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.
No, you don’t understand, these guys are tech bros, they’re special, for reasons.
From the article:
they don’t just think they’re the smartest people in the world, they think that everyone else is stupid.
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.
expect more of this kind of “tech bro” nonsense over time rather than less
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.
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.
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?
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.
Most of AI just seems to be blatant theft and copyright issues.
No, it’s only theft when it’s poor people doing it.
When it’s rich people, it’s fair use of a publicly available resource.
That’s pretty much the whole point.
Making use of other people’s work and likeness in a way that removes any obligations you would normally have to those people.
Just clearly define “copyright violation” for them, and they’ll craft a method that technically eludes your definition.
And traumatizing developing countries labor with what the internet has of most terrible.
Not in this case.
The precedent in this case already exists in Midler v. Ford Motor Co., in which when Academy Award nominated actress and singer Bette Midler sued Ford after Ford hired musical impersonators to sing famous songs for their commercials.
The court ultimately ruled in favor of Midler, because it was found that Ford gave clear instructions to the impersonating actress to sound as much like Midler as possible, and the ruling was voices, although not copyrightable, still constitutes their distinct identity and is protected against unauthorized use without permission. (Outside of satire, of course, since I doubt someone like Trump would be above suing people for making fun of him.)
I think Scarlett Johansson has a case here, but it really hinges on whether or not OpenAI actively gave the instruction specifically to impersonate Scarlett’s voice in “Her”, or if they used her voice inside the training data at all, since there is a difference in the “Sky” voice and the voice of Scarlett Johansson.
But then again, what do I know, I’m just here to shitpost and promote “Barbie”.
Loved you in My Name is Earl
That’s, uh, “Jaime Pressly”, who is totally not esteemed Academy Award nominated character actress Margot Robbie doing an American Southern accent to get more work in the US.
Real talk: at this point, you may be my main reason to still be active on Lemmy.
Because of an impersonator?
This reads like a lemmy version of a shittymorph post
Hey, I have more than one comedy bit I do here other than something something Hell in a Cell, OK?
Speaking of which, Hell in a Cell isn’t even that exciting anymore after the WWE made it an annual event and painted the cages red, and why did Seth Rollins get disqualified after he attacked “The Fiend” Bray Wyatt with a sledgehammer 2019 even though Hell in a Cell matches have always been no disqualification?
It’s like their script writers don’t even care about their own rules.
Yep, definitely a Lemmy version of /u/shittymorph
I miss shittymorph.
spoiler
asdfasfasfasfas
I think it’s more fun and productive to abolish intellectual property instead
Not before abolishing capitalism or you’re just making things worse.
I think abolishing intellectual property would hurt capitalism more than it would benefit it. Already it is strongly in favor of the rich and the big corporations. Getting rid of those limitations even without abolishing capitalism first, would, I think, be more to everyone’s benefit than detriment.
Disagree, without IP laws whoever has the most money can crush all competition. An example of this is how the first pump hand soap softsoap couldn’t patent the hand pump design because it already existed so they just bought all the existing stock to prevent anyone from releasing a competing product.
If you get rid of IP laws you’ll just further entrench the existing winners.
Write a good book? Without copyright, Penguin random house publishes an exact copy at a higher quality and sells a million copies while you sell a handful to discerning fans.
Build a quality product? Without trademark, proctor and gamble flood the market using your brand name and nobody can distinguish their products from yours even though their quality is much worse.
Invent something revolutionary? Without patents you have to keep your process a secret so you don’t get copied. If you get hit by a bus your invention is now lost to society forever unless someone manages to reverse-engineee it.
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That’s not happenning without weaking this core pillar.
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Tough N2T IMO but IANAL and IDH another good acronym UMS to drop here so GTFO and HAGO!
This is a calculated move to destroy competition. Scarlet is just a lightning rod.
That’s probably going to be a big deal in future AI lawsuit.
If intellectual property isn’t exterminated wholesale it will lead to explicitely refusing to answer any person or copyrighted works by name.
So instead of “sing a song about bananas by Taylor Swift” it will be “sing a song about banana by a female singer pop singer whose songs are, on the whole, quite straightforward, primarily revolving around the saga of girl-meets-boy, boy-fails-to-live-up-to-expectations, girl-pens-another-breakup-anthem. Each track features tales of romantic entanglements and emotional rollercoasters, culminating in catchy, radio-friendly tunes that are sure to dominate the charts, accompanied by dramatic twists and heartfelt reconciliations that appear almost out of thin air.”
Holy shit we have a character on Lemmy now I’m deleting my Reddit account
Who knew someone who plays characters on screen for a living would be so good at playing a character?
This is an A-Lister commie board, we have Ryan Gosling too!
Edit: whoops I thought this was a hexbear post but my point stands, less commie though
It’s that barbie girl, in the lemmy wooorld ~~
This story is blowing so fucking far out of proportion it’s honestly incredible. Just so everyone is one the same page, here is a video timestamped to the voice, and immediately following the voice you can hear the voice from Her as well.
https://youtu.be/3BWjomtK-94?si=tDu574b4GySpnPIy&t=42
They are not similar other than they are both female.
The whole “her” thing that Altman threw up on twitter is just because the goddamned movie was a touchstone for the kind of thing that they are doing. They weren’t cloning the fucking voice. It’s like naming your new iguana Godzilla. It’s not going to destroy Tokyo any time soon, it’s just a cultural reference, you know, like a meme.
As far as Johansson goes, she is falling prey to this shit just like every other celebrity that has been railing against big bad AI. There are so many sheisty lawyers trying to get their hands on the first big win from an AI suit that they will say anything to get a celebrity to sue, because if their firm wins, they become the Anti-AI lawfirm that all others will seek in the future. They will print money, but only if something sticks, and so far, nothing has. This will be another case like any other, where they take it to court, and there is no real basis for anything, and it ends up being all over the news and then disappearing like the whole debacle over Sarah Silverman’s book. In three months there will be another case against AI, and again, nothing will stick, because the people putting the bug in people’s ears don’t understand how to use most of the functionality of their cellphone, let alone how generative AI works.
They are not similar other than they are both female.
I thought Ferengi were supposed to have good hearing.
No no you don’t understand. Since Scar Jo played a female voice that behaved nicely and made jokes in a movie she now owns the rights to any female (or feminine male voice) that either: makes a joke, says something witty, answers a question, or makes a statement. This is a slam dunk case for Scar Jo. I will also be sued for writing this as she also wrote an email in a movie once that had words in the forms of sentences just like this post so I’m screwed.
Just tell the judge that an AI wrote your post and you can walk away scot-free.
Finally, a sane response. Of course they’ll “sound similar” because they’re both female voices attempting to come off as friendly with an American accent.
I’m more on the side of opposing AI implementations but people are really reaching with this one. I’m assuming it was pulled just so they can get their legal defense in order.
This will be another case like any other, where they take it to court, and there is no real basis for anything
Because then they’ll give up whoever it was that they used to voice the AI and it’ll be mostly over. The thing is though that if they rush into a lawsuit too eagerly, nobody’s going to want to work with them under a similar contract.
It’s still very much not nice to specifically use the reference from the movie given Scarlett clearly indicates she doesn’t like what they are doing.
You can literally pick another reference - not that she is the only person ever playing a digital/robotic woman.
But they proceeded anyway. This signals disregard and disrespect to whatever sources they use, if nothing else.
She did not indicate anything of the sort, just that she did not want to take part in it. Beyond that is speculation. She is asking for documentation proving they did not use her voice without permission to train the AI. That’s perfectly fair.
By all means, rattle off some references that will make sense in the context.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/3BWjomtK-94?si=tDu574b4GySpnPIy&t=42
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I think they’re both pretty similar. The main difference being that one is being played from a shitty phone speaker and recorded by a camera and the other is coming from studio quality audio.
Yeah I thought OpenAI came out and said that they modeled the voice of a different actress, and they don’t want to share their identity out of a respect for privacy.
It could just be a coincidence that Altman tweeted the image from Her, and people made the connection between the voice and ScarJo, especially since she did something extreme similar in that movie.
Could be coincidental. Could not be. We don’t really have the evidence to say either way, but maybe ScarJo’s suit will affect change so that better rights are granted to people and their digital twins.
A big lawsuit is necessary to set a precedence.
This article is bullshit man, voice is not even that similar, there is 0 proof that’s her voice or even that they asked her if they can use her voice. People is blowing this out of proportion
But they did ask if they could license her voice and she said no. Balls in your court.
And they didn’t use her voice. Article clearly states that she said she is shocked they choose similar voice to her after she declined. It makes sense for open Ai to choose similar one because when they were preparing list of the voices they obviously wanted voice to be of her kind. It’s not like her voice is something so fucking unique she has copyright over all of the similar voices in the world
And despite all your lame denials they are shutting that voice down. Why is that?
Avoiding dramas caused by unreasonable human population
compliance isn’t admission of guilt but again it’s OPENAI.
Because lawsuits are expensive, even when you’re not guilty.
I don’t think they’d be stupid enough to lie about hiring a voice actress for a voice model when they didn’t.
I guess every out of court settlement is an admission of guilt in your eyes? It’s nothing to do with the massive amount of money wasted dealing with legal matters or anything.
The court of public opinion has a much lower burden of proof than the court of law.
If Scarlett Johansson is trying to accuse them of using her voice without consent, do you really think it will only end up in the court of public opinion? My point is that it might escalate to court, which OpenAI might not want to deal with. Backing down in this case is just as much of an admission of guilt as taking a settlement out of court, which is not at all.
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Wtf are you talking about
Not what you or the Supreme Court thinks.
Phew, good thing the courts in the USA - (a country with sadly laughable protections for people’s rights compared to other large developed regions like the EU) - are the only courts in the world, and what they do is the only thing that matters.
Thanks for telling us all what we think, by the way. Where would we be without an American telling us all what we think?
We’re so lucky.
Are you telling me they’re going to assassinate Scarlett Johansson
Welp, we finally have the voice spoofer from Uplink.
“My voice is my passport, verify me.”
Fuck me sometimes I felt like I was the only person on the planet to play that game
Hah, guess there are at least 3 of us here.
Though I found it randomly on Steam, a decadeish after it originally came out.
Do not try to play it in 4k. It’ll work, because its an actually well coded game, but there is no scaling lol. Teeeny Tiny UI.
Introversion habe so far pretty much only knocked out well written games afaik!
Too bad I also came too late to the party to buy the source code discs they sold at the end of its lifetime…
My brother played the heck out of Uplink as a kid; thanks to him, I know about the UplinkOS mod, which makes the game (more) playable at higher resolutions. It looks to be an overhaul of the entire UX, so your mileage may vary, I guess.
Hey, I did not know about that! Thanks!
I can’t not read that in a garbled south african accent.
Shut this shit company down
I doubt they are using Johansson’s voice. I expect they need much more studio-quality training data than they would have for her.
The desire to create a “Her” might be real but explains why they chose a similar voice actress, made Sky the default, and continued to pursue Johansson to some day create the real thing.
Suspending the Sky voice looks guilty but it might be a temporary action while the legal team considers their response. There might be a non-zero risk of being found liable if there were directions in the voice casting process to seek a result comparable to Scarlet Johansson. You’d want to collect and assess correspondence to see if that’s a possibility, which might take a while.
If only she was ever in a situation where her voice was professionally recorded.
Since when would an actress be in front of a camera?
Wtf is this thinking.
Open Ai wouldn’t use something or someone without consent? There’s a plethora of lawsuits and evidence that they did that with pretty much every medium out there.
Wtf is this thinking.
Dispassionate, intellectually honest analysis.
Fine tuning a general TTS model on a specific custom voice doesn’t require as much data as you think it does.
The hard part is building the foundational model that can be easily fine tuned. And OpenAI has already done that.
They could easily make it based on publically available voice data, especially for an actress of her fame. That’s how they were able to create AI versions of Biden’s voice and other famous people.
That doesn’t mean they did, but your first sentence implies they couldn’t have, when they very easily could if they wanted to.
That doesn’t make it legal, let alone ethical. As a performer, her likeness, including her voice, is protected by personality rights. There have been multiple lawsuits over soundalikes in the past.
Oh definitely. If they used her voice in that way, not okay at all. I’m not sure if they have because I keep seeing contradicting arguments, but if they did, 100% agree with you that just because it’s out there, doesn’t mean you can take it and profit on it.
Pursuing a voice to match that of “Her” is a very weird move considering the story it tries to convey
Something, something… don’t ask for permission, ask for forgiveness. Yet, they asked for permission and were denied.
Not sure if they thought they’d get away with it or if they just wanted this publicity. I’m thinking it was their hubris.
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That was kind of random
It’s not. This is their 2nd comment on this thread about some part killing others or wherever vague type comment. I’m assuming this is a bot.
I’m much more concerned about the fact that the voice has simulated emotions behind it, leading people to trust their hallucinating AI even more.
Send a huge bill and then sue for payment. Let them fight the fight for you.
I’ve never seen “her” the movie and at certain inflections all I could hear is Scarlett Johansson’s voice.
Let’s say OpenAI did actually use Scarlett Johansson’s voice. Who owns the audio that OpenAI used? Scarlett Johansson herself or the movie company that used the audio in their movie(s)? This might be a case of Scarlett Johansson vs the movie company, not Scarlett Johansson vs OpenAI, as OpenAI could have paid for them.
If she signed away her likeness rights then probably. However if the contract didn’t have a provision for transfer to another medium then they would revert to her.
Source: Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
I have 4o and it doesn’t sound like her at all.
They disabled Sky’s voice. Also, the full 4o voice model isn’t public yet, just the text aspect of it.
I guess I have the standard Sky voice. But the voices online sound different to me. Voices is subjective.
Why downvote him? He made an observation and comments even explained why. I learned something, it added to the discussion.
That’s the major issue here. Voices and sounds should never be copyrighted. It sets the wrong president.
🔊 Vocal Comparison: ScarJo vs Samantha vs Sky
RedLib link via SafeReddit (privacy protecting)
“unsafe”reddit link
here (old.reddit)
Wish I had time yesterday to do a comparison myself, using better clips from Her and the newest OpenAI demo clips. Plus would get the ChatGPT app to speak some lines from Her.
