Why do you have an issue with them taking someone's likeness to use in their product but not with them taking someone's work to use in their product?

Because this isn't training an audio model along with a million other voices to understand English, etc. It's clearly meant to sound exactly like that one celebrity.

I suspect a video avatar service that looked exactly like her would fall afoul of fair use as well. Though an image gen that used some images of her (and many others) to train and spit out generic "attractive blonde woman" is fair use in my opinion.

Chances are this is. Basically same as LoRA. One of go-to tools for these literally uses Diffusion model and work on spectrograms as images.

Okay so as long as we steal enough stuff then it's legal.

Is this different from the various videos of the Harry Potter actors doing comedic high fashion ads? Because those were very well received.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipuqLy87-3A

One is a company with a nearly $100 billion valuation using someone's likeness for their own commercial purposes in a large-scale consumer product, which consumers would plausibly interpret as a paid endorsement, while the other seems to be an amateur hobbyist nobody has ever heard of making a parody demo as an art project, in a way that makes it clear that the original actors had nothing to do with it. The context seems pretty wildly different to me.

I'm guessing if any of the Harry Potter actors threatened the hobbyist with legal action the video would likely come down, though I doubt they would bother even if they didn't care for the video.

That has a much better chance of falling under fair use (parody, non-commercial) if the actors ever tried to sue.

There is a major difference between parodying someone by imitating them while clearly and almost explicitly being an imitation; and deceptively imitating someone to suggest they are associated with your product in a serious manner.

Is a billion dollar AI company utilizing someone's voice against their will in a flagship product after they said no twice different from a random Youtube channel making comedy videos?

I think so but that could just be me.

Those are parodies and not meant at any point for you to believe the actual Harry Potter actors were involved.

I think anti-deepfake legislation needs to consider fair use, especially when it comes to parody or other commentary on public figures. OpenAI's actions do not qualify as fair use.

The problem with that idea is that I can hide behind it while making videos of famous politicians doing really morally questionable things and distributing them on YouTube. The reason Fair Use works with regular parodies in my opinion is that everyone can tell that it is obviously fake. For example, Saturday Night Live routinely makes joking parody videos of elected officials doing things we think might be consistent with their character. And in those cases it's obvious that it's being portrayed by an actor and therefore a parody. If you use someone's likeness directly I think that it must never be fair use or we will quickly end up in a world where no video can be trusted.

I’m guessing you’re referring to people still thinking Sarah Palin said she could see Russia from her house, that was from a SNL skit and an amazing impression from Tina Fey. I agree, people have a hard time separating reality from obvious parody, how could we expect them to make a distinction with intentional imitation. Society must draw a clear line that it is not ok to do this.

Let me start by saying I despise generative AI and I think most AI companies are basically crooked.

I thought about your comment for a while, and I agree that there is a fine line between "realistic parody" and "intentional deception" that makes deepfake AI almost impossible to defend. In particular I agree with your distinction:

- In matters involving human actors, human-created animations, etc, there should be great deference to the human impersonators, particularly when it involves notable public figures. One major difference is that, since it's virtually impossible for humans to precisely impersonate or draw one another, there is an element of caricature and artistic choice with highly "realistic" impersonations.

- AI should be held to a higher standard because it involves almost no human expression, and it can easily create mathematically-perfect impersonations which are engineered to fool people. The point of my comment is that fair use is a thin sliver of what you can do with the tech, but it shouldn't be stamped out entirely.

I am really thinking of, say, the Joe Rogan / Donald Trump comedic deepfakes. It might be fine under American constitutional law to say that those things must be made so that AI Rogan / AI Trump always refer to each other in those ways, to make it very clear to listeners. It is a distinctly non-libertarian solution, but it could be "necessary and proper" because of the threat to our social and political knowledge. But as a general principle, those comedic deepkfakes are works of human political expression, aided by a fairly simple computer program that any CS graduate can understand, assuming they earned their degree honestly and are willing to do some math. It is constitutionally icky (legal term) to go after those people too harshly.

I think that as long as a clear "mark of parody" is maintained such that a reasonable person could distinguish between the two, AI parodies are probably fine. The murkiness in my mind is expressly in the situation in the first episode of Black Mirror, where nobody could distinguish between the AI-generated video and the prime minister actually performing the act. Clearly that is not a parody, even if some people might find the situation humorous. But if we're not careful we give people making fake videos cover to hide behind fair use for parody.

I think you and I have the same concerns about balancing damage to the societal fabric against protecting honest speech.

There’s a big difference between a one off replica and person-as-a-service.

An actress that specifically played the voice of AI in a movie about AI no less.