words like “politics” or “inflation”, despite being very much active in both. e.g., FaceBook facilitated genocide was bad - oh uh… well uh… haven’t you heard, FaceBook is dead now, while we are “Meta”, didn’t you know!?
But both the Musk and the Donald have their own proprietary social media platforms - Xhitter and [Alternative]Truth Social, respectively - and they have already eaten out the heart of most of the former conservative party. i.e. before the Tea Party (e.g. Ted Cruz) could eat out the GOP from the inside out, the Donald overtook that process and was so “successful” at it that a lot of people - us and them even! - call it the “GQP” now. The Kings of Old, aka Moscow Mitch, now have to kiss the ring of the twice-impeached former reality TV personality, while ignoring the sounds & smells of shatting (it pains me to think that the latter part of that sentence I mean literally! and then arguably even worse figuratively, e.g. how Trump makes fun of their wives in public but they have to swallow their pride and praise him or else their own supporters will boot them out as fast as McCarthy was).
Anyway, Trump is not a “tech bro”, but the likes of the Musk look up to him all the same, and also there’s a fantastic argument that FaceBook helped elect Trump to be President in the first place, much as Twitter is trying to get him back in for a second term, so the tech bro culture is very much ingrained in the heart of the conservative party even now.
According to her statement, they were still trying to strike a deal with her within days of the release.
I can’t imagine anything more shady than trying to strike a deal with someone for their likeness, all the while preparing to use it anyway and later denying it had anything to do with them
She is going to take them to the cleaners, and Altman and his circlejerk club will deserve every single cent of the damages they’re forced to pay. I genuinely hope she makes it an incredibly messy and eye wateringly expensive legal process for them. I’m not a ScarJo fanboy by any means, but fuck OpenAI for thinking they can get away with something so absurdly blatant and obviously unethical.
Gods, I hope you’re right. I hope it’s so bad that it scares every other AI company. Because they get away with this kind of crap all the time with no repercussions, since your average person doesn’t have the money to bring them to court over it.
Well, more importantly, a lot of people with a lot of assets invested a lot of money and thus expect to make a lot more money on OpenAI, so my bet’s on this getting sidetracked in some weird sketchy fashion because the US is a corporate feudal state these days (amongst other things).
If you read another article that has more information to it, instead of just this opinion piece, it looks like they hired and paid a voice actress and that it is her natural voice (supposedly).
Which begs the question: Can a voice actor be denied work or denied the ability to have their voice used, if they sound similar to someone else who is more famous?
This kind of reminds me of Crispin Glover, from Back to the Future. He tried to negotiate a higher pay for the second movie, so the producers hired a different actor to play the role, but deliberately made the actor up to look like Glover. In response, Glover sued the producers and won. It set a critical precedent for Hollywood, about using someone’s likeness without consent.
The article mentions they reached out to her two days before the launch - if she had said ‘OK,’ there’s no way they could have even recorded what they needed from her, let alone trained the model in time for the presentation. So they must have had a Scarlett Johansson voice ready to go. Other than training the model on movies (really not ideal for a high quality voice model), how would they have gotten the recordings they needed?
If they hired a “random” voice actress, they might not run into issues. But if at any point they had a job listing, a discussion with a talent manager, or anything else where they mentioned wanting a “Scarlett Johansson sound-alike,” they might have dug themselves a nice hole here.
Specifically regarding your question about hiring a voice actor that sounds like someone else - this is commonly done to replace people for cartoons. I don’t think it’s an issue if you are playing a character. But if you deliberately impersonate a person, there might be some trouble.
Honestly, with the tweets that reference the Her movie, they may already be in a hole, anyway. Plus, it’s not just the voice, it’s that the ‘character’ of the Sky voice is very similar to Sam in the Her movie.
If I were a jurist, I could easily be persuaded to believe they willingly committed IP theft and attempted to imply endorsement of the Her movie (the production studio?), Spike Jonze, and Scarlett Johansson.
(Of course, that statement would disqualify me as a jurist, so I’ll never know!)
Well one of the other articles I’ve read said they listened to and sampled 400 voice actors and selected 5 of them to have flown out to do all the voice work. The voice in the product also doesn’t sound that much like Scar Jo. Just similar. She never had a very unique voice.
I think it is less a question of whether the voice sounds like Scarlett Johansson, as that is subjective and arbitrary (e.g. assume you could objectively measure the similarity, what’s the acceptable cut off - 80%? 90%?). The same is true for the uniqueness of her voice.
I think the real question will come down to intention. They clearly wanted her voice. Did they intentionally attempt to replicate it when they couldn’t have the real thing? If so, there is precedent that would suggest they could be in a little trouble here, e.g.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-05-09-me-238-story.html
The voice they’re using isn’t a replicated one, though. It’s a paid voice actress and it is supposed to be her natural voice. It also does sound a bit different than scar jo.
Intent probably matters a lot here. The actor they hired did not coincidentally have a similar voice. They were hired because they had a similar voice, and the fact that Scarlett Johansson was approached to start with only underscores this.
They were specifically looking for her likeness, for commercial reasons. And when it was denied, they purposely imitated it. That doesn’t feel right to me. In the end, they’re still trying to use her likeness without permission.
That’s different than if they liked a VA’s voice and hired them. The voice could be similar, but there was no ill intent nor attempting to copy a likeness. I think they would’ve been fine if they were even shooting for something like her voice. Where OpenAI fucked up is approaching Johansson to start with, because it shows they didn’t want something like her voice or the VA coincidentally sounded similar – they purposely wanted her likeness, and went behind her back to do it once she denied them.
That won’t be a copyright issue, but if you’re deliberately making it indistinguishable from somebody else it can be a publicity rights issue by (false) implicit support from the one impersonated.
That‘s the type of cockiness you‘d expect from scoundrels who just committed the biggest heist in history and got away with it. I‘m not surprised in the slightest.
They’re not just deliberately using her voice; they’re deliberately lying about it and bragging about what really happened in public. They’ll pay some nuisance settlement that’s a small fraction of their profit.
That’s how they treat an a list actress. Imagine how they treat everyone else. You don’t get a settlement. You just get fucked.
No, you don’t understand, these guys are tech bros, they’re special, for reasons.
From the article:
And that sums up techbros in one sentence.
You see this in action anytime people go “no no you just don’t understand how this works” as a way of sidestepping the overall issue. They try to bury you in the minutiae of it, and what’s “technically” possible without acknowledging that A) what’s possible will increase over time and B) the issue is not technology, it’s the intention of it and the motivations of the people behind it.
It’s like trying to deconstruct the concept of a gun, talking about all its potential mechanical malfunctions, its capacity limits, the fact you have to aim it, and so on, all as a way of trying to downplay the danger of it being pointed directly at you.
Damn you really nailed it. This is something that has bothered me a lot but I’ve never found a good way to explain it. Your analogy is perfect.
They would not keep doing it if it did not keep working.
There are a great many similarities to this and all of Trump’s many & varied trials - when the rewards (of rape, bribery, extortion, blackmail, assassination, and so many other things) FAR outweigh the risks, it would be the height of stupidity to expect that nobody would ever even so much as dream of taking advantage.
And by stupidity, I suppose I mean Mitch McConnell, who more than any other singular individual that we can see decides e.g. which and whether judges can be appointed to their seats, and which and whether government programs may get funded - e.g. watchdog organizations that used to prosecute law-breaking behaviors, way back in ye olden times. (Mitch’s partner in this is not worth mentioning bc that role is played by a rotating cast of characters - now it’s Mike Johnson, before it was Kevin McCarthy, maybe next it will be Matt Gaetz, who da fuq knows.)
Every time we hear about another tech bro that gets a slap on the risk, while e.g. a black person gets shot just for walking/running/jogging/working/breathing/sleeping, we should remind ourselves: this is on purpose (or at least deemed “acceptable losses”, “collateral damage”). Those laws were supposed to be ours (Of/For/By The People) to make as we wished, and were, before this country was taken over from the inside by a silent coup, more than a decade prior to January 6. Now, an increasingly smaller minority runs the entire nation - e.g. less than a handful ousted McCarthy - and we seem to have collectively decided that we will do nothing about it.
Even conservatives should be against this, bc getting your way is not the same thing as doing things properly, and maintaining a stable
democracysystem of governance (who am I kidding, we’ve been a plutocracy since basically the beginning) is something that is required for us all to continue to exist. Example scenario: I am a father and two of my teenage children are having a birthday celebration, with both of their hearts desires set on sushi, and my wife wanted Chinese food but is okay with sushi. However, I don’t like sushi, hence we are all going for barbecue (despite one of the birthday teens being vegetarian except fish), and that’s final - sound familiar? Winning an argument is not the same as “winning” at life.TLDR: expect more of this kind of “tech bro” nonsense over time rather than less, bc we have more foundational issues that are leaking out to cause / allow them.
Sorry this is a lot of words - I think sometimes we oversimplify so wanted to keep all these details, this time.
They’ll probably end up becoming the next big conservative party if the social conservative fascists are beaten.
In a very realistic sense that has happened already.
First, the actual smart ones (or those who listen to smart advisors, same difference) - I’m talking about the likes of Zuckerberg and Bezos - have adapted to get ahead no matter who wins the election. These will utilize whatever advantage their robot/lizard brains can concoct. We hear about these, but they have successfully managed to train society to not think about them all that much, especially in conjunction to words like “politics” or “inflation”, despite being very much active in both. e.g., FaceBook
facilitated genocidewas bad - oh uh… well uh… haven’t you heard, FaceBook is dead now, while we are “Meta”, didn’t you know!?But both the Musk and the Donald have their own proprietary social media platforms - Xhitter and [Alternative]Truth Social, respectively - and they have already eaten out the heart of most of the former conservative party. i.e. before the Tea Party (e.g. Ted Cruz) could eat out the GOP from the inside out, the Donald overtook that process and was so “successful” at it that a lot of people - us and them even! - call it the “GQP” now. The Kings of Old, aka Moscow Mitch, now have to kiss the ring of the twice-impeached former reality TV personality, while ignoring the sounds & smells of shatting (it pains me to think that the latter part of that sentence I mean literally! and then arguably even worse figuratively, e.g. how Trump makes fun of their wives in public but they have to swallow their pride and praise him or else their own supporters will boot them out as fast as McCarthy was).
Anyway, Trump is not a “tech bro”, but the likes of the Musk look up to him all the same, and also there’s a fantastic argument that FaceBook helped elect Trump to be President in the first place, much as Twitter is trying to get him back in for a second term, so the tech bro culture is very much ingrained in the heart of the conservative party even now.
According to her statement, they were still trying to strike a deal with her within days of the release.
I can’t imagine anything more shady than trying to strike a deal with someone for their likeness, all the while preparing to use it anyway and later denying it had anything to do with them
She is going to take them to the cleaners, and Altman and his circlejerk club will deserve every single cent of the damages they’re forced to pay. I genuinely hope she makes it an incredibly messy and eye wateringly expensive legal process for them. I’m not a ScarJo fanboy by any means, but fuck OpenAI for thinking they can get away with something so absurdly blatant and obviously unethical.
Gods, I hope you’re right. I hope it’s so bad that it scares every other AI company. Because they get away with this kind of crap all the time with no repercussions, since your average person doesn’t have the money to bring them to court over it.
Well, more importantly, a lot of people with a lot of assets invested a lot of money and thus expect to make a lot more money on OpenAI, so my bet’s on this getting sidetracked in some weird sketchy fashion because the US is a corporate feudal state these days (amongst other things).
If you read another article that has more information to it, instead of just this opinion piece, it looks like they hired and paid a voice actress and that it is her natural voice (supposedly).
Which begs the question: Can a voice actor be denied work or denied the ability to have their voice used, if they sound similar to someone else who is more famous?
This kind of reminds me of Crispin Glover, from Back to the Future. He tried to negotiate a higher pay for the second movie, so the producers hired a different actor to play the role, but deliberately made the actor up to look like Glover. In response, Glover sued the producers and won. It set a critical precedent for Hollywood, about using someone’s likeness without consent.
The article mentions they reached out to her two days before the launch - if she had said ‘OK,’ there’s no way they could have even recorded what they needed from her, let alone trained the model in time for the presentation. So they must have had a Scarlett Johansson voice ready to go. Other than training the model on movies (really not ideal for a high quality voice model), how would they have gotten the recordings they needed?
If they hired a “random” voice actress, they might not run into issues. But if at any point they had a job listing, a discussion with a talent manager, or anything else where they mentioned wanting a “Scarlett Johansson sound-alike,” they might have dug themselves a nice hole here.
Specifically regarding your question about hiring a voice actor that sounds like someone else - this is commonly done to replace people for cartoons. I don’t think it’s an issue if you are playing a character. But if you deliberately impersonate a person, there might be some trouble.
Honestly, with the tweets that reference the Her movie, they may already be in a hole, anyway. Plus, it’s not just the voice, it’s that the ‘character’ of the Sky voice is very similar to Sam in the Her movie.
If I were a jurist, I could easily be persuaded to believe they willingly committed IP theft and attempted to imply endorsement of the Her movie (the production studio?), Spike Jonze, and Scarlett Johansson.
(Of course, that statement would disqualify me as a jurist, so I’ll never know!)
Well one of the other articles I’ve read said they listened to and sampled 400 voice actors and selected 5 of them to have flown out to do all the voice work. The voice in the product also doesn’t sound that much like Scar Jo. Just similar. She never had a very unique voice.
I think it is less a question of whether the voice sounds like Scarlett Johansson, as that is subjective and arbitrary (e.g. assume you could objectively measure the similarity, what’s the acceptable cut off - 80%? 90%?). The same is true for the uniqueness of her voice.
I think the real question will come down to intention. They clearly wanted her voice. Did they intentionally attempt to replicate it when they couldn’t have the real thing? If so, there is precedent that would suggest they could be in a little trouble here, e.g. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-05-09-me-238-story.html
The voice they’re using isn’t a replicated one, though. It’s a paid voice actress and it is supposed to be her natural voice. It also does sound a bit different than scar jo.
Intent probably matters a lot here. The actor they hired did not coincidentally have a similar voice. They were hired because they had a similar voice, and the fact that Scarlett Johansson was approached to start with only underscores this.
They were specifically looking for her likeness, for commercial reasons. And when it was denied, they purposely imitated it. That doesn’t feel right to me. In the end, they’re still trying to use her likeness without permission.
That’s different than if they liked a VA’s voice and hired them. The voice could be similar, but there was no ill intent nor attempting to copy a likeness. I think they would’ve been fine if they were even shooting for something like her voice. Where OpenAI fucked up is approaching Johansson to start with, because it shows they didn’t want something like her voice or the VA coincidentally sounded similar – they purposely wanted her likeness, and went behind her back to do it once she denied them.
Then what about impersonators for hire? Or like a Motley Cru cover band?
That won’t be a copyright issue, but if you’re deliberately making it indistinguishable from somebody else it can be a publicity rights issue by (false) implicit support from the one impersonated.
Nice try chatgpt but we know it’s tou.
That‘s the type of cockiness you‘d expect from scoundrels who just committed the biggest heist in history and got away with it. I‘m not surprised in the slightest.
These are the same dudes who have LSD and mushroom parties with their female coworkers and then pressure them into sex.
Source? Sounds about right for techbro AI douches, curious though
Orgies and psychedelics use is super common in their own rite, but it’s even more common in high tech silicone valley circles:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40401043
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/machine-learning-researcher-links-openai-185652824.html
I don’t think actresses are worth more than ordinary people but sure, I get what you are saying.
Big tech fucks everyone over, as usual.