• remotelove
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    24 days ago

    OpenAI had an idea of a type of voice they wanted

    Yep. It was a very specific voice they wanted.

    they hired a voice actor

    This made me think a little too, but then I started thinking about how people talk. Even if a person’s tone is similar, the mannerisms are still drastically different. The voice actor had to spoof Scarletts voice well enough to even fool Scarletts friends.

    While I haven’t read Altman’s tweets (or tweets from someone else at OpenAI?) personally, rumor has it he knew what he was doing with a specific voice actor. The intent was to spoof her voice. The intent is probably more damning than the actual act, TBH.

    To summarize, there are a few nuggets here: They approached SJh first with a specific reason to use her voice; Some asshat bragged about spoofing the voice on Twitter; There was clear intent of generating a likeness of SJh.

    (Thinking about the broke actors for a second… /s) Their face and voice are at the core of their career, similar to how company branding is makes a company unique. While I am not a lawyer, it seems there are some parallels with trademark and copyright law here.

    “Accidentally” using a voice that sounds like SJh would be a really poor argument now as well.

    • ignirtoq@fedia.io
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      24 days ago

      they hired a voice actor

      This made me think a little too, but then I started thinking about how people talk. Even if a person’s tone is similar, the mannerisms are still drastically different. The voice actor had to spoof Scarletts voice well enough to even fool Scarletts friends.

      I don’t get this. Why are you assuming they constructed the voice with only the samples from another voice actress and didn’t use any from Johansson? Why are you assuming they used the samples from that voice actress at all and didn’t only use samples of Johansson’s voice they scraped from all corners of her prolific history of work?

      Any random company I would give the benefit of the doubt, but these AI companies have specifically shown they don’t care about copyright law specifically or ethics in general, and they definitely have no qualms lying about where they get their data and what they do with it.

      • remotelove
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        24 days ago

        If parts were generated, copied or acted it seems somewhat irrelevant. They intended to, and did, generate SJh’s likeness, by whatever means, and that is the key point.

        But yeah, they probably mixed and matched voice samples to their liking. I wouldn’t doubt that for a second. If actual samples were used in the final product, that would be extremely damning.

      • Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works
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        24 days ago

        Ok see this I get. Yes I agree if they did this, it’s totally unethical and presumably illegal as well and they should face consequences for that. They claim to have hired voice actors for all their voices though, assuming that’s true (maybe a big assumption) I don’t think there’s an issue but if it’s more like what you suggested then it’s a big violation.