🏠 Her

Sky-jo has got beef with OpenAI

Brett Goldstein
May 27, 2024

GM! It’s Brett again. Happy Memorial Day to everyone! 🇺🇸

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🏠 AI

The Voice Drama

The TL;DR is that OpenAI unveiled GPT-4o and one of the synthetic voices they used is called "Sky" and has an uncanny resemblance to Samantha, the virtual assistant voiced by ScarJo in the movie “Her”.

The Scarlett camp claims OpenAI reached out multiple times, including just days before the demo, to get her on board to voice the AI herself. When she declined, they went ahead and created an imitation voice anyway.

Where it gets interesting though is whether this actually constitutes a legal violation of publicity rights.

OpenAI seems to have a legitimate defense that Sky was voiced by a different professional actor, even if the resemblance is crazy close. They've provided documentation around their whole casting process from way before Scarlett was ever involved.

Now you could argue they were still aiming for a deliberate soundalike, which has been grounds for lawsuits before (see: Bette Midler v Ford Motor Company). But the claims of outright voice imitation or use of recordings seem tough to prove.

The question on my mind is: Was it really worth all this PR mess just to kind of impersonate Scarlett's voice?

Maybe not. But it certainly feels like a big goof-up.

David Sacks on the All-In Podcast said, "If they never reached out to Scarlett, they could claim it's just a coincidence. But they called her twice - some months before and then two days before, which indicates panic."

It likely gets settled quietly. OpenAI cuts Scarlett a check, maybe even an "advisory" role and everyone moves on to focus on the bigger gen AI game.

But this is another example of OpenAI's growing pains as they transition from upstart to cultural heavyweight. When you yield that level of influence, every misstep gets magnified.

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