> However, the company hiring her might not have the right to use her voice with the intent purpose of passing that voice off as that of the other person.

Aren't they very explicitly not doing that? They're saying it isn't her.

Is that why Sam Altman tweeted "her"?

They've lost any argument of coincidence, with just that one tweet…

I mean, SamA tweeted "Her", as in a reference to the movie "Her" which very famously features Scarlett Johansson's voice. So by not saying precisely who provided the voice actor for the "Sky" voice and ensuring it was either the same as or very similar to Scarlett Johansson, it was obviously going to understood by the users of the app to be Scarlett Johansson herself.

That is, OpenAI was going to end up capitalising from Scarlett Johansson's voice, fame, and notoriety whether it is her exact voice or not, and without her permission.

It would be like me promoting a new AI movie featuring an AI generated character very similar in build and looks to Dwayne The Rock Johnson and promoting the movie by saying "Do you smell what we're cooking?" and then claiming it had nothing to do with The Rock and was just modelled on someone who happened to look like him.

But do we really want to encourage people to build fame, rather than build things that have value?

Part of the value of a voice assistant is the voice itself and if OpenAI simply copied that voice from someone, did they really create this value?

Also, the value of a voice comes from (at least partly anyway), the huge amount of work, practice, skill, experience, from training that voice, experience in acting (and voice acting), and the recognition that resulted from all this experience and skill. Her voice wouldn't have "value" if she hadn't trained in acting, auditioned, honed her skills over many years. But OpenAI gets to use all that earned and worked for value for free?

This for me is similar to a writer honing his craft for a lifetime, 1000s of hours of work and labour, then someone training a model using his corpus to write plays and sell them without crediting him or paying him. It's trivial to make a model to imitate a writer, it's not trivial to become that writer to produce that work in the first place, so the writer needs to be both credited and compensated.

> But OpenAI gets to use all that earned and worked for value for free?

They paid the voice actor right? The accusation isn't that they trained on ScarJos voice, it's that they paid a voice actor that sounds like her.

The only thing in the list you gave is recognition that's different.

> The accusation isn't that they trained on ScarJos voice, it's that they paid a voice actor that sounds like her.

Johansson's accusation did not specify the method. OpenAI claimed they hired another actor and the similarity was unintentional. The 2nd claim seems unlikely. Some disbelieve both claims.

This is the question a court would be deciding. OpenAI claims it’s not on purpose, but I think there’s enough doubt to investigate

> However, the company hiring her might not have the right to use her voice with the intent purpose of passing that voice off as that of the other person.

Please cite statute.

Generally speaking malicious intent only does not an illegal act make. Last I checked a voice is rightly not a trademarkable thing (it's a quality, not a definable entity).

Case law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

Thanks.

Wow, damn, that's such a crazy ruling. How distinct is distinct enough? How famous is famous enough? I'm surprised Ford's lawyers didn't press the issue further up the courts.

No, it's a pretty straight-forward and understandable ruling. Intent matters, the law is fuzzy.

Nobody said intent doesn't matter.

Yeah but it’s not just intent, they released a product after the intent.