It is not about the voice. Rather using the fame of known actress to boost the product. If your inner motive is to sound like her because she is well-known, differences in voice does not matter much.
The voice was called Sky and OpenAI wasn't using her likeness to promote the voice or product. She isn't that well known, I didn't even know she was in Her.
There's 1 billion English speakers, there are going to be voice overlaps.
The issue is that they contacted her and advertised based on her. They clearly wanted it to sound like her. Now, that it sounded like her, there is a reason to make conclusions about OpenAI's real motives.
How did they advertise this as being SJ? It is worth pointing out that Sky kind of sounded like the voice from Her, not SJ. The voice in Her is a voice SJ did for that movie. It isn’t her normal speaking voice. Does she get to own the likeness of every kind of voice she’s made, or could make?
And he could have meant a whole lot of different things by that, including the perfectly reasonable observation that the voice assistant tech is at parity with what we saw in _Her_.
The assertion that this one tweet, in the absence of any other official communication, constitutes advertising the product to be voiced by Scarlett Johansson is a _huge_ stretch.
I'm certain OpenAI would have been much happier with SJ as the voice actress. But how different does a female voice have to be to _not_ be considered an impersonation of someone?
How does that only refer to the voice? And how is that advertising, or using SJ's likeness or image?
I think the fact that the AI in the OpenAI demos acts like it is at a similar level to Her is far more impressive than the voice may sound like the one SJ did for that movie. Impressively mimicked voices aren't that new. Amazon sold a Samuel L Jackson Alexa voice years ago.
It's such an easy lesson to learn, here: if you are a founder or in any position where your speech relative to a product or service matters, get your ass off Twitter!
That the voice is called Sky is actually part of what's suspicious about this to me. They had all the world of female names to choose from for the voice that would recreate "Her" (and there's plenty of evidence that suggests that the movie was used as inspiration), and they chose one that started with the same rare consonant cluster as this actress. The only other names that Wikipedia lists with that consonant cluster are Skyler and Scarlett [0]. If they truly were trying to separate themselves from her rather than subtly cue the likeness, why Sky?
> She isn't that well known, I didn't even know she was in Her.
She's the second-highest-grossing actor (and the highest-grossing actress) of all time [1]. You might not know her (and neither do I), but that says more about you and me than it does about her.
> and they chose one that started with the same rare consonant cluster as this actress
Okay so we can't use voices that are similar to actress voices, and we can't use names that starts with the same "rare consonant cluster" as actress names.
> Okay so we can't use voices that are similar to actress voices, and we can't use names that starts with the same "rare consonant cluster" as actress names.
No, we just can't advertise or get other clear benefits based on the fame of something well-known without considering these entities.
It is about the overall picture, and in this case there is very high relation to the movie and Scarlett.
Tweeting a single word, a pronoun no less, is a "very high relation". And that is a legal bar?
Most people have never heard of Her. It wasn't a very big movie, especially outside tech circles. Most of my friends who aren't in tech would have no clue that Altman was referring to an AI in a movie.
Agreed, if you take each piece of the puzzle in isolation it sounds silly and totally not worth Johansson's time. But that's how most legal cases are: there's no one single piece of evidence that is conclusive proof in and of itself, there is a collection of facts that together form a reasonable basis for concluding a level of intent that meets the burden of proof.
I'm not convinced that the pieces all add up to a slam dunk, but you can't dismiss them one by one, you have to look at the whole.
We would not see these headlines, if they never asked her and never mentioned her. Then it would be just voice of some voice actress which might or might not sound like Scarlett.
So if I have a company that sells, say, manure, I can search and hire a voice actress that sounds exactly like Scarlett to promote me in radio ads? And write a tweet that vaguely implies that it's really her?
Exactly. I barely know who this actress is. To me, it sounds like the tens of thousands of other white american voices. How is the remotely too similar?
SJ doesn’t get to own the voice rights to everyone that sounds at all like her just because she is famous.