05-21-2024, 11:19 PM
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Confirmed User
Join Date: Feb 2010
Posts: 1,068
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Yes, and he also tweeted the single word 'her' the day before the release.
According to 'The Briefing' :
Quote:
Altman and OpenAI can breathe a little easier about one thing: For the moment, at least, Johansson has no plans to sue the company over the affair, according to a person familiar with her thinking. But if she changes her mind, would she have a case? I asked Ryan Calo—a law professor at the University of Washington, who specializes in the legal implications of AI and other technologies—and his answer was unequivocal. “This is a very strong case of appropriation of likeness,” he said.
Appropriation of likeness involves the unauthorized use of a person’s name, physical likeness or voice. Celebrities like Johansson, for obvious reasons, are particularly sensitive to companies using their identities in ad campaigns and products without their permission, including in cases where the companies employ impersonators. Long before AI made computerized imitation possible, celebrities had successfully sued companies for using soundalikes of them in commercials. For example, the singer and actress Bette Midler won $400,000 in damages from an ad agency after it used a copycat voice in a 1986 Ford commercial. In 1990, the singer Tom Waits won $2.48 million in damages from Frito-Lay and its ad agency for using a singer who imitated Waits’ gravelly voice in a Doritos radio commercial.
According to Calo, it doesn’t matter whether OpenAI hired a ScarJo soundalike or used AI to create a synthetic version of her voice. “What matters exclusively is: Were they trying to make it sound like ScarJo?” he said. “The evidence that they were is very strong.”
Calo says that evidence includes the fact that Altman asked Johansson to voice ChatGPT last September and she said no, according to Johansson; that Altman has publicly raved about how ‘Her’ nailed its representation of AI voice assistants; that the ChatGPT voice at issue does, in fact, sound like Johansson’s voice; and that OpenAI removed the voice after Johansson’s lawyers complained to them. OpenAI, for its part, says the voice in question is the “natural speaking voice” of an actor, not an imitation of Johansson. It would likely take the discovery process from a lawsuit to shed more light on this saga (my colleague Kaya explores some of the other legal issues around such a case here). But it’s up to Johansson whether that’s worth the hassle.—Nick Wingfield
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