If it's true that they used a different actress for The voice, then this should be very easy to put to rest. Just let us hear from the voice actress.
I thought the amount of "Weirdo defending Musk on Twitter' energy for Elon was amazing, but the amount of reality-denial that the OAI defenders have is quite a different beast. They wanted SJ's identity, she declined, they effectively cloned her against her will instead. That's about as sick as you can get. Future really looks bright!
> The Torment Nexus announces it has retained counsel in OpenAI dispute.
> On Sunday OpenAI announced it was removing its new horny robot girlfriend voice, explaining in a blog post that the voice was “not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson” at all (and frankly it’s weird of you even to think that???) but was actually the real human meat voice of a completely different actress who goes to another school, you wouldn’t know her. Also she’s from Canada.
> Recapping the imbroglio, Casey Newton wrote that Sam Altman is full of shit [measured, respectful] and Ed Zitron wrote that Sam Altman is full of shit [angry diatribe]. But with the final departure of co-founder and actual technologist Ilya Sutskever, whose last-ditch effort to oust Altman failed last fall, OpenAI is now firmly under the control of Paul Graham / Marc Andreessen style technofascist incompetents, and this kind of clown show will increasingly be the norm.
There's about a dozen links in there I don't feel like copying but it's easy to find.
Agreed that it's obvious that (assuming there is another voice actress) they found one as close to Scarlett Johansson as possible. That's a dirt bag move. But ~it's not illegal and~ it's not copying if they used a real, different actress. It's Scarlett Johansson's right to refuse her own voice, but it's not her right to prevent anyone else from agreeing.
That voice actress that they used has just as much right to her voice as Scarlett Johansson does to hers. Why should the voice actress not be allowed to work just because she sounds like Johansson? Why shouldn't Johansson be disallowed to work because she sounds like the unnamed voice actress?
Edit: It may indeed be illegal. Thank you child comments
That is simply untrue. Check out the Midler-Ford case, the Tom Waits case as just two examples.
If the intent is to mimic the character, you're in trouble. OpenAI is trying to claim they weren't mimicking Samatha, but you'd have to be a fool to believe that, given the other evidence.
I'm quite torn on whether this is how it ought to be though. If the burden of proof is on showing intent, then I think it's a good balance. If it shifts to just "chance of confusion" like many trademark cases have, that seems pretty unfair to average people and stacked in favor of the rich and famous.
Refs for others:
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co
[2]: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-05-09-me-238-st...
[3]: https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/22/tech/openai-scarlett-johansso...
https://www.expertinstitute.com/resources/case-studies/adver...
https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/using-name-or-likeness-anot...
https://www.tramatm.com/blog/category/other/sound-alikes-5-h...
> That's a dirt bag move. But ~it's not illegal
Experience tells me that everyone loves when someone chooses what the law allows over morality.
Can we acknowledge that immoral acts are often not illegal and illegal acts are often not immoral and then say that it's put to rest that it's obviously and definitely a dirt bag move?
Absolutely! No disagreement from me there.
I would also add that (to me personally) companies choosing what the law allows over what is moral doesn't impress me at all, in fact it lowers (sometimes drastically) my opinion of the company. When companies choose the moral thing over not-illegal-but-gross, especially when it costs them money, it raises them a huge deal in my book. I try to celebrate those decisions when I see them.