Yes, absolutely illegal. You don't need to copyright anything, you simply own the rights your own likeness -- your visual appearance and your voice.

A company can't take a photo from your Facebook and plaster it across an advertisement for their product without you giving them the rights to do that.

And if you're a known public figure, this includes lookalikes and soundalikes as well. You can't hire a ScarJo impersonator that people will think is ScarJo.

This is clearly a ScarJo soundalike. It doesn't matter whether it's an AI voice or clone or if they hired someone to sound just like her. Because she's a known public figure, that's illegal if she hasn't given them the rights.

(However, if you generate a synthetic voice that just happens to sound exactly like a random Joe Schmo, it's allowed because Joe Schmo isn't a public figure, so there's no value in the association.)

There are two similar famous cases I know offhand. Probably there are more.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

Bette Middler successfully sued Ford for impersonating her likeness in a commercial.

Then also:

https://casetext.com/case/waits-v-frito-lay-inc

Tom Waits successfully sued Frito Lay for using an imitator without approval in a radio commercial.

The key seems to be that if someone is famous and their voice is distinctly attributeable to them, there is a case. In both of these cases, the artists in question were also solicited first and refused.

I’m not a lawyer and don’t have any deep background this area of IP, but there is at least some precedent apparently:

> In a novel case of voice theft, a Los Angeles federal court jury Tuesday awarded gravel-throated recording artist Tom Waits $2.475 million in damages from Frito-Lay Inc. and its advertising agency.

> The U.S. District Court jury found that the corn chip giant unlawfully appropriated Waits’ distinctive voice, tarring his reputation by employing an impersonator to record a radio ad for a new brand of spicy Doritos corn chips.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-05-09-me-238-st...

The problem is they pursued, was rejected, then approximated. Had they just approximated and made no references to the movie…then I bet social marketing would have made the connection organically and neither Ms Johansson or the Her producers would have much ground because they could reasonably claim that it was just a relatively generic woman’s voice with a faint NY/NJ accent.

In the United States, likeness rights vary by state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights

It's not precisely copyright, but most states recognize some form of personality rights, which encompass a person's voice just as much as the person's name or visual appearance.

Not here to weigh in on the answers to these questions. But it certainly feels pretty scary to have to ask such questions about a company leading the LLM space, considering the U.S. currently has little to no legal infrastructure to reign in these companies.

Plus the tone of the voice is likely an unimportant detail to theor success. So pushing up against the legal boundaries in this specific domain is at best strange and at worst a huge red flag for their ethics and how they operate.

This is known as personality rights or right to publicity. Impersonating someone famous (eg faking their likeness or voice for an ad) is often illegal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights

I think this will fall under what are termed personality rights, and the answer varies by state within the US.