I don't feel the ScarJo story was debunked. Those are OpenAI's counterpoints, sure, but it's a huge leap to accept they just completely, coincidently hired the one voice actor with an eerily similar voice, all the while continuing to reference the movie and continuing to reach out to Scarlett Johansson.
It’s been downgraded to “a preponderance of evidence” from “beyond a reasonable doubt”.
"A preponderance of evidence" is the standard for a civil case which is what this would be, "beyond a reasonable doubt" is the standard for a criminal case.
The issue with the ScarJo case, irrespective of the facts behind the development of OpenAI's voices, is that a) ScarJo's team indicated an intent to sue and b) legal precedent exists that can give the performer ownership if it's uncannily similar.
It's not as clear cut as non-lawyer tech people say it is even if it will be an uphill battle for ScarJo, which is what makes it more interesting. She did fight Disney and won, after all.
As far as I can tell, all of that precedent involves the "copier" of the voice giving specific instruction to the "mimic", which didn't happen here.
If the series of events was: They wanted Scar Jo, she said no. They found someone similar. That would be the end of the story. The question then was, why did they reach out to her again immediately before putting it out there? That seems pretty strange to me.
Re:It's all unraveling at OpenAI (again)
by pseudalopex on Sunday June 09, 2024 @04:12PM
(#40627213)
They made a voice model from Scarlett Johansson recordings and hoped she would change her mind maybe.
They did no such thing. The Washington Post found the voice actor they used, it's her natural speaking voice, she was not asked to perform ScarJo, and the movie "Her" wasn't mentioned.
Re:It's all unraveling at OpenAI (again)
by pseudalopex on Tuesday June 11, 2024 @02:17PM
(#40649629)
Sky was 1 voice model. OpenAI made and released 4 others. It is plausible they made and did not release at least 1.
> The Washington Post found the voice actor they used
They found the voice actor? Or OpenAI produced the actor's agent?
Is there reporting about this happening, or is this simply something you think could have happened? Because a lot of things could have happened.
Re:It's all unraveling at OpenAI (again)
by pseudalopex on Wednesday June 26, 2024 @08:23PM
(#40806061)
What does maybe mean?
They said it seemed strange OpenAI contacted Johansson when they did. I countered this assumption.
I believe an unreleased Scarlett Johansson voice model would not infringe her publicity rights. Do you disagree?
Re:It's all unraveling at OpenAI (again)
by jgalt212 on Wednesday June 12, 2024 @01:58PM
(#40660989)
parallel construction?
I don't have more to say here other that I'm aware of the legal precedent being discussed here, read 2 cases, and in both the fact pattern cited in the decision involved specific instruction for the performer to mimic someone else's performance. That's all.
> and the voice suspected to be a clone or performance of ScarJo's own voice was the natural speaking voice of one of those actors, who was not instructed to mimic ScarJo
Yeah, but I bet out of all the voice actors available, I can guess why that specific one was chosen. There's more than one way to intentionally copy a voice.
The rest of it is about "safety" whistleblowers. That's something that seems like it could be a real problem for OpenAI, if you believe that transformer models are something that raise genuine safety issues, or if you take seriously OpenAI's founding commitments to be something more like a monastic society than a company.
For some time now, I've mentally bucketed OpenAI in with all the other tech companies, and I find that perspective pretty refreshing; there's just not much to think about here, apart from the technology, because, to my eyes, it's not reasonable to expect a lot more of OpenAI than I would from Apple or Google. Is OpenAI becoming less and less like a religion and more like a hyper-rational technology business? To me: that's a good thing. It is fine that we disagree.
† I anticipate many responses about the subtle angles of this silly voice actor story that I am not capturing, like Altman's professed love for the movie "Her", and to all that I'll preemptively respond: you do you, we (again) can simply disagree, I would have delighted in a news cycle where a giant tech company actually gets shredded by Rebecca from Ghost World, but I found the WaPo story dispositive.