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this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
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If you read another article that has more information to it, instead of just this opinion piece, it looks like they hired and paid a voice actress and that it is her natural voice (supposedly).
Which begs the question: Can a voice actor be denied work or denied the ability to have their voice used, if they sound similar to someone else who is more famous?
This kind of reminds me of Crispin Glover, from Back to the Future. He tried to negotiate a higher pay for the second movie, so the producers hired a different actor to play the role, but deliberately made the actor up to look like Glover. In response, Glover sued the producers and won. It set a critical precedent for Hollywood, about using someone's likeness without consent.
The article mentions they reached out to her two days before the launch - if she had said 'OK,' there's no way they could have even recorded what they needed from her, let alone trained the model in time for the presentation. So they must have had a Scarlett Johansson voice ready to go. Other than training the model on movies (really not ideal for a high quality voice model), how would they have gotten the recordings they needed?
If they hired a "random" voice actress, they might not run into issues. But if at any point they had a job listing, a discussion with a talent manager, or anything else where they mentioned wanting a "Scarlett Johansson sound-alike," they might have dug themselves a nice hole here.
Specifically regarding your question about hiring a voice actor that sounds like someone else - this is commonly done to replace people for cartoons. I don't think it's an issue if you are playing a character. But if you deliberately impersonate a person, there might be some trouble.
Honestly, with the tweets that reference the Her movie, they may already be in a hole, anyway. Plus, it’s not just the voice, it’s that the ‘character’ of the Sky voice is very similar to Sam in the Her movie.
If I were a jurist, I could easily be persuaded to believe they willingly committed IP theft and attempted to imply endorsement of the Her movie (the production studio?), Spike Jonze, and Scarlett Johansson.
(Of course, that statement would disqualify me as a jurist, so I’ll never know!)
Well one of the other articles I've read said they listened to and sampled 400 voice actors and selected 5 of them to have flown out to do all the voice work. The voice in the product also doesn't sound that much like Scar Jo. Just similar. She never had a very unique voice.
I think it is less a question of whether the voice sounds like Scarlett Johansson, as that is subjective and arbitrary (e.g. assume you could objectively measure the similarity, what's the acceptable cut off - 80%? 90%?). The same is true for the uniqueness of her voice.
I think the real question will come down to intention. They clearly wanted her voice. Did they intentionally attempt to replicate it when they couldn't have the real thing? If so, there is precedent that would suggest they could be in a little trouble here, e.g. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-05-09-me-238-story.html
The voice they're using isn't a replicated one, though. It's a paid voice actress and it is supposed to be her natural voice. It also does sound a bit different than scar jo.
That won't be a copyright issue, but if you're deliberately making it indistinguishable from somebody else it can be a publicity rights issue by (false) implicit support from the one impersonated.
Intent probably matters a lot here. The actor they hired did not coincidentally have a similar voice. They were hired because they had a similar voice, and the fact that Scarlett Johansson was approached to start with only underscores this.
They were specifically looking for her likeness, for commercial reasons. And when it was denied, they purposely imitated it. That doesn't feel right to me. In the end, they're still trying to use her likeness without permission.
That's different than if they liked a VA's voice and hired them. The voice could be similar, but there was no ill intent nor attempting to copy a likeness. I think they would've been fine if they were even shooting for something like her voice. Where OpenAI fucked up is approaching Johansson to start with, because it shows they didn't want something like her voice or the VA coincidentally sounded similar -- they purposely wanted her likeness, and went behind her back to do it once she denied them.
Then what about impersonators for hire? Or like a Motley Cru cover band?
Nice try chatgpt but we know it's tou.