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Comment by bnralt | Hacker News Reader

> Also looking from the perspective of the lesser known voice actress, does Scarlett Johansson have the right to trample the lesser known voice artists future job opportunities by intimidating her previous employers?

Right, it would be one thing if there was evidence that OpenAI asked the actress to imitate Johansson. But people are saying that using this voice actress at all without Johansson's permission shouldn't be legal, which is a bizarre claim. If someone thinks my voice sounds similar to a celebrities, now that celebrity owns my voice? In any other situation, everyone here would think such a standard would be completely outrageous.

(For what it's worth, I didn't find the Sky voice to sound anything like Scarlett Johannson personally)

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Exactly, everyone claiming so hasn't actually listened to it [1], or they're basing their opinion off of "suspicious correlations", like that Altman mentioned "her" just before releasing a voice-interactive AI assistant.

[1] https://x.com/chriswiles87/status/1792909936189378653

Maybe because it's the most famous recent good movie about voice interface AI?

He's wasn't citing Lucy or whatever other garbage.

Some may have listened to it and just have such a poor opinion of OpenAI that they allow it to cloud their judgment. Both voices sound like white women in a similar age group, must be Scarlett Johansson.

> Some may have listened to it and just have such a poor opinion of OpenAI that they allow it to cloud their judgment

I think that's exactly it, or they're critical of all corporations, and they're jumping all over suspicious timelines, like that they tried to convince her 9 months ago and again 2 days before the new release as some kind of evidence of malfeasance.

And not just white women, Rashida Jones is biracial and a lot of people think the voice sounds like hers. I agree that it actually sounds much more like Jones’ than Johansson’s - I think I’d be able to accurately distinguish between Sky and Johansson’s voice just about every time, but I’m not sure I would be able to do the same with Sky and Jone’s.

And as far as I can tell, OpenAI also had 4 different female voices - two from the API, and two in ChatGPT. So there are several different types of voices they covered.

> Rashida Jones is biracial and a lot of people think the voice sounds like hers.

I listened again and you're right, it does sound more like Rashida Jones.

> Exactly, everyone claiming so hasn't actually listened to it

Completely false. Even the journalists at the launch of "Sky" last year were singling it out of the batch of voices, and specifically asking OA about how it sounded like Johansson: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/25/chatgpt...

You mean people who are incentivized to stir up controversy were trying to stir up controversy? I'm shocked. This is definitely not a case where self interest would cloud anyone's judgment.

In case it's not clear, my moderately low opinion of Open AI is bested only by my even lower opinion of journalists.

The article says it sounded "somewhat similar." It doesn’t sound like anyone mistook it for Johansson, or thought it was the same voice:

> The new personas for ChatGPT are named Sky, Ember, Breeze, Juniper and Cove. Each of the personas has a different tone and accent. “Sky” sounds somewhat similar to Scarlett Johansson, the actor who voiced the AI that Joaquin Phoenix’s character falls in love with in the movie “Her.” Deng, the OpenAI executive, said the voice personas were not meant to sound like any specific person.

No one said it was identical (and OA is rebutting a strawman when they expostulate on how they trained on a real human voice actress, which is not what Johansson's statement accused them of to begin with).

The point is here is someone who 'actually listened to it' at the debut long ago, and immediately asked the OA people about it. I don't know what more you want for similarity. They launched several voices, without any of the mentions of Johansson or _Her_ that have been brought up here or the controversy, and back then and there, on the spot, people felt the need to ask about how one sounded 'somewhat similar' to Scarlett Johansson specifically.

I would bet these charitable readings of OA intentions are going to get wiped away by some internal emails found during discovery. It does sound like Mr. Altman was talking about it publicly in a tweet, it’s probable there are internal comms about this.

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