Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/20/scarlett-johansson-denied-openai-the-right-to-use-her-voice-for-chatgpt-they-used-it-anyway.html
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Of course they did… 
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Point of order: Everything that comes out of a “generative AI” is a hallucination. Sometimes, by accident, that hallucination is vaguely congruent with reality, and we call that a success. The model does not know this, and is incapable of caring.
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Didn’t someone from OpenAI say they employed a voice actor to produce this voice? I get being pissed about having your voice/likeness impersonated by having your performances/appearances scraped without consent, but if this is indeed based on a voice actor’s performance employed for purpose then is there really a problem here?
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IANAL
In questions of law like this, a usual standard applied is “would a reasonable person believe…” and finish the sentence with the case at hand. In Johansson’s case:
“I was shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference,” she said
So yeah, a reasonable person - even reasonable people who know exactly what she sounds like - would believe.
Given that OpenAI approached her and asked for permission, it’s obvious permission matters for something here. They didn’t get it.
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Intellectual property laws (like, you know, most laws) protect whoever has the most expensive lawyer, so Open AI’s position is not surprising.
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Are you asking if there is anything wrong with what OpenAI did or if there was anything illegal in what they did? There’s likely not any copyright violation. There’s probably a good argument for some kind of rights of publicity violation (the rights of people to protect the use of their name, image, and likeness…Johansson’s voice, or a good facsimile of it, would fall under this), but that’s going to be state law, and I don’t know what those laws are exactly for California or whatever state would be appropriate. But “is there a problem here” is a much broader question, and I would say yes. They asked for her permission to use her voice. She said no. They asked again right before launch, and she again said no. And then they went ahead and released this with a voice that sounds very much like hers. Whether they actually trained the AI on her voice or not is irrelevant. What they did was wrong, even if it was legal.
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- MICROSOFT
- SAG-AFTRA
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voters
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My guess would be that they were training their AI to imitate her voice before it even occurred to them to ask her for permission.
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Frito-Lay once asked Tom Waits to do a commercial for them. He declined. They hired someone to do their very best Tom Waits impersonation for the commercial instead. Waits successfully sued them for several million dollars.
In this case, they made several public references to the movie “Her” in anticipation and clearly both intended Johansson to provide the voice and were creating the expectation she would, for a promotional product (i.e. effectively a commercial). I also wouldn’t remotely take their claim that they used a different voice actor at face value - if they were expecting her to sign off on it a couple days before launch, they didn’t have time for an alternate plan, and OpenAI have been caught fudging facts and disingenuously claiming ignorance in the past…
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A well-established problem long before the AI era
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I don’t doubt that it’s a thing they did, and shame on them, but what is this supposed to be about?
I feel like I’m missing some context here. Why would this guy go to the trouble of trying to be sneaky like this if Altman is then going to just straight-up blurt out “her” an hour later?
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These grifters will eventually kill us all.
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Given that they tried to get her to change her mind days before launch, it seems far more likely that they just trained the AI on samples of her voice.
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Altman says it isn’t her, and he’s sorry they didn’t communicate better.
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Oh well that’s that then. I mean…he couldn’t be completely full of shit, could he?
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Glitch is a perfectly usable word for what their LLM apps do when they’re wildly off…
Although bug might be more accurate for an inherent problem.
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Well, it obviously isn’t literally her. Just as obviously, he really really wanted a chatbot that sounded just like her and it hardly seems credible that the chatbot they ended up creating just happened to sound exactly like the actress he wanted to emulate.
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