Technology

I've never seen "her" the movie and at certain inflections all I could hear is Scarlett Johansson's voice.

🔊 Vocal Comparison: ScarJo vs Samantha vs Sky

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Wish I had time yesterday to do a comparison myself, using better clips from Her and the newest OpenAI demo clips. Plus would get the ChatGPT app to speak some lines from Her.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Scarlett Johansson is famed for many roles, among them her disquieting performance in Her, a movie about the relationship between a man and an AI chatbot.

When OpenAI boss Sam Altman contacted Johansson to ask to use her voice for his company's forthcoming real-life AI chatbot, you can well imagine why1 she said no.

Johansson, clearly livid, ultimately issued a public statement and a legal letter before the clone was removed.

"I was shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference," she said, … "In a time when we are all grappling with deepfakes and the protection of our own likeness, our own work, our own identities, I believe these are questions that deserve absolute clarity," Johansson said in a statement to NPR.

But Murati's audacious claim never to have heard the voice of the AI chatbot in her boss's favorite movie is key to understanding something else: they don't just think they're the smartest people in the world, they think that everyone else is stupid.

As a final fun thing today, check out how Google News's AI junk has hallucinated a factually incorrect headline that's the exact opposite of the truth here:

The original article contains 427 words, the summary contains 216 words. Saved 49%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

It sounds more like Rashida Jones.

Let's say OpenAI did actually use Scarlett Johansson's voice. Who owns the audio that OpenAI used? Scarlett Johansson herself or the movie company that used the audio in their movie(s)? This might be a case of Scarlett Johansson vs the movie company, not Scarlett Johansson vs OpenAI, as OpenAI could have paid for them.

I doubt they are using Johansson's voice. I expect they need much more studio-quality training data than they would have for her.

The desire to create a "Her" might be real but explains why they chose a similar voice actress, made Sky the default, and continued to pursue Johansson to some day create the real thing.

Suspending the Sky voice looks guilty but it might be a temporary action while the legal team considers their response. There might be a non-zero risk of being found liable if there were directions in the voice casting process to seek a result comparable to Scarlet Johansson. You'd want to collect and assess correspondence to see if that's a possibility, which might take a while.

Nearly 2 years ago we were considering moving to San Francisco and I began to search for jobs. I found one that I was well qualified for and took a deep look at, but backed out because it was full of all this bold-faced language about 40 hours on prem and how remote would never be permitted. The wording really seemed a bit shocking to me and I backed the heck away. It was OpenAI and they tried to fire Altman like a month later. I am so glad that I walked away from that, the whole thing is terrifying.