Sam Altman Ignoring Scarlett Johansson's Lack of Consent Shows Us Exactly What Type of Person He Really Is
Sam Altman Ignoring Scarlett Johansson's Lack of Consent Shows Us Exactly What Type of Person He Really Is
It sounds like Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, did something interesting last year: he asked Scarlett Johansson for consent.
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You don't own the rights to the voice of every actor who arguably sounds kinda like you. OpenAI had an idea of a type of voice they wanted, when Scarlett said no they hired a voice actor. I mean, what? There are many valid criticisms of Sam and OpenAI don't get me wrong but this is one I just can't get on board with.
I feel like I'm missing something though because so many people are commenting on this as though Scarlett had her own voice used without her consent or something.
They reached out to her a couple days before they launched, and said hey do you want to maybe reconsider that thing where we asked you about this a couple times, and both times you told us to go fuck ourselves
And then they told the media that they were in discussions with her, when the discussions were her lawyer telling them to go fuck themselves
And then Altman tweeted "her"
And then when it launched, it was according to her so freakishly similar that her friends were weirded out by it
If it was some different actress saying hey this sounds a lot like me, that wasn't the one that they clearly had in mind when they were making their plans about it, then I could see a pretty strong argument to say hey relax buddy sometimes different people just sound similar
I don't really know; I'm not familiar enough with movie people to really listen to it and see what I think and I don't care enough to investigate. But just based on the above I feel like probably she has a fairly strong case.
Yeah. Imagine the great advertising and publicity they would get by having it voiced by Scar Jo.
If she would have said yes, they likely would have dropped the similar sounding voice that they had and released it with the other three voice options, got Scar Jo to come do the voicing, and then released her voice like two weeks later.
OpenAI had an idea of a type of voice they wanted
Yep. It was a very specific voice they wanted.
they hired a voice actor
This made me think a little too, but then I started thinking about how people talk. Even if a person's tone is similar, the mannerisms are still drastically different. The voice actor had to spoof Scarletts voice well enough to even fool Scarletts friends.
While I haven't read Altman's tweets (or tweets from someone else at OpenAI?) personally, rumor has it he knew what he was doing with a specific voice actor. The intent was to spoof her voice. The intent is probably more damning than the actual act, TBH.
To summarize, there are a few nuggets here: They approached SJh first with a specific reason to use her voice; Some asshat bragged about spoofing the voice on Twitter; There was clear intent of generating a likeness of SJh.
(Thinking about the broke actors for a second.. /s) Their face and voice are at the core of their career, similar to how company branding is makes a company unique. While I am not a lawyer, it seems there are some parallels with trademark and copyright law here.
"Accidentally" using a voice that sounds like SJh would be a really poor argument now as well.
they hired a voice actor
This made me think a little too, but then I started thinking about how people talk. Even if a person's tone is similar, the mannerisms are still drastically different. The voice actor had to spoof Scarletts voice well enough to even fool Scarletts friends.
I don't get this. Why are you assuming they constructed the voice with only the samples from another voice actress and didn't use any from Johansson? Why are you assuming they used the samples from that voice actress at all and didn't only use samples of Johansson's voice they scraped from all corners of her prolific history of work?
Any random company I would give the benefit of the doubt, but these AI companies have specifically shown they don't care about copyright law specifically or ethics in general, and they definitely have no qualms lying about where they get their data and what they do with it.
If parts were generated, copied or acted it seems somewhat irrelevant. They intended to, and did, generate SJh's likeness, by whatever means, and that is the key point.
But yeah, they probably mixed and matched voice samples to their liking. I wouldn't doubt that for a second. If actual samples were used in the final product, that would be extremely damning.
Ok see this I get. Yes I agree if they did this, it's totally unethical and presumably illegal as well and they should face consequences for that. They claim to have hired voice actors for all their voices though, assuming that's true (maybe a big assumption) I don't think there's an issue but if it's more like what you suggested then it's a big violation.
Yes, "to summarize" indeed.
Yeah most voices aren't even close to unique.