My very favourite line, among many, from "Step Right Up": __The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.__
Willie Williams https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1KV51qIdI0
Howlin Wolf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ri7TcukAJ8
or Screamin Jay Hawkins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kGPhpvqtOc
It surprises me a little because the Dorito commercial sounds like a fairly generic blues backing track and a raspy voiced singer. From the article, there's an indication that Doritos was looking to replicate the sound and feel of the song, and they were aware of the legal concern. But to me it kind of sounds like Tom Waits is doing an impersonation, the Doritos song is doing an impersonation, but it's not totally obvious from the song that the Doritos impersonation necessarily goes via Tom Waits rather than back to the original source material.
See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG0p2JHcsQ0 . It's playful, original, pulls from a lot of previous artistic work.
Later on he does the soundtrack for The Black Rider, changes record label and gets the freedom to dabble in post-punk and weirder stuff.
The commercial was using a tom waits song sung by an artist who impersonated Tom waits and the folks involved discussed the potential legal implications and did it anyways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anywhere_I_Lay_My_Head
Eclectic choices even for Waits songs. Though I'd like to hear her take on Poor Edward or Fish And Bird or Soldier's Things
I think that's why this was posted... I saw it referenced in a comment on that thread.
Change your shorts, change your life
Change your life, change into a 9 year old Hindu boy and get rid of your wife
It takes a while to get a lawsuit going. According to the article, Waits learned about the ad on October 3, 1988, filed a suit in November 1988, and the case was tried before a jury in April and May 1990.
With sj, they approached her 6 months ago, she declined, and again just prior to launch to which she didn't respond. And Sam tweets one word 'her'.
This is a slam dunk and they will lose.
"Passing similarity"? All her friends and coworkers say it sounds like her - she describes being contacted by friends who thought she'd done it. A lot of the public, including HNers, identified the voice as hers, independently - not in some A/B test, but they heard it and said to themselves "Johanasson did the voice for this."
You're the only person in the room who thinks OpenAI didn't use samples of her voice for their voice model - or that the voice has "passing similarity."
Altman approached her asking her to do it. She refused; they went ahead and did it anyway, probably using interviews since the audio would be very clean - and two days before they went live with it, Altman tried to negotiate a second time and was rebuffed. Released it anyway.
Why would Altman feel the need to panic-negotiate a second time, days before they went live, if they hadn't used her voice for it?
If OpenAI designed it to sound like her, that's Midler tort. They actually used her voice to train it, which means Midler tort and more. The question will be how much more - I hope they get sued into the ground.
That said, this is certainly a problem we will see in the future.
Copying a comment from another HN user (not sure if appropriate to name them):
* This one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgYi3Wr7v_g
* compare it to: https://youtu.be/GV01B5kVsC0?feature=shared&t=158
That seems like quite a strong resemblance to me.
I wanted to laugh at and belittle openai when I first saw scarjos claim that her friends and family couldn't tell the difference but from the samples you just linked I find that so unlikely that I think she is lying.
> It looks? like you're part of some recording? or production setup? With those lights? tripod? and possibly a mic? It looks like you might be gearing up to shoot a video? or maybe even a live stream?
They both have a vocal fry, but the former sounds more like valley girl without the slang or vowel lengthening.
They still created a voice that sounds like ScarJo - and many signs point to that being intentional. Overall, not unlike the case in "Tom Waits vs. Frito-Lay, Inc".
The Waits case is highly dissimilar, IMO. But tbf this isn't an area of law I'm expert in, and my knowledge of Right of Publicity law is mostly from law school, which was... a while back.
The problem OpenAI has is they tried to get Scarlet to do the voice and after she declined OpenAI found someone who has a similar voice to do it. That shows intent which would otherwise be difficult, combined with the actual result being closer to Scarlet’s voice than Sky is naturally and they are likely going to lose.
Edit: By after I am saying they decided to use Sky’s voice not that it was recorded first.
As the public currently knows based on reporting from WaPo, the original VA was selected and performed her role (months) BEFORE they reached out to Scarlett for the first time. Please don't misconstrue the timeline for other people that are just now tuning in.
Here’s what probably happened. OpenAI people realize they can do TTS for ChatGPT so they hire some voice actors. Some people point out that it would be cool if it could be as good as it is in Her, especially with 4o on the way, so they decide to contact Scarlett Johansson either to do a voice or just some promotional thing. She declines, but after 4o is released OpenAI realizes they can fairly make the comparison to the movie based on the quality and speed of the voice. Simply subtly referencing the film via an obvious parallel doesn’t constitute deceptive impersonation.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/05/22/openai-...
Case in point, Owen Wilson was the voice of the main character in the Cars movie, but they got a different voice actor for some of the cartoons who sounded similar. Same thing for the ghostbuster cartoon after the movie was a big success in the 80s.
Why is that ok?
Additionally there is usually a provision explicitly allowing for this in the contract with the initial voice actor. Depending on the voice actor’s leverage, they can negotiate for things like approval over the replacement, right of first refusal to voice the character or payment when a sound-a-like is used.
The fact the character sounds exactly like Owen Wilson himself is somewhat incidental though understandably makes this confusing. What they couldn’t do in this case is have an Owen Wilson soundalike voice a DIFFERENT Disney character. They only own Owen Wilson’s voice as it pertains to portraying the character Lightning McQueen.
In the OpenAI situation and Frito Lay there is no initial contract granting any rights to a voice performance.
What if she wasn't doing her own voice? Many actors have voiced characters not in their own voice over the years. Does Elmo's original voice actor own Elmo's voice or is it whoever owns Sesame Street?
I'm not necessarily making any assertions, I'm genuinely asking cause I don't know what kind of precedent is here. Though personally I'm not convinced of the case against OpenAI, other than bad optics from Altman.
Reminds me of an Archer bit: https://youtu.be/c9uuITbtl-g?t=2
- Oh my god, Slim Goodbody!
- No! No, this is absolutely not that trademark character. Just a unitard with the systems of the human body on it. On a guy.
- On a guy named TV's Michael Gray.
> All credits to FX. I do not own any rights.
Appropriate
Recently I had a friend message me to ask me if it was me asking a question at a recorded event with audience questions that they were watching on YouTube (the camera only showed the stage, not audience members at the microphones).
They had absolutely no reason to think I would have been at that particular event.
And I told them, yup -- it was me asking that question a few years ago.
And there is nothing particularly distinctive about my voice. If anything, my voice is probably particularly generic. But it's just timbre, accent, and the unique "fingerprint" of my particular vocal personality.
It, at best, makes it slightly less likely that the original intent was commercial imitation, but it doesn’t do anything to refute the case that that’s what the ultimate use was. Adding one extra round to the back and forth of how they got to that point doesn’t really change anything important.
Yeah, not really damning evidence either way but it certainly looks like, according to their own words, OpenAI intended to use her as marketing.
OpenAI might have had a leg to stand on if their CEO hadn't gone on the internet and blasted out "Her" when advertising the Sky voice, and another co-founder had not specifically name-dropped using SJ to market their voice product. (And reading the WaPo article, they hired a film director to handle the voice recording, and the individual in charge of artistic decision-making, apparently an avid Her fan, was conveniently not made available to interview...Hm...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
(TLDR; Ford licenses a Bette Midler track and gets a sound-a-like to perform it for a commercial after Bette Midler refuses to participate. Midler sues and wins)
> In sum, our holding in Midler, upon which Waits' voice misappropriation claim rests, has not been eroded by subsequent authority.
It probably could be stretched to musicians as well. Maybe lookalike actors too if we go down that route.
I just can't imagine it'd be a good thing to have your voice be owned by someone else just because they became famous first.
Waits won because they were clearly intending to impersonate his voice, while singing his song. Not because a random guy on the radio sounded like him.
Ditto for SJ--there was a clear intent to reproduce her specific voice, based on her role in "Her".
Again, there wasn't. An article literally came out today that they had contracted the VA before contacting SJ. [1]
Honestly this argument right here is what the slippery slope argument is all about. If you continue any further, you're just further proving it. They literally didn't even contact SJ before hand.
>while singing his song
You even added this caveat before, its already the slippery slope in action. No song was being sung here.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/05/22/openai-...
I'm betting on the actor sounding nothing like SJ at all. Their voice was used as a baseline in the training of the tool, but ultimately it was modified to copy SJ.
The potential legal issue is much more about the details of the commercial presentation and marketing of the work by OpenAI than it is about her work itself, beyond whether the work has sufficient similarity to make the particular manner of commercial use a legal issue. There’s nothing for her to defend.
Backstory: https://theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/20/chatg...
First, the "Her" reference from OpenAI.
Then ScarJo saying "Hey that sounds like me. Even some of my friends think so."
The voices sound kind of similar in some ways, and dissimilar in other ways. If the voice actor was trying to mimic ScarJo, she didn't do a very good job.
Is a casual reference to the title character exemplifying the same concept, a female-voiced AI, in a movie that won best screenplay at the Academy Awards and Golden Globes, an IP violation? Even if that were the case, it would be a studio matter and not Scarlett's IP.
I am curious why they reached out to ScarJo again 2 days prior, though.
Did they want to use her purely for marketing? That seems doubtful, because they'd have to get movie studio clearance to use "Her" in official marketing.
Did they have a separate model trained on her voice (I wouldn't put this past OpenAI) and were hoping they could get last-minute clearance to use it? This is actually my suspicion. That failed, so they just went with the voice models they already had clearance to use. That's not illegal. It's not even unethical. Anyone can try to train voice models on voice samples they collect. What's a problem is commercial use and representation of likeness.
I don't think a casual reference to Her was a representation that the voice is like ScarJo. It was merely referencing (very effectively) the concept of the movie's always-there [female] AI-voiced AI-chatbot.
> I just can't imagine it'd be a good thing to have your voice be owned by someone else just because they became famous first.
Are you saying that anyone being able to train generative AI on someone's work or a facsimile to directly compete with them is actually better for commercial artists?
That seems to be a leap. It's not at all hard to define a bright line between two people that merely sound the same and inappropriate appropriation. Lots of folks have deep voices similar to James Earl Jones, but if you hire one of them to voice a helmetted character named Tarf Later you'd expect to lose a suit under this statue, right?
The case at hand isn't that Sky sounds like Johansson in the abstract (whose actual voice isn't even all that unique or notable), it's that explicitly evocative of her role in Her, and most damningly that they clearly tried to hire her to do it.
I think nowadays, the idea that doing a commercial damages your artistic integrity is considered sort of an anachronism. For better and worse, I guess, and largely driven by the consequences of technology in any case. But, a similar lawsuit today would probably be about damaging the monetary value of the artist's brand, rather than about damaging their artistic credibility per se, as it was with Waits at the time.
It used to be a truism that taking money from sponsors changed your allegiances, and changed the nature of your art. For the worse. Whether time has been proven that true or false is an exercise for the reader. Point is, that's where Waits seems to be coming from. It's not about "they didn't pay me first," it's about the commercial diminishing his credibility because it looks like he might have agreed to do it in the first place.
I'm not sure this is true. It was always the case that these things were contextual and based a lot on how the artist/musician/author presented themselves. The whole idea of "selling out" is predicated on the assumption you have some high ground to give up, or at least that the action you are taking would undermine strongly held beliefs of your fan base.
When popularity swings more to (obviously) commercially driven output, there is plenty of selling, but less selling "out", as it were. The pendulum will likely swing again.
Scarlett Johansson might beg to differ.
I think some people just happen to create art.
I think others make it part of their personal definition, and to those integrity is part of it (if they choose to have it)
> When I was a kid, if I saw an artist I admired doing a commercial, I'd think, "Too bad, he must really need the money." But now it's so pervasive. It's a virus. Artists are lining up to do ads. The money and exposure are too tantalizing for most artists to decline. Corporations are hoping to hijack a culture's memories for their product. They want an artist's audience, credibility, good will and all the energy the songs have gathered as well as given over the years. They suck the life and meaning from the songs and impregnate them with promises of a better life with their product.
Tom Waits did have a point that I think today's content creators need to take onboard. With music it was not always about money for everyone, the love of music was motivating enough, bringing people together for a good time.
I do not see many content creators in it 'for the content' and bringing a community together. There are definitely some but the algorithm isn't helping them.
> Eventually, artists will be going onstage like race-car drivers covered in hundreds of logos. John, stay pure. Your credibility, your integrity and your honor are things no company should be able to buy.
I wish politicians were obliged to wear suits decorated in all the logos of their sponsors.
The difference is that artists used to be able to earn a decent living from selling their art.
Today, artists (unless they are actually producing physical artifacts) are expected to give their work away for free (or for so little as to be pointless).
It doesn't mean that that kind of music isn't any good, but it's often entirely commercial from the very start which makes it hard for artists who had little if anything to do with the creation of those songs to care about "selling out".
Most rap songs are explicitly bragging about how they will do anything to make money, and about how people that won’t aren’t morally superior but are either born privileged or just making excuses for being weak and soft.
It’s alien coming from an upper middle class white family, where people try to pretend they have less money and care about money less than they actually do, because it isn’t socially acceptable- people hide their supercar in the garage and drive an old Toyota when people they know are looking. These people are just as ruthlessly greedy as Biggie claims to be, they just hide it.
If you mean 60s and 70s artists cared about their art, whereas now they primarily care about the money, then yes.
>Like, today, most rap songs with explicit lyrics have a sanitized version for general broadcast. Music artists in the 60's would have fought hard against that.
Fighting for something you believe in and/or the integrity of your song? Such suckers!
Not so coldly charted, it's really just a question of your honesty
The article explicitly mentions the Tom Waits case did not include a copyright component as he didn't own the copyright, and Frito-Lay probably obtained synch rights from the copyright owner.
Tom Waits won the suit without invoking copyright violations - read into that what you may.
If OpenAI's lawyers thought they were going to get away with it then OpenAI needs to get better lawyers.
I'm pretty sure this is exactly why TFA was posted—apparently you can, in fact, protect a voice under California law. Of the $2.6 million in damages awarded in TFA $2 million were for "voice misappropriation".
This seems to be the relevant section of the civil code:
I wouldn't be surprised if there were literally thousands of voice actors that sounded close enough to any given actress to pass as her.
My take is that for a certain cohort of AI hypersters and Sam fans, it is literally impossible for OpenAI to do wrong. Sam could probably shoot a man in cold blood on national television and we'd have somebody explaining how technically it's legal because reasons.
I think they 1000% did, because despite all the fuss there is actually no resemblance between the Sky voice and Scarlett Johansson's. The Sky voice is in a different pitch, doesn't have the vocal fry, doesn't have the slightly nasal tone. Listen for yourself[1].
This was a marketing coup for both OpenAI and Johannson. OpenAI, because they're in no danger of a negative judgment, Johansson because she gets her name all the place in the press and drums up free publicity for her film.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1cx1np4/voice_...
In the sample you linked to you're correct, but in this sample the vocal fry is present and in fact quite pronounced:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vgYi3Wr7v_g
I can't hear the nasal tone in either voice, but the video linked above sounds much closer to Johansson's than the sample the reddit poster chose. It's definitely not a home run, though.
Cynical.
Is there any reason why Elektra/Asylum didn't license the actual recording copyright[0] to Frito-Lay? I'm assuming Tom Waits (like any other musical artist) wouldn't have veto rights over licensing the recordings, in the same way he apparently couldn't stop Fifth Floor Music from licensing the song itself to Frito-Lay.
The thing is, if Frito-Lay had actually licensed the recording, Tom Waits wouldn't have a leg to stand on in court, because of a very funny concept in copyright law called federal preemption. Any claim under any other law - state[1] or federal - that looks and quacks like a copyright is null and void. You only get to sue for copyright with copyright. So you can't, say, trademark a public domain work[2] and then sue people for reproducing it. Misappropriation, false endorsement and publicity rights are very much trademark-shaped laws, so they also lack any jurisdiction over copyright matters. There really just isn't room in the law for "I license you this work" but also "you reproducing this work is a false endorsement". The public is not confused when copyrighted works are used with permission.
However, I'm also not sure why suing for copyright infringement was off the table in the first place. The thing is, when you make a derivative work, you own what you added. If you and me both go to Disney and buy licenses to produce Avengers merch, but I decide to copy your design for the merch, you get to sue me. My license to make my own derivative version of something does not entitle me to copy other derivatives of that same work. So Frito-Lay, having a license to record their own version of Step Right Up, doesn't get the right to copy Tom Waits' recording of Step Right Up.
Who knows, maybe recording copyright is a lot narrower than other forms of copyright, but it's hard not to shake the feeling that he could have gone up against Frito-Lay for a lot more.
[0] Music copyright has two souls: the copyright over the song itself - lyrics, sheet music, and so on - and a separate copyright over a recording of a specific performance of the song. Originally you could only copyright the song and not the recording.
[1] The reason why federal preemption exists is that states started inventing their own recording copyrights for music. Which sounds absolutely wild to lawyers today, who are taught that copyright is inherently a federal question and that states have no say in how it works. What's even more wild is that some state recording copyright laws were actually perpetual, this somehow survived the "for limited times" language in the Copyright Clause, we didn't establish federal preemption and shut down these schemes until the 1970s, and we didn't extinguish already extant perpetual recording copyrights until the Music Modernization act in 2018.
[2] i.e. Disney putting Steamboat Willie in their logo
Eg:
That's right, it fillets, it chops
It dices, slices, never stops
Lasts a lifetime, mows your lawn
And it picks up the kids from school
It gets rid of unwanted facial hair
It gets rid of embarrassing age spots
It delivers a pizza
And it lengthens, and it strengthens
And it finds that slipper that's been at large
Under the chaise longe for several weeks
And it plays a mean rhythm master
It makes excuses for unwanted lipstick on your collar
And it's only a dollar, step right up
It's only a dollar, step right up
A big part of that era’s music industry was being able to convince musicians they weren’t totally fucked as soon as they signed.
It's been pushed down the Memory Hole.
A true artist. Here's my favorite work of his: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Psk3rmjonQA
There was a time in my life when I was aware of just about every bit of Waits arcana available to the public.
Then I got older and lost my way.
Thank you for that link. #PEHDTSCKJMBA
eta: all the folks saying the voice actor doesn't sound exactly like ScarJo and was hired before the negotiations with ScarJo are neglecting to remember: AI is really good at making voice imitations from snippets. So Sky's voice is almost certainly not unprocessed voice acting. That's how the There I Ruined It guy does his covers.
Perhaps Andrey Karpathy if he has a change if heart - he's been hinted to have led the AI personality effort at OpenAI before he left.
If not him, then the discovery process ought to be good. Scarlett's lawyers asked for details on how OpenAI trained the voice, then the voice got pulled ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
If/when the voice returns and this goes to court, we may find out if there was any fine-tuning on ScarJo's interviews/movie audio.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/oct/08/tom-waits-angr...
There's nothing kind about man
You can drive out nature with a pitch fork
But it always comes roaring back again
For want of a bird
The sky was lost
For want of a nail
A shoe was lost
For want of a life
A knife was lost
For want of a toy
A child was lost"
I like that Waits never became an entertainment industry pushover.
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence (at least, until the legal team gets involved).
But in my experience, this is how 95% of corporate controversies happen - just some guy somewhere is an idiot and no one checks their work. But as soon as lawyers are involved they will pull out the Magna Carta if they have to in order to prove that you they were actually geniuses and within their rights to screw up.
Oops. I hope they get that fixed. I love Tom Waits.
