OpenAI’s feud with Scarlett Johansson could cost Hollywood AI deals.
OpenAl is sticking to its story that it never intended to copy Scarlett Johansson's voice when seeking an actor for ChatGPT's "Sky" voice mode.
This all “feels personal," the voice actress said, "being that it’s just my natural voice and I’ve never been compared to her by the people who do know me closely.”
This comes at a time when many studios are otherwise intrigued by the idea of using AI for things like digital effects but remain, after a long history of avoiding copyright conflicts, hesitant to connect with any company potentially viewed as stealing artists' work without consent, Reuters reported.
Setting aside whether soundalikes-hyped-as-the-real-deal is a violation of personal likeness rights…
How do we know what voice(s) they actually used? To my understanding, the process atomizes the input such that you can never actually prove what went into it.
Their whole business seems to be one of selling plausible-deniability engines.
I think a huge issue currently is the widespread "AI" hysteria. People kinda want to believe that they did this violation because they already have this negative image of LLMs in their mind from all the overblown headlines & scenarios that they've read.
I'm guessing probably because she was never cast as the friendly-sounding voice of an AI, what with that being something people associated Scarlett Johansson's voice with?
I'm guessing that the multiple people who took over for Bug Bunny's voice after Mel Blanc died were not compared to Mel Blanc before they took on the role.
Maybe, but she also may not have even known that she had that quality when she was hired. Casting directors don't necessarily tell you why you got a role. I did VO for quite some time. Sometimes I knew I was being hired to sound like someone else- generally a fictional character, but occasionally to dub in some dialogue when an actor was unavailable if I could do a good enough impression- but who knows about any of the other times? I've never been compared to Dan Aykroyd, but maybe someone thought I sounded enough like him that I got hired for a role which they wanted a voice like his for. They wouldn't have told me and I wouldn't have asked.
Is that something people associate her with? Everything I've seen her in she sounds pretty dry to me. Even when she's being nice in a role. I can't think of an example where she sounded "friendly".
Yes, people associate her with being the voice of an AI because she played the voice of an AI in a very popular film which won Best Original Screenplay at the Oscars.
Must be nice to operate a business on the bleeding edge where there are no effective requirements or regulations... My, albeit limited, understanding of how these things work is that sometimes no rules are made unless legal challenges like this lawsuit are made. In that way, win or lose, I think it is important to proceed in order to provide definition to a new industry (assuming a lot about functioning legal and legislative systems, lack of corruption, blah blah.. bunch of stuff that doesn't actually exist, etc.).
Tbh, I didn't hear the similarity in the GPT4o demos. Not saying OpenAI did right or wrong, just that I wouldn't have guessed that the Sky voice was meant to be ScarJo.
I don't disagree - I think this lawsuit is likely going to focus more on the fact that OpenAI tried to contract with ScarJo and then specifically got budget ScarJo and that Sam Altman is a dummy hype boi who tweeted a dumb thing right before the presentation. He basically pulled an Elon.