There’s a thing in intellectual property called “passing off” - if your logo and branding is so similar to McDonalds that consumers are likely to think that your product comes from McDonalds, then you’re in breach and will be sued.
Regardless of whether they hired a different actress for the voice model, enough consumers would be convinced “ohhh it’s the same as ScarJo in Her!” which should point to there being an issue with ScarJo’s image rights and likeness, and although the law right now doesn’t explicitly cover AI voice modelling, as soon as this is tested in court it would likely set a precedent. Unless ScarJo lost that case, which seems unlikely.
Think about the voice actor they hired (presuming they did so). Does she not have the right to use her own voice for money merely because she sounds like another, more famous persons?
Intent matters. There's enough evidence out there pointing out to OpenAI's intention to copy Scarlett Johansson's character in "Her". The voice actress could read literally the same lines with the same intonation for (say) Facebook and, as long as she wasn't coached to sound like Scarlett Johansson, it would be fine.
Suppose you turn down a job offer as a programmer. Can you be pissed at me if I offer the job to someone whose code looks like yours based on scraping GitHub?
"Impersonation of a voice, or similarly distinctive feature, must be granted permission by the original artist for a public impersonation, even for copyrighted materials."
Having someone sing in the exact same style as another singer is totally different from what OpenAI did with their voice AI (having a female actor speak in a flirty tone).
It makes sense with music but you're setting a really dangerous precedent if you can't even hire a voice actor who sounds similar for speaking.
It would depend on whether she got the job for having a good voice or for having a voice that is associated with a famous person. Would her voice have the same value if it was not sounding like another famous person's voice? That's up to the courts to decide.
How do you legally define that two voices sound alike? "I know it when I hear it?"
Algorithmically? How much of a similarity score is too much? How much vocabulary must you compare? Suppose two voices sound entirely identical, but one voice has Canadian aboot. Is that sufficient difference?
You can maybe see why the courts wouldn't want to touch this with a 1 kilometer pole
The same way every other IP lawsuit goes does. Same as all the “your song is too similar to mine” lawsuits. The two things are presented, with other evidence, and judge or jury decides.
It’s not up to the courts whether they touch things with a 1km pole or a 1 inch one. The courts have to deal with whatever ends up in them.
Given the courts regularly deal with murder via decapitation or incest, I’m sure “The Case of the Attractive Actress’ Voice” would be a nice day out for them.
Search for videos showing voice actors at work - it's their job to talk in all kinds of voices, accents, intonation patterns and more. I'm sure that the person doing voice acting could also do it in a way that wouldn't sound like ScarJo.
However, the company hiring her might not have the right to use her voice with the intent purpose of passing that voice off as that of the other person.
She is completely unfettered in any roles that do not have that intent.
> However, the company hiring her might not have the right to use her voice with the intent purpose of passing that voice off as that of the other person.
Aren't they very explicitly not doing that? They're saying it isn't her.
I mean, SamA tweeted "Her", as in a reference to the movie "Her" which very famously features Scarlett Johansson's voice. So by not saying precisely who provided the voice actor for the "Sky" voice and ensuring it was either the same as or very similar to Scarlett Johansson, it was obviously going to understood by the users of the app to be Scarlett Johansson herself.
That is, OpenAI was going to end up capitalising from Scarlett Johansson's voice, fame, and notoriety whether it is her exact voice or not, and without her permission.
It would be like me promoting a new AI movie featuring an AI generated character very similar in build and looks to Dwayne The Rock Johnson and promoting the movie by saying "Do you smell what we're cooking?" and then claiming it had nothing to do with The Rock and was just modelled on someone who happened to look like him.
Part of the value of a voice assistant is the voice itself and if OpenAI simply copied that voice from someone, did they really create this value?
Also, the value of a voice comes from (at least partly anyway), the huge amount of work, practice, skill, experience, from training that voice, experience in acting (and voice acting), and the recognition that resulted from all this experience and skill. Her voice wouldn't have "value" if she hadn't trained in acting, auditioned, honed her skills over many years. But OpenAI gets to use all that earned and worked for value for free?
This for me is similar to a writer honing his craft for a lifetime, 1000s of hours of work and labour, then someone training a model using his corpus to write plays and sell them without crediting him or paying him. It's trivial to make a model to imitate a writer, it's not trivial to become that writer to produce that work in the first place, so the writer needs to be both credited and compensated.
> The accusation isn't that they trained on ScarJos voice, it's that they paid a voice actor that sounds like her.
Johansson's accusation did not specify the method. OpenAI claimed they hired another actor and the similarity was unintentional. The 2nd claim seems unlikely. Some disbelieve both claims.
> However, the company hiring her might not have the right to use her voice with the intent purpose of passing that voice off as that of the other person.
Please cite statute.
Generally speaking malicious intent only does not an illegal act make. Last I checked a voice is rightly not a trademarkable thing (it's a quality, not a definable entity).
Wow, damn, that's such a crazy ruling. How distinct is distinct enough? How famous is famous enough? I'm surprised Ford's lawyers didn't press the issue further up the courts.
Yes of course she does. She’s demonstrably copying a certain actress playing the role of an AI here though, but yeah this is one of the points that would have to be duked out in court. Likely as part of the “coincidence” defence.
If they get sued (and I think they will), then it will be interesting to know how said actress was coached. Was she specifically asked to sound like Scarlett Johansson in Her?
Not when it’s an exact imitation of the movie her, in a product that looks exactly like the product in that movie, where the company using the recording is actively trying to convince its customers its scarlet and everyone in the world is convinced its scarlet.
That’s misleading and blatantly illegal.
Someone stole from a bank and your argument is “are you saying it’s illegal withdraw money from a bank with vigor?”
Regardless of whether they hired a different actress for the voice model, enough consumers would be convinced “ohhh it’s the same as ScarJo in Her!” which should point to there being an issue with ScarJo’s image rights and likeness, and although the law right now doesn’t explicitly cover AI voice modelling, as soon as this is tested in court it would likely set a precedent. Unless ScarJo lost that case, which seems unlikely.