41 replies
1d3h
The actual Sky voice actor was interviewed and, surprise, she sounds way more like the OpenAI voice than Scarlett.
That said, this is certainly a problem we will see in the future.
41 replies
1d3h
This is a good example of the case Scarlett Johansson has against OpenAI
30 replies
1d2h
... and that the Washington Post just comprehensively refuted, finding the voice actor and reviewing contemporaneous documentation showing that they were hired months before Johansson was ever contacted.
20 replies
1d2h
That…doesn’t refute the case at all.
It, at best, makes it slightly less likely that the original intent was commercial imitation, but it doesn’t do anything to refute the case that that’s what the ultimate use was. Adding one extra round to the back and forth of how they got to that point doesn’t really change anything important.
18 replies
1d2h
These are a lot of words that don't do anything to change the fact that the voice alleged to be an imitation of SJ is in fact the natural speaking voice of a professional voice actor hired months before OpenAI contacted SJ, in an open call that mentioned nothing at all about SJ or "Her".
5 replies
1d2h
Don’t get too hung up on facts like that. If it goes to court you will have an extraordinarily likable actress standing up to a giant soulless tech company. Good luck finding a jury sympathetic to the tech company.
All SJ has to do is show that they wanted her and plant the idea that they may have been thinking of her when they hired the other actor. The end results sounds enough like her that I think OpenAI is going to have a very rough time in court.
I think the chances of this getting to court are almost nothing. OpenAI will replace the voice and settle with SJ.
Remember the Blurred Lines vs Got to Give It Up lawsuit? I personally think they sound way different yet Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams lost that one.
4 replies
1d1h
All SJ has to do is show that they wanted her and plant the idea that they may have been thinking of her when they hired the other actor. The end results sounds enough like her that I think OpenAI is going to have a very rough time in court.
Wait, are you alleging that an individual has a right to faithful imitations of their voice, as well as to their actual performance?
So if I do a really good Morgan Freeman impression and I want to use that voice for a voiceover that I make, and I intentionally do an impression, he should have the right to tell me I cannot use the voiceover that I made, because I intended it to sound like Mr Freeman? Even if there is no intent to mislead and it's rightfully credited etc (not like the Tom Waits situation in TFA where the ad was intended to deceive)
What stops that from extending to parody? Should Sarah Palin be able to sue Tina Fey for the impression on SNL all those years ago?
If all it boils down to is >The end results sounds enough like her
this starts to sound like celebrities with sufficient popularity and clout can trademark likenesses that are sufficiently similar to them. So is the voice actor who happens to sound like Scarlett Johnansson but is insufficiently famous not allowed to use their own voice in recordings because it might sound too much like the famous person?
Absurd absurd absurd
3 replies
1d
Context is king here.
Nobody would confuse Tina Fey for Sarah Palin, while it would be possible for someone hearing the "Sky" voice combined with the "Her" aside to assume it was SJ providing the voice.
Again it would be up to a jury to decide, but there are plenty of previous cases decided in the artists favor that any sane lawyer would be uneasy taking it in front of a jury.
2 replies
1d
Nobody would confuse Tina Fey for Sarah Palin
Surprisingly many people think "I can see Russia from my house" is a thing the real Palin said.
1 replies
20h39m
Well, she actually did say "They're our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska." So, it's pretty close to a real thing Palin said.
0 replies
19h57m
But that part is true (it's just "Russia" and "Alaska" aren't the mainlands of either), the Diomede Islands are close enough together that you can see the Russian one from the US one.
3 replies
1d2h
It being the “natural speaking voice” of the voice actor is immaterial to what the intent or effect was when it was publicly used, which is what is legally relevant. Yes, that they didn’t record the intent to imitate at the time of the selection is absence of evidence of intent at that time, which is, viewed extremely generously, very weak evidence of absence of intent at that time, but…that’s it.
You seem to be looking at this as if right of publicity were like copyright, where what is essentially protected is, well, the act of copying.
Right of publicity is a separate area of law, but it is more like trademark than copyright. The mechanism by which a resemblance which is commercially leveraged is attained is not relevant.
2 replies
1d1h
But it doesn't sound that much like her, and wasn't positioned publicly in a way that in any way touches on right of publicity considerations. The Midler reasoning also rested on how much of the artist's brand recognition (though that's not the term used) was in the voice. Intentional impression of a singer doing that singer's song is very different than "they hired someone with moderately similar vocal features to ScarJo and Rashida Jones to speak in their own voice."
1 replies
1d
Except many, many people including a lot of HNers thought Johannson had done the voice. That is exactly what Midler tort is.
0 replies
1d
People mistaking one person's real voice for another person's real voice is basically nothing like what happened in the Midler case.
The Midler case was a vocal impersonation using one of Midler's songs. As discussed in the Midler case, where there's an imitation of the voice, one of the keys is also how much of the likeness/recognition/brand of the person is tied up in their voice, and that's substantially different between a singer's voice on their own song vs. an actress's voice. And given that it's not an impression/impersonation, and literally sounds more like another famous actress than it does ScarJo? This is a great example of facts you'd give to show where the Midler precedent doesn't apply — it's certainly in no way "exactly" like Midler.
3 replies
1d1h
Agreed. Not only does it not sound like SJ, at all, it’s someone else’s actual voice. Would this voice actor then be barred from doing voice acting? None of it makes sense.
2 replies
1d
Would this voice actor then be barred from doing voice acting?
That's where this has always gotten odd to me. There's obvious impersonation, sure, but what if this same actress wanted to e.g. be the Major in a new Ghost in the Shell dub? Is she responsible for making sure everyone who hires her very definitely isn't hiring her as a soundalike if she wants her work to get released?
I'm sure it would be fine in reality, but if saying "her" (when advertising an app you can have a conversation with) is enough to make this impersonation, then the same logic says she's barred from certain roles (or categories of role) because someone more famous got there first.
1 replies
22h0m
Bette Midler sued Ford for hiring an impersonator. She lost in the circuit court and won on appeal. The fact pattern in the appeal was that Ford had explicitly asked their actress to "sound as much as possible like Bette Midler". That's exactly what didn't happen here: not only did they not ask the actor to impersonate SJ or her character from "Her", they didn't even mention SJ. The actor used her natural speaking voice.
0 replies
14h53m
However knowing saying such a thing would be problematic they would be looking for workarounds. Considering they did giver her directions and the end result was closer to ‘her’ than the voice accesses natural voice they didn’t need to ask for a specific impersonation for people to make the connection.
I’m thinking of a number, bigger, no smaller. Keep playing the game and the end result is arbitrarily close to the number you’re thinking of.
The search space for generic seductive female voice is huge and they happened to end up with one that objectively sounds like someone they tried to recruit. They can’t argue random chance at this point.
1 replies
1d2h
It sounds like you're skeptical that ScarJo will be entitled to compensation should this go to court?
Would you be willing to bet a small sum on this?
0 replies
1d1h
I would. They'd probably settle just to get the distraction out of the way, but I'd be willing to bet that if it's decided in court, ScarJo would lose.
1 replies
1d
Why would Altman, two days before they went live, feel the need to try to get her to agree a second time if they'd done what you had said and used another voice actor?
Of course they didn't mention "sound like SJ" in the casting call - it might as well say "Please violate Midler tort." Actors wouldn't do it, casting agencies wouldn't do it. She / her agency would have found out almost immediately, and C&D'd them into the ground within hours.
I'm not sure why you're believing OpenAI when they say that the voice actor is who they actually used, and not that after bringing in the voice actor, they didn't just toss the recordings aside, have an intern collect clips of SJ in interviews, and throw that in to the machine?
Altman has a long history of demonstrating incredibly poor morals. Stop taking anything he says at face value.
0 replies
5h44m
If it was created from ScarJo's voice to sound like her, then it was done badly, because it lacks her voice's most distinctive feature and sounds more like Rashida Jones than it does ScarJo.
0 replies
1d2h
That completely refutes the case. There is no imitation. There was no intent to bypass Scarlett saying “no”. It doesn’t even sound that much like her.
6 replies
1d2h
And yet the CEO of OpenAI tweeted a reference to the character she played[0], and a co-founder of OpenAI less than 24 hours later tweeted "The killer app of LLMs is Scarlett Johansson."[1]
Yeah, not really damning evidence either way but it certainly looks like, according to their own words, OpenAI intended to use her as marketing.
4 replies
1d2h
It's probably the CEO just clumsily stumbled into the comparison.
He was probably not personally aware she was contacted, and it just so happened that his dumb movie reference hit a nerve.
The alternative is that he knew they were ripping off Scarlett Johansson and then publicly compared them. Which seems too stupid to be true.
2 replies
1d2h
The alternative is that he knew they were ripping off Scarlett Johansson and then publicly compared them. Which seems too stupid to be true.
People, even Silicon Valley CEOs, doing things that seem “too stupid to be true”, happens a lot more than most people think.
0 replies
1d
Washington Post rated this the sixth stupidest thing a tech CEO has done recently: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/05/21/chatgpt...
0 replies
1d1h
The problem is, a lot of conspiracy thinking relies on people being publicly stupid and careless, then privately extremely cautious and careful. The Washington Post looks at what was happening internally when the voice was created, and finds that the casting call didn’t ask for anyone who sounds like Johansson, and the actress wasn’t told to sound like her or imitate anything from Her. People say, “That doesn’t mean anything, maybe they were just keeping their intent hidden!”
OK, but then they openly blast it all over Twitter? If you’re so open about what you’re trying to do with everyone in the world, yet you didn’t bother mentioning to the voice actress who’s supposedly going to implement this?
0 replies
1d2h
I think we should retire the phrase “too stupid to be true” at this point. I think many of these CEOs are just as stupid as the rest of us, except they have a special interest in something really profitable.
I didn’t really think it sounded much like Johansson, but it looks like OpenAI decided to pull the voice(?). They are in a better position to evaluate their liabilities (or the PR cost of having the perception that are ripping her off, whether or not it is right). Hopefully they’ll add it back, Johansson doubles down, and then we can get a court case to satisfy everybody. Both entities have plenty of money to spend on this, having them battle it out seems like a real win. (It would have been a real shame if a small no-name voice actor without the cash to fight OpenAI felt copied instead).
0 replies
23h40m
Those tweets were made on May 13th and 14th, so they’re pretty clearly in reference to 4o, and the effort to make the chat seem more lifelike (similar to the AI in the movie “Her”). The Sky voice came out last year, and it doesn’t seem like anyone at the company referenced “Her” when it did (from what I can find).
The voice chat didn’t seem to be particularly well publicized. People mention how after the 4o announcement, many people started voice chatting for the first time (and mistaking it for 4o voice chat) because they hadn’t realized the voice chat was there before.
0 replies
1d1h
All of which is irrelevant, since the Waits case is about impersonation of likeness, not stealing likeness.
OpenAI might have had a leg to stand on if their CEO hadn't gone on the internet and blasted out "Her" when advertising the Sky voice, and another co-founder had not specifically name-dropped using SJ to market their voice product. (And reading the WaPo article, they hired a film director to handle the voice recording, and the individual in charge of artistic decision-making, apparently an avid Her fan, was conveniently not made available to interview...Hm...)
0 replies
1d2h
A truly convenient piece for a company so transparent and demonstrably trustworthy.
7 replies
1d1h
Tom Waits has a 1 in a billion voice. I'm fairly confident most people couldn't pick Scarlett Johansson's voice out of a lineup of 10 random 35 year old female professional voice actors.
5 replies
1d1h
You'd be wrong. We're almost as good at recognizing voices as we are at recognizing faces.
Recently I had a friend message me to ask me if it was me asking a question at a recorded event with audience questions that they were watching on YouTube (the camera only showed the stage, not audience members at the microphones).
They had absolutely no reason to think I would have been at that particular event.
And I told them, yup -- it was me asking that question a few years ago.
And there is nothing particularly distinctive about my voice. If anything, my voice is probably particularly generic. But it's just timbre, accent, and the unique "fingerprint" of my particular vocal personality.
4 replies
1d
I don't think I would be.
How many hours has your friend heard you talk? How many hours has the average person heard Scarlett talk? Coupled with the fact that Scarlett is acting when people generally hear her voice, which means some aspects of her vocal qualities change(black widow doesn't sound exactly like her character from Her)
3 replies
22h6m
It has nothing to do with hours of exposure. You don't need time to learn someone's voice, in the same way you don't need time to recognize their face.
And obviously we're talking about "normal" voices as opposed to impressions or accents. But we still recognize voices even if the voice is doing a wide range of emotions. The same way we don't stop recognizing someone's face when they change from a smile to a frown.
2 replies
20h50m
Recognizing someone has everything to do with hours of exposure. Which is why people are better at picking their mother out of a crowd rather than a random person who they were shown a picture of once.
I'm beginning to wonder if you've ever considered your interactions with other people, or if you're just making this up as you go along.
1 replies
4h50m
No, you're talking about something different.
We certainly have memory, and can forget people, like a random person we were once shown a picture of. And pictures are not 3D faces either.
But if you meet someone for half an hour and then run into them later that day, you recognize them just as easily as you do your mother. There's zero doubt that they are the person you met earlier (unless you have face blindness or something). You don't have to meet them for 10 more hours to be able to recognize them instantly.
Sure you might forget them a year later but that has nothing to do with your recognition capabilities, but with memory.
0 replies
2h52m
Ok, and how often does an average person hear Scarlett's voice that they would recognize her voice when they hear a random voice? This isn't a situation where someone hears a Scarlett voice sample, and then compares it to Sky. This is, someone has heard Scarlett randomly in movies over the past 20 years and then recognizes Scarlett as Sky.
Which, given the fact that the voice actor for Sky has put out a statement stating that her voice has never been compared to Scarlett's in real life, makes me think that people are just hallucinating that Sky sounds like Scarlett. For what it is worth, I listened to them side by side(before OpenAI put out a statement by the voice actor) and they are not the same voice.
0 replies
1d1h
Yeah. I imagine her case against OpenAI would be much stronger if she had spent decades on a strict diet of whiskey, candy, and gravel. (Not legal advice.)
1 replies
1d1h
A better one is Bette Middler vs Ford:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
(TLDR; Ford licenses a Bette Midler track and gets a sound-a-like to perform it for a commercial after Bette Midler refuses to participate. Midler sues and wins)
0 replies
23h38m
Midler is actually the foundation for Waits. The appeal hinged in part on whether Midler was still valid precedent (the court ruled it was):
In sum, our holding in Midler, upon which Waits' voice misappropriation claim rests, has not been eroded by subsequent authority.
31 replies
1d3h
Funny timing as I just revisited the brilliant "Step Right Up" (and the entire Small Change album) a few days ago, and had no idea about this case. Glad Tomcat won. Can't help but see some parallels between this and current Scarlett Johansson vs. OpenAI debacle.
My very favourite line, among many, from "Step Right Up": __The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.__
13 replies
1d1h
The logical parallels might be there but in legal substance they are different cases. A deliberate replication of an artist's distinct singing voice, while singing lyrics associated with that artist, is very different than a passing similarity to someone's non-unique speaking voice. Note that the Johansson issue is playing out only in the court of public opinion.
4 replies
1d
If you think they weren't trying to replicate sj's voice, I can only assume you've got open ai stock clouding your judgement... It looks like they caaaaarefully avoided writing down 'sound like sj' while choosing+directing a sound-alike actor for the role.
2 replies
1d
> If you think they weren't trying to replicate sj's voice
Coevolution. The AI and the now-famous actor are the end products of a selection process aimed at a similar audience. The AI creators were likely aiming for the most attractive female voice, according to a bunch of young men. That parallels the process used by those casting action movies, which are also aimed at young men. It should be to nobody's great surprise that the end products of both share many features.
What is very odd is how similar celeb faces actually are. There really is a mathematical standard for beauty when it comes to female faces, which is why so many celebs are have eerily identical proportions. There is probably a model too for voices.
https://gotobeauty.com/plastic-surgery/how-math-shapes-moder...
1 replies
20h13m
Coevolution. The AI and the now-famous actor are the end products of a selection process aimed at a similar audience
This might hold water if the actor weren't famous for more than a decade before the voice model existed
0 replies
3h45m
2003’s Lost In Translation opening scene would like a word.
0 replies
1h43m
There's already a well established pattern of corporations carefully not writing down things they don't want to be discovered in a lawsuit.
4 replies
1d
Non-unique? What?
"Passing similarity"? All her friends and coworkers say it sounds like her - she describes being contacted by friends who thought she'd done it. A lot of the public, including HNers, identified the voice as hers, independently - not in some A/B test, but they heard it and said to themselves "Johanasson did the voice for this."
You're the only person in the room who thinks OpenAI didn't use samples of her voice for their voice model - or that the voice has "passing similarity."
Altman approached her asking her to do it. She refused; they went ahead and did it anyway, probably using interviews since the audio would be very clean - and two days before they went live with it, Altman tried to negotiate a second time and was rebuffed. Released it anyway.
Why would Altman feel the need to panic-negotiate a second time, days before they went live, if they hadn't used her voice for it?
If OpenAI designed it to sound like her, that's Midler tort. They actually used her voice to train it, which means Midler tort and more. The question will be how much more - I hope they get sued into the ground.
3 replies
23h31m
You're the only person in the room who thinks OpenAI didn't use samples of her voice for their voice model
Really? No one seems to be claiming that anywhere I've seen.
We know that they really did use a voice actress, and that it really is her actual voice, and that she was hired for it before ScarJo was approached. There's no "panic negotiation" there -- the most panic needed would be if someone internally identified that there could be a PR issue if people mistakenly thought it was close enough to seem like intentional impersonation.
Of course they wanted ScarJo, once they thought of it! It'd be great publicity. But that doesn't then mean that anyone who sounds somewhat like ScarJo (but certainly not identical) becomes retroactively unusable or makes it vocal impersonation.
2 replies
16h34m
But that doesn't then mean that anyone who sounds somewhat like ScarJo (but certainly not identical) becomes retroactively unusable or makes it vocal impersonation.
yes. yes it does. That's what TFA is saying. Waits' case is exactly about this. They hired a singer to make a recording to sound like Waits. OpenAI hired a voice actress with a voice like Her to make their AI sound like Her. And then their CEO tweeted "her". It's that simple.
1 replies
15h58m
Ford hired a singer to impersonate Waits in a parody of a Waits song in his exact style.
OpenAI hired a voice actress with a pleasant, low, breathy voice who shares a hint of a regional accent with ScarJo to be one of a bunch of voices for their models. Eight months after releasing it, the CEO tweeted "her." It's not illegal to hire someone who sounds a bit like a celebrity for something, and certainly not one who literally sounds more like a different celebrity (Rashida Jones).
This isn't a violation of rights of publicity for a number of reasons, but the most dispositive of them is that she doesn't actually sound that much like ScarJo. There's no vocal fry! That's the most distinctive part of her voice!
0 replies
2h43m
I hate to commit the fallacy of ad hominem, but I wonder if you’re being deliberately obtuse.
0 replies
2h52m
Interesting that the OpenAI astroturfing brigade is coming out of the woodwork. You do know of course that they asked to clone her voice. And when she said no did it anyway, then asked again immediately before release, and then Sam tweeted that it was her?
0 replies
20h17m
Note that the Johansson issue is playing out only in the court of public opinion
It takes a while to get a lawsuit going. According to the article, Waits learned about the ad on October 3, 1988, filed a suit in November 1988, and the case was tried before a jury in April and May 1990.
0 replies
12h43m
There's another case with bette Midler and I think it was a Superbowl ad. They approached Midler, she said no, they hired a sounds like, she sued and won.
With sj, they approached her 6 months ago, she declined, and again just prior to launch to which she didn't respond. And Sam tweets one word 'her'.
This is a slam dunk and they will lose.
9 replies
18h22m
I love Tom Waits, but I always just assumed he was doing an impression of the other raspy blues artists that came before like
Willie Williams https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1KV51qIdI0
Howlin Wolf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ri7TcukAJ8
or Screamin Jay Hawkins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kGPhpvqtOc
It surprises me a little because the Dorito commercial sounds like a fairly generic blues backing track and a raspy voiced singer. From the article, there's an indication that Doritos was looking to replicate the sound and feel of the song, and they were aware of the legal concern. But to me it kind of sounds like Tom Waits is doing an impersonation, the Doritos song is doing an impersonation, but it's not totally obvious from the song that the Doritos impersonation necessarily goes via Tom Waits rather than back to the original source material.
3 replies
15h47m
Also, Captain Beefheart.
1 replies
6h45m
A man of culture I see. Yeah, any of Captain Beefheart's more bluesy numbers he is doing thr same thing.
Like Plastic Factory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soV8IcTzuj8
0 replies
3h9m
Totally underrated record. Trout Mask Replica gets all the love, but that one's an utter banger.
0 replies
5h13m
But without Beefheart's Little Richard genes
1 replies
12h29m
Did you read the link?
The commercial was using a tom waits song sung by an artist who impersonated Tom waits and the folks involved discussed the potential legal implications and did it anyways.
0 replies
6h49m
I did read the article and listened to the Doritos song as I mentioned in my comment. I agrree the statements about how they came up with the song are damning, as I mentioned. But they aren't doing a Tom Waits song.
0 replies
15h24m
I used to imitate Tom Waits when I'd play Tom Waits songs on the piano. And Leonard Cohen when I played his songs. But after 30 years of smoking I finally achieved my long term goal of just sounding like a cross between the two of them without trying. You can't really own smoker's growl. The best you can do is rent it for a few years.
0 replies
17h37m
I didn't read the case, but in a lot of these type of cases, there are memos or emails that make the case more than if you were just listening to the commercial. Like in the Scarlett Johansson case where they reached out to her to do the voice. The may have had internal memos that called the commercial the "Tom Waits Commercial" or the like. They may have had internal legal memos advising that they could be sued, etc.
0 replies
6h15m
No, he's been doing his own thing, but he's drawn inspiration from, or payed homage to, blues, jazz, r&b, bar pianists, country and so on.
See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG0p2JHcsQ0 . It's playful, original, pulls from a lot of previous artistic work.
Later on he does the soundtrack for The Black Rider, changes record label and gets the freedom to dabble in post-punk and weirder stuff.
1 replies
1d3h
Her debut solo album was Waits and Waits/Brennan covers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anywhere_I_Lay_My_Head
Eclectic choices even for Waits songs. Though I'd like to hear her take on Poor Edward or Fish And Bird or Soldier's Things
0 replies
4h0m
Speaking of which, Waits name drops KCRW Morning Becomes Eclectic which is still an outstanding way to hear new music.
0 replies
4h54m
Tired of being the life of the party
Change your shorts, change your life
Change your life, change into a 9 year old Hindu boy and get rid of your wife
0 replies
1d
I've got the same favorite line, it's pretty durable!
0 replies
1h30m
Yet another weird parallel: Scarlet Johansson did a cover album of Tom Waits songs in 2008
0 replies
1d1h
Can't help but see some parallels between this and current Scarlett Johansson vs. OpenAI debacle.
I think that's why this was posted... I saw it referenced in a comment on that thread.
0 replies
20h1m
Thank you for reminding me about Step Right Up. I recall hearing this on NPR and rushing home to download this on Limewire at least 20 years ago.
19 replies
1d2h
There is a very strong music copyright system in the US and in the Tom Waits case they had both music and voice impersonation. In Sky situation a person who sounds similar to Scarlet also sounds similar to some % of humanity as well. But no creative work of Scarlet was infringed upon. You can’t protect just a voice. People are born with it and if that was possible, many people on TikTok would liable for sounding like some celebrity. Being a celebrity doesn’t entitle you to a share of income from anyone who sounds like you and broadcasts.
10 replies
1d2h
They didn't infringe on a Tom Waits song, they got an impersonator to sing an entirely novel song.
My take is that for a certain cohort of AI hypersters and Sam fans, it is literally impossible for OpenAI to do wrong. Sam could probably shoot a man in cold blood on national television and we'd have somebody explaining how technically it's legal because reasons.
9 replies
1d1h
And similarly, some people are always hungry for an opportunity to villanize OpenAI. This kind of polarized, black-and-white thinking is not productive.
4 replies
1d1h
Neither is false balance or enlightened centrism. The point of the GP is that we shouldn't worshipping these companies. They're not your Lord.
3 replies
1d
Yes, and the point of the "enlightened centrist" is that bad actions by a company don't mean that any complaints thrown at them are automatically valid, or that every employee at the company is acting maliciously. Pledging your allegiance to a megacorp is bad, but thinking that the court of public opinion is always correct is just as foolish.
2 replies
1d
We're not talking about any complaint, we're talking about a specific complaint. In the other thread there are about a dozen OpenAI fanboys saying the OpenAI copycat is different from the Ford copycat for a reason which is refuted by the Tom Waits case; the Tom Waits impersonator wasn't singing a Tom Waits song, they were singing about chips.
1 replies
1d
I'm not. Your comment said that, for a certain group of superfans, OpenAI can do no wrong and will always be biased in their favour. nsvd added that other people want to see OpenAI fail and will view anything regarding them negatively. I'm just elaborating on that. For one reason or another, this discourse has become personal for many people - the specific complaints don't matter, many people will be coming in with preconceived notions no matter what.
0 replies
20h0m
The claim is that Sam fanboys would defend Sam in any circumstance, not that Sam is guilty in any circumstance. The distinction shouldn't require explaination. If you're confused, then ask the chatbot to explain it to you.
3 replies
1d
OpenAI hasn't made it hard. Releasing ChatGPT has made a lot of peoples' lives worse, and their bait and switch from non-profit to profit are just the tip of the iceberg.
2 replies
1d
Wait whos lives are made worse by ChatGPT? I have not yet seen a claim like this
1 replies
22h25m
Teachers, for starters.
0 replies
20h57m
Ok I can see that teachers cant tell if a student has written an essay or used ChatGPT but how is that materially different from students paying for other people to write their essays? Its cheaper and easier? I knew students who payed for essays well before ChatGPT existed.
Any other examples? Not trying to defend OpenAI just interested in this idea that it has actually made anyones lives worse.
5 replies
1d1h
There is a very strong music copyright system in the US and in the Tom Waits case they had both music and voice impersonation.
The article explicitly mentions the Tom Waits case did not include a copyright component as he didn't own the copyright, and Frito-Lay probably obtained synch rights from the copyright owner.
Tom Waits won the suit without invoking copyright violations - read into that what you may.
4 replies
1d1h
Bette Midler won a similar case where Ford licensed a Midler track and got a sound-a-like to perform it for a commercial.
If OpenAI's lawyers thought they were going to get away with it then OpenAI needs to get better lawyers.
1 replies
23h36m
Rick Astley v. Hauri is a recent case in the same vein: https://unicourt.com/case/ca-la23-richard-rick-paul-astley-v...
This one is unique because Hauri (aka "Yung Gravy") is another music artist. The Midler case is actually mentioned in the court filings, too.
It's interesting to think about the blurry line between art and commercial products.
0 replies
22h30m
Huh TIL, I like the song in question interestingly enough (Yung Gravy - Betty) but didn't know that the Rick Astley bit wasn't actually his voice.
0 replies
1d
then OpenAI needs to get better lawyers.
Part of being a good lawyer is sometimes "well, this didn't work in 1992 (or whatever) but it might fly now. Let's try it, worst case is X". And, as always, the devil is in the details.
0 replies
1d1h
Huge disanalogies between the Midler case and this. Certainly not clear in its applicability.
0 replies
1d
If you made me take the Pepsi challenge, I probably would not be able to distinguish most similarly-aged Hollywood actress's voices from one another in a blind test. No matter how distinct they start out, hanging around LA seems to turn their voices very similar: Young, white woman, slightly Californian accent, singsong vocal inflections, a little valley girl, a little vocal fry... After a few years, a lot of them kind of start sounding the same.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were literally thousands of voice actors that sounded close enough to any given actress to pass as her.
0 replies
23h48m
You can’t protect just a voice.
I'm pretty sure this is exactly why TFA was posted—apparently you can, in fact, protect a voice under California law. Of the $2.6 million in damages awarded in TFA $2 million were for "voice misappropriation".
This seems to be the relevant section of the civil code:
18 replies
1d2h
Tom Waits did some advertising work when he narrated a dog food commercial [1], but I think his artistic integrity is still intact considering all he did was a voiceover (no singing). In true Tom Waits fashion, when he was asked about why he did it, his response was "I was down on my luck and I like dogs". One of the things I love about Tom Waits is that his interviews are just as entertaining as his songs.
13 replies
1d1h
The advertisers are banking on your credibility, but the problem is it's no longer yours.
I think nowadays, the idea that doing a commercial damages your artistic integrity is considered sort of an anachronism. For better and worse, I guess, and largely driven by the consequences of technology in any case. But, a similar lawsuit today would probably be about damaging the monetary value of the artist's brand, rather than about damaging their artistic credibility per se, as it was with Waits at the time.
It used to be a truism that taking money from sponsors changed your allegiances, and changed the nature of your art. For the worse. Whether time has been proven that true or false is an exercise for the reader. Point is, that's where Waits seems to be coming from. It's not about "they didn't pay me first," it's about the commercial diminishing his credibility because it looks like he might have agreed to do it in the first place.
11 replies
1d
is considered sort of an anachronism.
I'm not sure this is true. It was always the case that these things were contextual and based a lot on how the artist/musician/author presented themselves. The whole idea of "selling out" is predicated on the assumption you have some high ground to give up, or at least that the action you are taking would undermine strongly held beliefs of your fan base.
When popularity swings more to (obviously) commercially driven output, there is plenty of selling, but less selling "out", as it were. The pendulum will likely swing again.
7 replies
23h48m
Are you saying the actual anachronism is that artists are even associated with credibility, integrity, or authenticity to sell out in the first place? If so, I guess that's a more precise way of saying why selling out isn't a thing anymore.
Personally, I think it's more a change in how artists view themselves in relation to the market—and how audiences view them as well—and that artists can still stay true to that understanding and have it be a kind of ethos... just a very different one than we had when I formed my opinions on music.
What I'm saying is, artists can still perform acts of betrayal, and lose their credibility to their audience. So, they must have some to lose it. It's more that licensing their music is not one of those acts anymore.
5 replies
21h55m
Are you saying the actual anachronism is that artists are even associated with credibility, integrity, or authenticity to sell out in the first place?
ska can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think what ska is saying is that the focus of the population is currently on artists who don't value their authenticity.
There remain many artists who are associated with authenticity, but they've lost the focus of the general population (for now).
2 replies
21h26m
Yes, that's close to what I had in mind. I don't think it's even so much that the (popular) artists don't value their authenticity is that it isn't part of the conversation as much because it's not in tension with the work they are doing. At other times, there is more tension.
1 replies
20h9m
Their personal view of their authenticity is not at conflict with selling the sound track to a commercial is all. I would bet largely it's quite the opposite, they wouldn't be the authentic them if they didn't take the payout.
There are certainly some genres where the audience values this sense of authenticity of course. That and people like Waits who actively cultivate this as part of their public image. Otherwise I wouldn't expect it as a norm.
Personally, I'm still waiting to see Maynard sing Hooker With a Penis on a Coke commercial.
0 replies
19h22m
I think we're saying roughly the same thing. Authenticity is a potential red herring anyway, but essentially something like licensing a track to a mainstream commercial isn't in tension with either how they present their music, or how their fans think of their music and other output. No tension there means no problem.
1 replies
19h51m
For some artists, embracing commercialism is more authentic than pretending not to care about money.
Being a successful businesswoman is part of Taylor Swift's artistic identity, where it wasn't for Loretta Lynn. Selling sneakers is part of Kanye West's artistic identity, where it wasn't for Tupac. It doesn't make any of them less authentic.
0 replies
3h47m
I agree. Rap and Hip Hop have always been very showy about wealth and name dropping luxury brands. I suppose that's authentic for the genre.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/these-are-the-fashion-brands-ra...
Meanwhile, I can't imagine any band in the punk or metal genres making it very far if they leaned into commercialism. That would not be authentic at all.
0 replies
12h20m
Selling out isn’t a thing anymore because everyone has sold out long ago. It’s just common to have no integrity and often even celebrated (get that bag)
2 replies
15h55m
If dunkaccino taught me anything, it's that selling out is over, and the real crime is being boring or produced by committee
1 replies
12h42m
That’s not real. It’s a parody, from an Adam Sandler movie, about selling out.
Here’s a clip with the part that comes after the ad:
0 replies
5h1m
But they were selling out because they got paid by Dunkin Donuts to do it. If you do something ironically while taking the money because even irony works to sell it, you are still selling out.
0 replies
21h33m
I think nowadays, the idea that doing a commercial damages your artistic integrity is considered sort of an anachronism.
Scarlett Johansson might beg to differ.
I think some people just happen to create art.
I think others make it part of their personal definition, and to those integrity is part of it (if they choose to have it)
0 replies
4h53m
I keep a LogSeq page just for Tom Waits interview quotes
0 replies
3h25m
One of the things I love about Tom Waits is that his interviews are just as entertaining as his songs.
0 replies
1d2h
Yeah. I agree that voiceover work is way different than having some amalgamated version of your primary artistic output and advertising copy get slapped on corn chips.
0 replies
5h12m
His interviews are the best… I love how the interviewers are usually bewildered and don’t know what to do with him.
13 replies
1d2h
I think if SJ went to court and won (though I doubt it'd ever get that far), the precedent would be downright dooming for the entire VA industry. If your voice sounded close to any other major VA, no one would touch you for fear of their liability going through the roof.
It probably could be stretched to musicians as well. Maybe lookalike actors too if we go down that route.
I just can't imagine it'd be a good thing to have your voice be owned by someone else just because they became famous first.
4 replies
1d2h
That assumes an incredibly slippery slope.
I just can't imagine it'd be a good thing to have your voice be owned by someone else just because they became famous first.
Are you saying that anyone being able to train generative AI on someone's work or a facsimile to directly compete with them is actually better for commercial artists?
3 replies
1d1h
I think what they’re saying is directors of films, commercials, etc. probably at least start with a certain type of voice they’re looking for. And might well communicate that to a casting director by naming some specific actors they’re familiar with.
1 replies
22h32m
The country I'm in dubs a lot of usa films. Rambo in another language is hilarious, other actors are played by different VAs so eg schwarzenegger sounds different every film. So sj will be played by many vactresses...In many countries.
0 replies
16h25m
This is a great use case. If I were a famous actor, I would require them to take my voice and use AI to translate into another language. They will likely still need another voice actor to have the AI voice follow to get it right. But I would want my voice on every version.
Also, AI to change my lip movement so that it does not look dubbed.
0 replies
22h28m
It's seems like the slippery slope argument is saying it would be risky for an AD to say "we need a deep gravelly voice, but more like Donald Sutherland than Robert Loggia. Let's see who we get that has that vibe." I don't see it. What the industry wants to be able to do is say "We want Donald Sutherland but don't want to pay his rates. Let's pay this company that has modeled his voiceover style so we can have our own Donald Sutherland."
I think the Marvin Gaye ruling is concerning, especially because no mere mortal could hope to either launch or defend themselves against such an action. However, I don't think those extremes are a reason to just say "oh well. I guess fair use should apply to nearly all derivative use, even commercially. If that means creativity is only commercially viable for AI companies now, so be it." Professional creative expertise can't be replaced by generative AI, and it's important to or society, but copyright is the only set of guardrails on the only viable market for many creative fields. I'd love to abolish copyright, but first is love to live in a society that could support the millions of people that use it as currency.
2 replies
1d2h
Do keep in mind that the supposed soundalike actor they supposedly used for the voice that sounds exactly like SJ is not coming forward at this point to defend their work, and OpenAI refuses to make them available to journalists. It's understandable at this point, but with how duplicitous OpenAI has shown itself to be, I will need proof of their existence beyond just OpenAI saying so.
I'm betting on the actor sounding nothing like SJ at all. Their voice was used as a baseline in the training of the tool, but ultimately it was modified to copy SJ.
0 replies
1d2h
If it were me, I would absolutely be unwilling to come forward.
0 replies
1d1h
Do keep in mind that the supposed soundalike actor they supposedly used for the voice that sounds exactly like SJ is not coming forward at this point to defend their work
The potential legal issue is much more about the details of the commercial presentation and marketing of the work by OpenAI than it is about her work itself, beyond whether the work has sufficient similarity to make the particular manner of commercial use a legal issue. There’s nothing for her to defend.
1 replies
1d2h
I disagree with the slippery slope argument here.
Waits won because they were clearly intending to impersonate his voice, while singing his song. Not because a random guy on the radio sounded like him.
Ditto for SJ--there was a clear intent to reproduce her specific voice, based on her role in "Her".
0 replies
1d2h
Ditto for SJ--there was a clear intent to reproduce her specific voice, based on her role in "Her".
Again, there wasn't. An article literally came out today that they had contracted the VA before contacting SJ. [1]
Honestly this argument right here is what the slippery slope argument is all about. If you continue any further, you're just further proving it. They literally didn't even contact SJ before hand.
while singing his song
You even added this caveat before, its already the slippery slope in action. No song was being sung here.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/05/22/openai-...
0 replies
1d1h
SJ = Scarlett Johansson VA = Voice Actor
Backstory: https://theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/20/chatg...
0 replies
1d1h
The funniest thing about the whole affair is that it wouldn't have blown up except for psychological priming. And some people are so blind to this effect that they've formed what's effectively an army on these OpenAI-ScarJo threads.
First, the "Her" reference from OpenAI.
Then ScarJo saying "Hey that sounds like me. Even some of my friends think so."
The voices sound kind of similar in some ways, and dissimilar in other ways. If the voice actor was trying to mimic ScarJo, she didn't do a very good job.
Is a casual reference to the title character exemplifying the same concept, a female-voiced AI, in a movie that won best screenplay at the Academy Awards and Golden Globes, an IP violation? Even if that were the case, it would be a studio matter and not Scarlett's IP.
I am curious why they reached out to ScarJo again 2 days prior, though.
Did they want to use her purely for marketing? That seems doubtful, because they'd have to get movie studio clearance to use "Her" in official marketing.
Did they have a separate model trained on her voice (I wouldn't put this past OpenAI) and were hoping they could get last-minute clearance to use it? This is actually my suspicion. That failed, so they just went with the voice models they already had clearance to use. That's not illegal. It's not even unethical. Anyone can try to train voice models on voice samples they collect. What's a problem is commercial use and representation of likeness.
I don't think a casual reference to Her was a representation that the voice is like ScarJo. It was merely referencing (very effectively) the concept of the movie's always-there [female] AI-voiced AI-chatbot.
0 replies
1d1h
If your voice sounded close to any other major VA, no one would touch you for fear of their liability going through the roof.
That seems to be a leap. It's not at all hard to define a bright line between two people that merely sound the same and inappropriate appropriation. Lots of folks have deep voices similar to James Earl Jones, but if you hire one of them to voice a helmetted character named Tarf Later you'd expect to lose a suit under this statue, right?
The case at hand isn't that Sky sounds like Johansson in the abstract (whose actual voice isn't even all that unique or notable), it's that explicitly evocative of her role in Her, and most damningly that they clearly tried to hire her to do it.
12 replies
23h29m
I've seen this discussion a lot, but what about when they hire a sound-a-like voice actor for a cartoon after a popular movie?
Case in point, Owen Wilson was the voice of the main character in the Cars movie, but they got a different voice actor for some of the cartoons who sounded similar. Same thing for the ghostbuster cartoon after the movie was a big success in the 80s.
Why is that ok?
3 replies
23h13m
I work in animation. There are two reasons this is okay. One, the company owns the rights to the character lightning McQueen and they own the performance of the character by way of their contract with the actor. This probably makes more sense when the specific voice performance is sounds more “charactery” and less like the actors speaking voice but the same principle applies.
Additionally there is usually a provision explicitly allowing for this in the contract with the initial voice actor. Depending on the voice actor’s leverage, they can negotiate for things like approval over the replacement, right of first refusal to voice the character or payment when a sound-a-like is used.
The fact the character sounds exactly like Owen Wilson himself is somewhat incidental though understandably makes this confusing. What they couldn’t do in this case is have an Owen Wilson soundalike voice a DIFFERENT Disney character. They only own Owen Wilson’s voice as it pertains to portraying the character Lightning McQueen.
In the OpenAI situation and Frito Lay there is no initial contract granting any rights to a voice performance.
2 replies
21h35m
OpenAI didn't want their voice to sound like Scarlett Johansson, they wanted it to sound like Samantha from Her. Does Warner Brothers have a right to AI voices that sound like Scarlett Johansson? Shouldn't it be them suing?
What if she wasn't doing her own voice? Many actors have voiced characters not in their own voice over the years. Does Elmo's original voice actor own Elmo's voice or is it whoever owns Sesame Street?
I'm not necessarily making any assertions, I'm genuinely asking cause I don't know what kind of precedent is here. Though personally I'm not convinced of the case against OpenAI, other than bad optics from Altman.
0 replies
19h57m
OpenAI didn't want their voice to sound like Scarlett Johansson, they wanted it to sound like Samantha from Her
That is likely the case they would try to make if they went to court. But this likely will be settled out of court if there's anything there
OpenAI trying to contract Scarlett twice would likely put a big damper on the "We didn't want it to sound like her, we wanted it to sound like the character" too
It's definitely not cut and dry
0 replies
9h27m
The “smoking gun” is they (allegedly) reached out to Johansson, which shows it is her voice they were interested in. If they wanted to use the character they should have reach out to WB, but it is likely Johansson still have som say in how her act is used. A major point of contention in the recent actors strike was about to what extent studios could use ai models based on a performance.
1 replies
23h22m
Isn't because in Cars the character itself is the IP, not the actor? For example, if Owen Wilson started cosplaying as the Cars character and making money out of it, he could be sued.
Reminds me of an Archer bit: https://youtu.be/c9uuITbtl-g?t=2
- Oh my god, Slim Goodbody!
- No! No, this is absolutely not that trademark character. Just a unitard with the systems of the human body on it. On a guy.
- On a guy named TV's Michael Gray.
0 replies
17h42m
The video description is
All credits to FX. I do not own any rights.
Appropriate
0 replies
23h18m
Corollary: what if the replacement voice isn't actually a voice actor but an AI?
0 replies
23h13m
I don't know the answer, but please notice the situation you describe is quite different: in this case, a lot of parties, if not all (showrunners of the cartoon, viewers, maybe even the actors, etc.) would prefer that the character still be voiced by the original actor; but usually, the talent is so much in demand that it would be too expensive.
0 replies
23h16m
Probably part of the contract with Wilson. Actors usually don’t own the characters they play and producers have the right to recast.
0 replies
23h21m
I keep seeing this point, in various forms, being regurgitated. The answer is: because it is OK with Owen Wilson is why. And likely stipulated in contract.
0 replies
23h19m
Work for hire vs. work owned by artist
0 replies
18h44m
I would imagine like everything in Hollywood it's just "because the contract says it's okay"
5 replies
1d2h
Interesting that the law suit was just against Frito Lay rather than PepsiCo.
When I was a kid, if I saw an artist I admired doing a commercial, I'd think, "Too bad, he must really need the money." But now it's so pervasive. It's a virus. Artists are lining up to do ads. The money and exposure are too tantalizing for most artists to decline. Corporations are hoping to hijack a culture's memories for their product. They want an artist's audience, credibility, good will and all the energy the songs have gathered as well as given over the years. They suck the life and meaning from the songs and impregnate them with promises of a better life with their product.
Tom Waits did have a point that I think today's content creators need to take onboard. With music it was not always about money for everyone, the love of music was motivating enough, bringing people together for a good time.
I do not see many content creators in it 'for the content' and bringing a community together. There are definitely some but the algorithm isn't helping them.
Eventually, artists will be going onstage like race-car drivers covered in hundreds of logos. John, stay pure. Your credibility, your integrity and your honor are things no company should be able to buy.
I wish politicians were obliged to wear suits decorated in all the logos of their sponsors.
3 replies
17h30m
I think part of it is that 60's and 70's music artists were a bit idealistic and "precious" about their "art." I think today's artists are more practical. Like, today, most rap songs with explicit lyrics have a sanitized version for general broadcast. Music artists in the 60's would have fought hard against that.
0 replies
11h3m
were a bit idealistic and "precious" about their "art." I think today's artists are more practical
If you mean 60s and 70s artists cared about their art, whereas now they primarily care about the money, then yes.
Like, today, most rap songs with explicit lyrics have a sanitized version for general broadcast. Music artists in the 60's would have fought hard against that.
Fighting for something you believe in and/or the integrity of your song? Such suckers!
0 replies
16h39m
That's because in the 60s and 70s artists were much more likely to write their own music and develop their own sound. Today artists are mostly just performers who record labels hired because they were pretty and can be autotuned to sound okay and their songs are the product of committees that buy and then assemble a few hooks written by hitmakers and Swedish people before handing those hooks off to producers to finish, while the performer might get provide some token input or come up with a few lyrics as long as they work around the mentions of whatever products corporations paid the record label to include in the song (https://www.wired.com/2008/09/products-placed/). That's obviously not always the case, but it's often not too far off. I'd recommend reading "The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory" for some ugly details
It doesn't mean that that kind of music isn't any good, but it's often entirely commercial from the very start which makes it hard for artists who had little if anything to do with the creation of those songs to care about "selling out".
0 replies
4h58m
“Gimme the loot, gimme the loot (I'm a bad bad bad) (What's mines is mines and what's yours is mine)” -Biggie Smalls
Most rap songs are explicitly bragging about how they will do anything to make money, and about how people that won’t aren’t morally superior but are either born privileged or just making excuses for being weak and soft.
It’s alien coming from an upper middle class white family, where people try to pretend they have less money and care about money less than they actually do, because it isn’t socially acceptable- people hide their supercar in the garage and drive an old Toyota when people they know are looking. These people are just as ruthlessly greedy as Biggie claims to be, they just hide it.
0 replies
17h35m
For the words of the prophets were written on the subway walls
Not so coldly charted, it's really just a question of your honesty
4 replies
1d2h
A fantastic read, but slightly different from the OpenAI debacle? It sounds like Frito-Lay got to air their commercial for the usual period. Yes, there was a small downside in that it cost them $2.5M (plus their own lawyer's fees), which I imagine was beyond their budget for Genuine 100% Certified Tom Waits, but they did at least achieve their aim.
3 replies
1d2h
That said, with all the publicity around this, maybe OpenAI at least partially achieved their aim?
I think they 1000% did, because despite all the fuss there is actually no resemblance between the Sky voice and Scarlett Johansson's. The Sky voice is in a different pitch, doesn't have the vocal fry, doesn't have the slightly nasal tone. Listen for yourself[1].
This was a marketing coup for both OpenAI and Johannson. OpenAI, because they're in no danger of a negative judgment, Johansson because she gets her name all the place in the press and drums up free publicity for her film.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1cx1np4/voice_...
1 replies
23h30m
The Sky voice is in a different pitch, doesn't have the vocal fry, doesn't have the slightly nasal tone.
In the sample you linked to you're correct, but in this sample the vocal fry is present and in fact quite pronounced:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vgYi3Wr7v_g
I can't hear the nasal tone in either voice, but the video linked above sounds much closer to Johansson's than the sample the reddit poster chose. It's definitely not a home run, though.
0 replies
19h11m
Thanks for that video. I was really confused because I only watched those voice comparison videos that doesn’t sound much like her, but that OpenAI video made me go “wow, that’s definitely Scarlett Johansson”. I get how she’s upset.
0 replies
17h41m
This was a marketing coup for both OpenAI and Johannson. OpenAI, because they're in no danger of a negative judgment, Johansson because she gets her name all the place in the press and drums up free publicity for her film.
Cynical.
3 replies
1d3h
[1988]?
2 replies
1d3h
2003, apparently. The cause of the suit occurred in 1988, this writeup about it has quotes through 2002.
1 replies
1d2h
I could only find it going back to 2019 (https://web.archive.org/web/20191213165922/http://tomwaitsli...) but you're right, it does feel 2003-ey. We'll put that year above. Thanks!
0 replies
1d2h
I got the date from http://tomwaitslibrary.info/updates/. If you C-f for "frito", the only mention is 2003.
2 replies
1d2h
I'm glad he got paid. It was done in bad faith (much like the ScarJo case). He does allow for covers — Rod Stewart's Downtown Train cover paid for his swimming pool.
0 replies
1d2h
The Blind Boys of Alabama do great covers of Jesus Gonna Be Here and Way Down in the Hole, both on the Spirit of the Century album. The version of Amazing Grace set to the music of House of the Rising Sun, though, is to me the standout on an excellent album.
0 replies
1d1h
In the US, artists don't get to 'allow' for covers or not. The words and composition of a song are covered under a mechanical license. The recording and performance is covered under a different license. Under U.S. law, the mechanical license is a compulsory license - the rightsholder must give a license to anyone who applies and pays for it. The payment is standardized and includes royalties, so it's a pretty good deal for anyone who writes a song that gets a popular cover.
2 replies
1d1h
Ahhh the good old days before Frito Lay murdered people who were about to win lawsuits against them.
1 replies
20h58m
Sorry, what?
0 replies
15h55m
Sorry.
It's been pushed down the Memory Hole.
1 replies
1d
Tom Waits did not sue Frito-Lay for copyright infringement. At the time Waits didn't own the copyright (in the work of authorship) to the song "Step Right Up". This was, and is, owned by Fifth Floor Music Inc (controlled by Martin/ Herb, Evan Cohen). One might assume Frito-Lay did indeed obtain the "synch" license from Fifth Floor Music to use the song in the commercial. And as they were not using the song as recorded by Waits himself, they didn't have to worry about copyright in the musical work (owned by Elektra/ Asylum).
Is there any reason why Elektra/Asylum didn't license the actual recording copyright[0] to Frito-Lay? I'm assuming Tom Waits (like any other musical artist) wouldn't have veto rights over licensing the recordings, in the same way he apparently couldn't stop Fifth Floor Music from licensing the song itself to Frito-Lay.
The thing is, if Frito-Lay had actually licensed the recording, Tom Waits wouldn't have a leg to stand on in court, because of a very funny concept in copyright law called federal preemption. Any claim under any other law - state[1] or federal - that looks and quacks like a copyright is null and void. You only get to sue for copyright with copyright. So you can't, say, trademark a public domain work[2] and then sue people for reproducing it. Misappropriation, false endorsement and publicity rights are very much trademark-shaped laws, so they also lack any jurisdiction over copyright matters. There really just isn't room in the law for "I license you this work" but also "you reproducing this work is a false endorsement". The public is not confused when copyrighted works are used with permission.
However, I'm also not sure why suing for copyright infringement was off the table in the first place. The thing is, when you make a derivative work, you own what you added. If you and me both go to Disney and buy licenses to produce Avengers merch, but I decide to copy your design for the merch, you get to sue me. My license to make my own derivative version of something does not entitle me to copy other derivatives of that same work. So Frito-Lay, having a license to record their own version of Step Right Up, doesn't get the right to copy Tom Waits' recording of Step Right Up.
Who knows, maybe recording copyright is a lot narrower than other forms of copyright, but it's hard not to shake the feeling that he could have gone up against Frito-Lay for a lot more.
[0] Music copyright has two souls: the copyright over the song itself - lyrics, sheet music, and so on - and a separate copyright over a recording of a specific performance of the song. Originally you could only copyright the song and not the recording.
[1] The reason why federal preemption exists is that states started inventing their own recording copyrights for music. Which sounds absolutely wild to lawyers today, who are taught that copyright is inherently a federal question and that states have no say in how it works. What's even more wild is that some state recording copyright laws were actually perpetual, this somehow survived the "for limited times" language in the Copyright Clause, we didn't establish federal preemption and shut down these schemes until the 1970s, and we didn't extinguish already extant perpetual recording copyrights until the Music Modernization act in 2018.
[2] i.e. Disney putting Steamboat Willie in their logo
0 replies
21h9m
They likely didn't license the original recording as the lyrics specifically and continually lampoon advertising and marketing. There's likely not a long enough section that could be used or even edited together that'd work.
Eg:
That's right, it fillets, it chops
It dices, slices, never stops
Lasts a lifetime, mows your lawn
And it picks up the kids from school
It gets rid of unwanted facial hair
It gets rid of embarrassing age spots
It delivers a pizza
And it lengthens, and it strengthens
And it finds that slipper that's been at large
Under the chaise longe for several weeks
And it plays a mean rhythm master
It makes excuses for unwanted lipstick on your collar
And it's only a dollar, step right up
It's only a dollar, step right up
1 replies
5h44m
So many people flocking to defend a corporation based on bad audio samples and ignorance of first-hand reports. This whole OpenAI/SJ issue can be solved in the courts. The people saying "it does not sound like her at all" just sound rediculous and the entire thing just reminds me that HN isn't some place "better than the rest of the internet." It just has more people that think because they are smart in one area it applies to everything else.
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2h1m
People were saying that Juniper sounded like her (the current OpenAI voice)! Personally I think Sky and ScarJo are not the same human voice. They are perhasps the same "performance" as both ScarJo in Her and Sky are playing a friendly/bubbly AI.
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1d2h
Too bad there's no "Stephen Carter" to provide testimony for imitating ScarJo. It's amusing to think of an AI giving testimony in lawsuit, though.
eta: all the folks saying the voice actor doesn't sound exactly like ScarJo and was hired before the negotiations with ScarJo are neglecting to remember: AI is really good at making voice imitations from snippets. So Sky's voice is almost certainly not unprocessed voice acting. That's how the There I Ruined It guy does his covers.
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1d1h
Too bad there's no "Stephen Carter" to provide testimony for imitating ScarJo. It's amusing to think of an AI giving testimony in lawsuit, though.
Perhaps Andrey Karpathy if he has a change if heart - he's been hinted to have led the AI personality effort at OpenAI before he left.
If not him, then the discovery process ought to be good. Scarlett's lawyers asked for details on how OpenAI trained the voice, then the voice got pulled ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
If/when the voice returns and this goes to court, we may find out if there was any fine-tuning on ScarJo's interviews/movie audio.
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1d3h
"Two and a half million bucks. Spent it all on candy."
A true artist. Here's my favorite work of his: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Psk3rmjonQA
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1d1h
https://youtu.be/8h6TYV3Tz00?si=hT51w3JvdGsJTPmW
There was a time in my life when I was aware of just about every bit of Waits arcana available to the public.
Then I got older and lost my way.
Thank you for that link. #PEHDTSCKJMBA
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12h57m
A little off topic, but for anyone who hasn't seen this live performance of Step Right Up, I highly recommend it: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ByomIJf5n9w&si
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23h0m
Read the whole thing in his voice with Going out West playing in the background. What a true boss.
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1d2h
"Yeah, we nailed 'em. It was David and Goliath... They were lame. The problem with a big company like that is that its hands don't talk to its feet, and nobody knows what anyone else is doing. In this case, it was an ad agency that hired a fan of mine actually, in Texas."
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence (at least, until the legal team gets involved).
But in my experience, this is how 95% of corporate controversies happen - just some guy somewhere is an idiot and no one checks their work. But as soon as lawyers are involved they will pull out the Magna Carta if they have to in order to prove that you they were actually geniuses and within their rights to screw up.
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1d2h
My favorite Tom Waits story is the one when he was in a legal battle with an avante-garde French circus performer
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/oct/08/tom-waits-angr...
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1d3h
“The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.” ―Tom Waits
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7h0m
TLDR; AI summary: ScarJo is eating too many Cheetos
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16h28m
OpenAI should have chosen Gilbert Gottfried for its voice.
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1d3h
"If there's one thing you can say about mankind
There's nothing kind about man
You can drive out nature with a pitch fork
But it always comes roaring back again
For want of a bird
The sky was lost
For want of a nail
A shoe was lost
For want of a life
A knife was lost
For want of a toy
A child was lost"
I like that Waits never became an entertainment industry pushover.
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23h54m
As an aside, anyone know if Tom Waits is still making music? It's been thirteen years since his last album, and he's at the age where I wouldn't be surprised if he's done.
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22h23m
Tom Waits is the ultimate artist. He is also quite intelligent and hilarious. I always liked his appearances on Letterman.
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1d2h
The m3u link is broken but the recording of the "corn chip sermon" Waits was referring to is on the same site: http://www.tomwaitslibrary.info/audio/fritolay.mp3. I can see why he was upset, I'd fall for it.
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20h45m
We all read these things and are moved, but we do nothing. Let's do something.
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1d2h
”Killers, thieves, and lawyers”
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22h46m
> <object ... </object>
Oops. I hope they get that fixed. I love Tom Waits.
If they had simply used Sky from the beginning and stuck with her natural voice they would likely be in the clear.
The problem OpenAI has is they tried to get Scarlet to do the voice and after she declined OpenAI found someone who has a similar voice to do it. That shows intent which would otherwise be difficult, combined with the actual result being closer to Scarlet’s voice than Sky is naturally and they are likely going to lose.
Edit: By after I am saying they decided to use Sky’s voice not that it was recorded first.
As the public currently knows based on reporting from WaPo, the original VA was selected and performed her role (months) BEFORE they reached out to Scarlett for the first time. Please don't misconstrue the timeline for other people that are just now tuning in.
They made the choice to use that voice after she decided otherwise they would never have approached Scarlet. When the recording session occurred is irrelevant. They wanted her voice, couldn’t get it, and then chose to use something similar.
If they really recorded the Sky actor well in advance then there's nothing wrong with them using it. They aren't required to suddenly delete the other voice actor's work because Scarlett Johansen refused a later proposal to use her voice instead. She owns the rights to her voice, not any vaguely similar sounding white female voice put together before they even talked to her.
OpenAI didn’t need to talk to her to create an imitation there’s many recordings freely available. Recording beforehand therefore has zero impact on their ability or intent to imitate such a public figure.
The core question eventually put before a jury would be if it was unintentionally similar or an imitation and attempting to pay her for use of her voice is clear evidence they wanted it because of it or they perceived the voices where overly similar. Either of those are possible, but to then use the voice anyway became problematic.
It doesn't matter if they "could" have made a copy of her voice if they didn't actually do it, and the voice actress who recorded Sky's voice is saying just that.
Read up on Glover vs Universal, the likeness doesn’t have to be that close to run into issues and that’s for the studio who owned the character.
I’m not saying Sky did anything wrong. But the final result is close enough many people assumed it was Scarlet without promoting, that’s problematic when they are making references to her role as an AI voice and obviously wanted to make a deal.
Glover v. Universal was settled out of court at the behest of Universal's insurer. We don't know who would have prevailed if it had continued.
And of course, some specific aspects of the case are unique. Universal used a face mold they had made of Glover's face, for instance.
The uncertainty is itself information. I would have assumed Universal would have been fine, but presumably expert legal advice thought the risk was fairly high.
I’ll give you the mold makes the intent more clear, but I doubt the jury is going to be debating intent. Pulling the voice suggests OpenAI thinks this is either a real risk or bad publicity.
"Similar" in that it's a friendly flirty female voice? Is that entire category supposed to be off the table after SJ declined?
There’s literally thousands of flirty female voices which would have sounded like a different actress, singer, etc who they didn’t approach and therefore would have been less risky.
Really using a voice on a digital assistant that sounds like the actress playing a role of a digital assistant is just dumb. Especially if you then tweet about the film days before releasing the voice.
This changes absolutely nothing about the legality or ethics involved.
Using something similar is a possible legal problem. Creating evidence likely to sway a jury that it was intentionally similar even if it wasn’t intended in that fashion is a problem.
Why does this matter? I'd say whether they contacted ScarJo before, after or not at all is irrelevant. Then again, yes, I guess best to present events and the timeline as they were.
For starters, it lends credence to (a claim I've read somewhere in this morass) OpenAI wanting to have a 6th voice in addition to the previous ones already created.
How does that affect the end result?
No, they didn't. The opposite thing happened. They hired and recorded this voice actor months before they reached out to Johanssen. People are scrambling to hold bits of this original story together, but it's dead, Jim.
It was recorded first, but not used publicly beforehand.
If they had released the voice they could have argued they wanted something different, but by waiting and going with Sky after the negotiations failed it’s a different matter.
No, I don't think you can walk this back:
they tried to get Scarlet to do the voice and after she declined OpenAI found someone
This is exactly the question the Washington Post set out to answer, and the answer is "no": that didn't happen.
There’s no walking back. My initial post said: “used Sky from the beginning” If they had released Sky’s voice publicly before contacting Scarlet it would have been a different situation, but they made the decision afterwards.
Simply recording Sky’s voice beforehand doesn’t imply a different intent. This isn’t animation where you’re trying to match two mediums and you want the actors recording first. Having a similar voice to work with would have been useful internally to know if they wanted to pay what it might cost to use her voice.
Even further - they hired multiple female and male voice actors to create various voices that people can choose from. There isn’t one ChatGPT voice that would have either gone to this actress or Johansson. People are making the assumption that if Johansson agreed, Johansson’s voice would have replaced the Sky voice option, but there’s no evidence that this would have happened. It’s likely that Johansson’s would have been just another voice option, in addition to Sky and all the other options available.
If they had 1,000 voices I would definitely be onboard with that interpretation, especially if they then went on trying to contact dozens of famous people for their voices.
But it’s a small number of voices who all sound distinct. So it seems unlikely they wanted to released two similar voices in that context. Especially when it specifically sounds like the voice actor in a film as an AI.
they hired the VA before they even contacted Scarlett.
Here’s what probably happened. OpenAI people realize they can do TTS for ChatGPT so they hire some voice actors. Some people point out that it would be cool if it could be as good as it is in Her, especially with 4o on the way, so they decide to contact Scarlett Johansson either to do a voice or just some promotional thing. She declines, but after 4o is released OpenAI realizes they can fairly make the comparison to the movie based on the quality and speed of the voice. Simply subtly referencing the film via an obvious parallel doesn’t constitute deceptive impersonation.
That seems like an extremely generous interpretation on OpenAI’s behalf especially the timing of when they first think of the movie.
Personally there’s many ways they could have been less suspicious from my perspective. Have a large number of voices or the ability to tweet them in many ways and no one voice seems important. Contact many famous people and it would have seemed like a promotional rather than a reference. Have someone lower on the totem pole than the CEO of a multi billionaire dollar corporation trying to make the deal. This not being about an actor playing an AI assistant in a movie vs the voice of an AI product. Not actually making the reference in a tweet.
The phrase ‘the preponderance of the evidence’ comes to mind.
not sure what you mean by the “tweet them in many ways” sentence.
There’s a chance they did contact other celebrities. We only know for sure they contacted Scarlett due to her lawsuit.
Here’s the thing. No matter what, people would make the reference to Her. It’s like how everyone would make the connection to any sci fi movie if a device came out similar to the one in it. A woman’s voice as a virtual assistant is a very broad UI category, and being cheeky and drawing the comparison to a specific movie on everyone’s mind doesn’t constitute misleading impersonation, especially when you consider from OpenAI’s view the fact that they hired a different actress and didn’t ask her to do a Her impersonation.
*tweak
That’s not specifically what they are accused of doing. The voice actress’s raw audio is only half the story, how they manipulated that audio makes a real difference in what the model sounded like. As many people assumed it was her objectively the end result was close. Worse the model sounds closer to Scarlet than the voice actress does.
Put another way, they wanted to end up at X and also happened to end up close to X when the search space was huge. Where did you get that Huge TV? It’s the craziest thing it just happened to fall off a truck.
You mean the voice actor's natural speaking pattern is more similar to the OpenAI Sky voice than ScarJo's performance in Her movie? Perhaps. But isn't that expected?
They still created a voice that sounds like ScarJo - and many signs point to that being intentional. Overall, not unlike the case in "Tom Waits vs. Frito-Lay, Inc".
Not looking forward to a future in which some media company owns a couple hundred voices whose "sounds similar to" halo cover 99.99% of human voices.
This reminds me of this article on a couple of people trying to make every "possible song" public domain.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxepzw/musicians-algorithmic...
Yep I've had a similar thought. Heck, in my personal life I've been confused with so many people both celebrity and locals, that I just shrug at this point and move on with my life.
It's by far the most obvious outcome of this AI hate fueled rage on this topic. In 10 years the very same people complaining on twitter and here will be complaining that the big 3 music labels are taking down smaller musicians.
A voice isn't that unique in the grand scheme of things.
It's not an impression, isn't a close match (and is a closer match to another actress!), isn't performing a song (or similar) in the same vocal style, isn't explicitly designed to parody the artist, wasn't advertised in a way that trades on the publicity rights of the artist, the voice of an actress is a smaller portion of their public image than the voice and style of a singer (a large factor considered in right of publicity cases), and a particular vocal performance in one film is much less protectable under right of publicity than a unique vocal style of a singer.
The Waits case is highly dissimilar, IMO. But tbf this isn't an area of law I'm expert in, and my knowledge of Right of Publicity law is mostly from law school, which was... a while back.
I think your confusion may be the difference between the popular demo people are referencing and the Sky voice actress’s actual voice.
Copying a comment from another HN user (not sure if appropriate to name them):
* This one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgYi3Wr7v_g
* compare it to: https://youtu.be/GV01B5kVsC0?feature=shared&t=158
That seems like quite a strong resemblance to me.
they are certainly both the voices of women
These do not sound close at all to me.
I think openai looks pretty bad right now, especially with the "her" tweet, but I can't honestly say these voices sound similar. The her clip is so iconically scarjo and I don't think the sky voice is even that close. I'm not a voice expert and I dont know all the technical terms but it isn't very similar in tone, cadence, or what I want to call texture (?)
I wanted to laugh at and belittle openai when I first saw scarjos claim that her friends and family couldn't tell the difference but from the samples you just linked I find that so unlikely that I think she is lying.
Uh, those don't sound like the same person at all. The former uptalks (high rising terminal) a lot. The cadence is different, the pitch is different.
They both have a vocal fry, but the former sounds more like valley girl without the slang or vowel lengthening.
But it’s more like identity theft, they are stealing his identity, not mimicking him. They are hijacking his fame, obviously that’s the just of the commercial. This is free speech.
Oh of course, I don't disagree with the Waits decision at all. I just presume this was posted as a proxy for the OpenAI situation.
Here is the article above poster is referring to.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/05/22/openai-...
The Sky voice has been in the app for... at least 8 months? The 4o voice stuff hasn't even been released.