I don't think with the current copyright system you would owe another artist money when recording a commercial just because your voice happens to sound like theirs. But with AI perhaps it's "fair" (given the assumption that there's any fairness to copyright in the first place) to expect a creator to provide some kind of compensation to the source material that their AI was trained on.

Case in point, this bot was clearly trained on David Attenborough samples, perhaps it can't be used commercially without purchasing some rights to the man's likeness.

What would happen if a voic was trained on Morgan Freeman, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, George Clooney and tuned to not sound like any one individual but have the characteristics we find appealing. Could that be used for its own copyright claim?

I believe the answer is almost certainly yes under current law.

Whenever the topic of copying material for model training purposes arises on hn, however, a number of folks seem convinced such use falls under the rubric of “transformative” and will be considered fair use.

Do you just believe this or was this tested in court yet? I haven't been following the various lawsuits on this issue closely but I had thought that, so far, they were leaning towards fair use.

I believe it, and I don’t think it’s been significantly tested.

It’s hard to see how mixing (copying!) a bunch of books into a computer algorithm to produce (commercially!) content that might itself easily be incorporated into a book in the same market could possibly be fair use.

Picasso is widely quoted as having said that “good artists borrow, great artists steal.” https://lifehacker.com/an-artist-explains-what-great-artists...

There is a significant difference between "stealing" artistic ideas, and impersonating individual humans.

How folks can think it's reasonable to impersonate Morgan Freeman and use his voice to sell, for example, crypto crap. It's gross and should absolutely be illegal.

Well Picasso wasn’t much of a legislator, and I don’t think his point was that all artistic theft is justifiable to begin with.

> I don't think with the current copyright system you would owe another artist money when recording a commercial just because your voice happens to sound like theirs

No, its a right of publicity/right of personality issue, not a copyright issue. While that's not a federal law issue in the US, its an issue in some US jurisdictions, and its a national law issue in a number of non-US jurisdictions.

The mistake is thinking “would not owe money under the current copyright regime” means “would not owe money”: there are more laws in the world than just copyright law.