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0 pointsKennyBlanken2y ago0 comments

Non-unique? What?

"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.

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Matticus_Rex2y ago· 2 in thread

> You're the only person in the room who thinks OpenAI didn't use samples of her voice for their voice model

Really? No one seems to be claiming that anywhere I've seen.

We know that they really did use a voice actress, and that it really is her actual voice, and that she was hired for it before ScarJo was approached. There's no "panic negotiation" there -- the most panic needed would be if someone internally identified that there could be a PR issue if people mistakenly thought it was close enough to seem like intentional impersonation.

Of course they wanted ScarJo, once they thought of it! It'd be great publicity. But that doesn't then mean that anyone who sounds somewhat like ScarJo (but certainly not identical) becomes retroactively unusable or makes it vocal impersonation.

marcus_holmes2y ago

> But that doesn't then mean that anyone who sounds somewhat like ScarJo (but certainly not identical) becomes retroactively unusable or makes it vocal impersonation.

yes. yes it does. That's what TFA is saying. Waits' case is exactly about this. They hired a singer to make a recording to sound like Waits. OpenAI hired a voice actress with a voice like Her to make their AI sound like Her. And then their CEO tweeted "her". It's that simple.

Matticus_Rex2y ago

Ford hired a singer to impersonate Waits in a parody of a Waits song in his exact style.

OpenAI hired a voice actress with a pleasant, low, breathy voice who shares a hint of a regional accent with ScarJo to be one of a bunch of voices for their models. Eight months after releasing it, the CEO tweeted "her." It's not illegal to hire someone who sounds a bit like a celebrity for something, and certainly not one who literally sounds more like a different celebrity (Rashida Jones).

This isn't a violation of rights of publicity for a number of reasons, but the most dispositive of them is that she doesn't actually sound that much like ScarJo. There's no vocal fry! That's the most distinctive part of her voice!

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