While the Sky voice and a version of ChatGPT Voice have been around for some time, the comparison to Johansson became more obvious due to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and many others, drawing the similarity between the new AI model and the movie "Her".
When your CEO inadvertently helps build a copyright suit against your product... Not a good look.
They revealed some sort of companion for your phone that is ironically close to those in the movie „Her“ where the virtual girlfriend is voiced by Scarlet Johansson.
Irony, since Scarlet had dubbed over the original voice actor Samantha Morton because in post Spike Jonze realized the voice needed something "different". So in the movie they needed to turn the dial up a bit, while in reality they started at 11 and had to dial it back.
If she can prove they used Johansen's voice as training data... Maybe. If the pitch and tambre of openai's voice came about naturally I don't see what leg they have to stand on.
Iirc it's not like recording artists can sue other singers that happen to sound like them.
Sky is my favorite voice. It'd be a shame if they took it away as her voice is by far the best one of the bunch. It sounds so natural and makes Siri, Cortana, and Alexa seem crude in comparison.
The ChatGPT case aside, what are the copyright laws on impersonating the voice of an actor portraying a particular film character? If someone imitates the voice of Johnny Depp playing Jack Sparrow, or Andy Serkis playing Gollum, but makes no reference to the character apart from the voice performance, does that infringe on the copyright to the character?
They did, but I'm not sure that applies in this case unless for some reason OpenAI signed a deal with SAG. Otherwise, they aren't beholden to any protections not afforded by the law.
At least, AFAIK. Someone with more legal knowledge should probably chime in
There are no applicable laws that I know about, and as a voice actor I am similarly concerned. There is a lot of focus on this in the industry atm, but we all know how glacially slow government moves. SAG-AFTRA and NAVA have this as a focus currently, and I'm watching with interest.
Apparently Amelia Tyler - the Narrator for BG3 - checked in on some random twitch stream, and they had an AI voice trained from her narration controlled by twitch chat - which was saying some fucking horrendous stuff.
Scary as fuck.
Remember to talk to everyone you know about voice scams. Scammers absolutely are leveraging this tech, and piling it on top of the usual "I've flushed my phone down the toilet, I'm texting from a mates phone and I need money to buy a new one for my job interview tomorrow" kinda scams.
Agree on a password or something, so that if "you" ever call (edit: or text) and put them under pressure then they ask for the password. Scammers will instantly divert or bail.
Apparently the answer is no. There is even someone making a KITT app using a LLM, but using an AI voice based on a voice imitator as they didn't got the rights from William Daniels and that's legal.