They cannot disclose the identity of the person involved in order to protect their privacy. This is a very convenient cloak, leaving no way to know if they cloned Scarlet Johansson's voice or if it's from someone else.
Fortunately for Scarlett, she can just sue them and force them to tell her. She also isn’t shy to litigate. I was surprised that Sam wanted to poke that particular beehive.
I know trademark litigation is wishy-washy, but can she even claim her voice is unique enough to claim some form of infringement? If I just happen to sound like her, am I a walking infringement?
Voices such as Shatner or Walken are at least as much about speech patterns than the voice, giving you another axis to compare voices against, so I can somewhat see those as being trademarkable. But when I hear the ChatGPT voice, it just sounds like "slightly-flirty generic female voice 03" to me.
Sam Altman and other OpenAI employees have been referencing the movie ahead of the presentation[1][2]. I think it'd be really challenging to prove that they didn't have that exact outcome in mind.
I’m not sure it’s a trademark question so much as an appropriation of likeness question. I just meant that they can’t really train on her actual voice samples and then conceal whether they did it; that’s what discovery is for.
OpenAI is going to do a very good job of pretending that it stealing literally everything on the internet and re-selling it is some unique new activity that's not happened before. That's their core business. What they're not going to be able to do is pretend that hiring a soundalike and then making repeated references to the original voice is ok. This isn't new legal ground no matter how much money you throw at it. Otherwise every advert on TV would have some no-name actor doing impressions of well known actors. They will have to pay ScarJo a lot of money, and probably they'll have to stop using the voice too - because they've pissed her off so much at this point.
