Sky voice actor says nobody ever compared her to ScarJo before OpenAI drama
Sky voice actor says nobody ever compared her to ScarJo before OpenAI drama
OpenAI’s feud with Scarlett Johansson could cost Hollywood AI deals.
OpenAl is sticking to its story that it never intended to copy Scarlett Johansson's voice when seeking an actor for ChatGPT's "Sky" voice mode.
This all “feels personal," the voice actress said, "being that it’s just my natural voice and I’ve never been compared to her by the people who do know me closely.”
This comes at a time when many studios are otherwise intrigued by the idea of using AI for things like digital effects but remain, after a long history of avoiding copyright conflicts, hesitant to connect with any company potentially viewed as stealing artists' work without consent, Reuters reported.
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The issue is Altman made it murky. If my name is Joe McDonald, I'm allowed to open a hamburger shop. What I can't do is purposefully confuse customers for my personal gain.
This isn't parody, it's image and likeness. It is much less murky when they are promoting it as "Her" as in the movie starring Johansson as the voice of a sentient AI assistant.
Parody is legal. This is not parody.
To be fair, I have not looked into this case enough to have an opinion. Just wanted to point out the logic error.
So like, can you a record label sue another band for 'sounding like' the band that they are promoting?
It was more of a thing in the 90s, but there were always competing follow up bands (Sublime being followed by 311) that chased the sound of another artist.
Like should NSync be sued for being a boy band following in Backstreet Boys wake?
Not parody, but mimicry is fundamental to art.
I suppose my rather extreme views on copyright and up leaves me the outlier here, but I think the whole thing is rather absurdist.
It is not allowed. See Tom Waits vs. Frito Lay. Vocal timbre is considered to part of a celebrities' "likeness" and reproducing it to imply endorsement will get you landed in court. ScarJo is a huge Tom Waits fan so she knows the story.
That's not the same thing, they hired an impersonator and copied something really distinct about how he talked. Johansen's deep mid western accent is not distinct, and Sky was not doing an impression.
Lots of women speak like Scarlet. The first person to become famous cannot copyright a way millions of people speak and act.
It was murky from the getgo. Open AI immediately came out and stated it was the voice of a hired voice actor and that all four or five voice options were, and that it was the voice actor using her own natural voice. The media has just chose to mostly completely ignore that and instead wanted to run with rumors that they stole ScarJos voice from the movie or by sampling a bunch of her work, because that sounds way more gossipy.
To your 2nd point though. The trump voicing stuff is a clear and apparent "parody" which is protected to be legally used. Even when Weird AL does his music, he doesn't actually have to get the artists permission. He just always has because he's a world treasure.
Yeah this was the case right from the start. I'm not sure why people are just coming around now, I guess it helps that the actual voice actor has spoken out so it's concrete proof that she at least exists.
What would be neat is if ScarJo sues and wins, could the Jane Doe voice actor then hit ScarJo with an antitrust lawsuit? I mean, if the poor lady can't get work because the market for "that voice" is dominated by one actor: then what?
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Parody is supposed to be comedic in nature. This is not.
If the voice actor actually made an obvious parody of the HER voice (as an example giving it an over the top southern drawl to subvert expectations about southern ludditism) but parodies can't just be "like that thing but we hired a cheaper voice actor".
Setting aside whether soundalikes-hyped-as-the-real-deal is a violation of personal likeness rights…
How do we know what voice(s) they actually used? To my understanding, the process atomizes the input such that you can never actually prove what went into it.
Their whole business seems to be one of selling plausible-deniability engines.
I think a huge issue currently is the widespread "AI" hysteria. People kinda want to believe that they did this violation because they already have this negative image of LLMs in their mind from all the overblown headlines & scenarios that they've read.
It’s kind of funny. This lawsuit is the same kind of “criti-hype” that they’ve been pushing since day one.
I'm guessing probably because she was never cast as the friendly-sounding voice of an AI, what with that being something people associated Scarlett Johansson's voice with?
I'm guessing that the multiple people who took over for Bug Bunny's voice after Mel Blanc died were not compared to Mel Blanc before they took on the role.
I’m guessing she won’t say otherwise because if her voice is canceled she probably won’t get paid as much.
Maybe, but she also may not have even known that she had that quality when she was hired. Casting directors don't necessarily tell you why you got a role. I did VO for quite some time. Sometimes I knew I was being hired to sound like someone else- generally a fictional character, but occasionally to dub in some dialogue when an actor was unavailable if I could do a good enough impression- but who knows about any of the other times? I've never been compared to Dan Aykroyd, but maybe someone thought I sounded enough like him that I got hired for a role which they wanted a voice like his for. They wouldn't have told me and I wouldn't have asked.
Voice actors are usually paid for the work they do, not the performance of the final product.
Is that something people associate her with? Everything I've seen her in she sounds pretty dry to me. Even when she's being nice in a role. I can't think of an example where she sounded "friendly".
Yes, people associate her with being the voice of an AI because she played the voice of an AI in a very popular film which won Best Original Screenplay at the Oscars.
For anyone interested, here's a comparison. They really don't sound the same at all.
Here's a longer video I came across. Sky sounds pretty different to me, but we'll see what the courts think. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdrgFCldvrA
It sounds pretty similar. Like it was inspired by.
There's a popular tiktok account where the guy is constantly trying to get the ChatGPT voice to admit she's Scarlett Johansson and that was waaaaay before this lawsuit.
The AI voice sounds like Siri but only slightly less robotic and very clearly nothing like Scarlet Johansson's except for being female.
Must be nice to operate a business on the bleeding edge where there are no effective requirements or regulations... My, albeit limited, understanding of how these things work is that sometimes no rules are made unless legal challenges like this lawsuit are made. In that way, win or lose, I think it is important to proceed in order to provide definition to a new industry (assuming a lot about functioning legal and legislative systems, lack of corruption, blah blah.. bunch of stuff that doesn't actually exist, etc.).
There's already voice and likeness protections on the books. They got a similar sounding voice actress, but the voices are definitely distinguishable. ScarJo shouldn't get to own any semi robotic voice that sounds fairly close to her own from a 10 year old movie. If every actor and actress gets to start making these claims against every voice actor or actress, that's going to just screw over opportunities for the voice actors. Everybody sounds somewhat like one famous person or another.
Tbh, I didn't hear the similarity in the GPT4o demos. Not saying OpenAI did right or wrong, just that I wouldn't have guessed that the Sky voice was meant to be ScarJo.
I don't disagree - I think this lawsuit is likely going to focus more on the fact that OpenAI tried to contract with ScarJo and then specifically got budget ScarJo and that Sam Altman is a dummy hype boi who tweeted a dumb thing right before the presentation. He basically pulled an Elon.
Wow cause she looks just like her
/s
Thank you, good lord are there a lot of Johansen simps. They're acting like they've never heard another mid western woman speak.
Please fix that typo
Done thank you