You're seeing a pattern of bad faith "beg forgiveness instead of asking permission" and they got their hand caught in the cookie jar when someone insisted they didn't want part. Reddit, Stack Overflow, etc were just happy to roll over and accept the check after the fact.

Someone from OpenAI wrote on Twitter that pulling this voice was in the works for a month already. Must be true, it was on the Internet.

Prepare the rollback/fallback pre-mortem, not surprised

Stopping behaviour is not an automatic admission of guilt.

And we're not in a court of justice here, where that distinction would be extremely important.

This is all about public opinion, and they have communication managers and PR strategists. If they didn't train this voice on Scarlett Johansson, they would have had so much better of a response by not taking it offline and instead insisting it is not trained on her. The entire discourse right now would be very different. And you can't shift this back later, burned is burned.

The way I see it, there's 3 options:

· they did train it on Scarlett's voice

· they don't know if they trained it on Scarlett's voice

· their PR/communications people don't know what they're doing

I don't think #2 is any better than #1. If it's #3… idk, better companies have been ruined by poor PR.

> And why ask Scarlett again, just a few days before release?

For one, because it's obviously better to have the exact voice rather than an imitation. For two, because it avoids exactly this kind of sticky situation: even if you believe you have a legal and moral right to do something, it's always nice to have the question completely air-tight.

Also, remember that OpenAI isn't a single person, but a large organization with different people and viewpoints. Not unlikely somebody in the organization foresaw the potential for this kind of reaction, knew they couldn't convince the right people to pull the voice completely, but thought they could maybe convince people to reach out again.

I mean, suppose they had a Darth Vader-y voice for some reason and had approached James Earl Jones to do it, and Jones had said no. Is it really so terrible to have someone else try to imitate the Darth Vader character? Jones, along with Lucas, made Darth Vader a cultural phenomenon; I don't think Jones should have the right to dictate forevermore all references to that phenomenon. The same goes for Scarlett Johansson and the author / director of 'Her'.

> Also, remember that OpenAI isn't a single person, but a large organization with different people and viewpoints.

This falls flat since the CEO tweeted "her" when the version featuring her voice clone was released. The CEO was bragging about this feature; the company was aligned behind it until the blowback went public.

I think you missed my point. Did Sam Altman personally think, a few days before the release, "Hmm, maybe I'd better call Scarlett again, just to be sure"? Or did someone else in the org propose that, to which Sam didn't object?

According to Johansson, Altman personally reached out to her. He didn't just "not object" here, he's the guy taking the actions. Nor is he a lackey who just does what he's told; he's the actual CEO. Unless you're saying OpenAI is a big organization with lots of Sam Altmen, I'm not sure that the point you're trying to make applies here.

https://www.npr.org/2024/05/20/1252495087/openai-pulls-ai-vo...

> OpenAI is a big organization with lots of Sam Altmen

Hopefully you meant this as a joke, but this nightmare isn't so unrealistic! Put Sam's voice on top of gpt-5o and spin up fifty of them to start cold calling starlets, why not?

It's like a joke, but isn't funny.

Disney would sue them for that, no?

If it sounds too alike intentionally, it’s basically an impersonation of a character, which falls under copyright.

Someone else was sharing case law about this.