The funniest thing about the whole affair is that it wouldn't have blown up except for psychological priming. And some people are so blind to this effect that they've formed what's effectively an army on these OpenAI-ScarJo threads.
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.
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.