OpenAI's obvious homage to the film she” ,” which imitates the voice of Scarlett Johansson, is rekindling a Hollywood-wide backlash against artificial intelligence, executives said. Reuters.
After failing to reach an agreement, Johansson accused ChatGPT's creators of copying her performance in a Spike Jonze feature film, rekindling fears about the existential threat posed by AI for the creative class, even as Hollywood studios test new tools and consider partnering with OpenAI.
“This really seems to have resonated with people,” one industry executive said. “It makes it seem human… a well-known tech company has done something to someone we know.”
OpenAI stunned the world in February when its text-to-video conversion tool, Sora, produced feature-film-quality videos. Since then, Hollywood executives and agents have met multiple times with the company to discuss potential creative partnerships and applications of the technology, according to agents and industry executives.
Johansson's slamming of OpenAI's use of a sultry voice that she described as “eerily similar” to her own performance in a public demo of the latest version of ChatGPT has antagonized some entertainment executives amid discussions about working more closely together on the project, people with direct knowledge said. Reuters.
“You'll never have a respectful collaboration between content creators and tech giants,” one studio executive said, calling OpenAI's actions “arrogant.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement on Monday that the voice “is not Scarlett Johansson's, and we have never attempted to imitate her. We had hired a voice actor to voice Skye before reaching out to Ms. Johansson.”
The company, in which Microsoft is its largest investor, did not respond to a request for comment about its ties to Hollywood after the dispute.
Before the recent conflict, Reuters Some people, on the condition of anonymity, have spoken out in recent weeks about their concerns that OpenAI's models appear to have been trained on copyrighted works, which the company considers fair use because they are publicly available on the internet – a major hurdle for professional directors and filmmakers who are hesitant to use tools built on other people's work without their consent.
But technologists across the entertainment industry see Sora as a promising tool to enhance the film and TV production process, and they believe the technology will soon be used to speed up digital effects.
Fox is already using OpenAI's ChatGPT to recommend new TV shows and movies to viewers of its Tubi streaming service.
OpenAI says it aims to protect copyrights and has blocked the ability to generate videos featuring well-known characters like Superman and well-known actors like Jennifer Aniston, but concerns remain about how to protect lesser-known performers.
I lost my voice
Johansson's standoff with Open AI opens a new chapter in the content industry's battle with AI leaders. According to John Yanchunis, a partner at law firm Morgan & Morgan, Johansson has grounds to argue that Open AI violated her right of publicity, which gives individuals the right to control the commercial use of their name, image and likeness.
Singer Bette Midler used California law to get her voice back in a case that legal scholars say set a precedent. She sued Ford's advertising agency, Young & Rubicam, and the company had hired a former backing singer to imitate her rendition of “Do You Want to Dance?” in a car commercial after she turned down an offer to sing the song. The case, filed in 1987, went all the way to the Supreme Court, which upheld her right of publicity. Tom Waits won a similar lawsuit against Frito-Lay in 1988 after a commercial imitated Waits' raspy singing style.
“In both cases, the lookalikes were singing songs that the singers made famous, so people were likely to infer that the singers were singing and promoting a product,” said Mark Lemley, director of Stanford University's Law, Science and Technology Program.
While Johansson's case is not as clear-cut as the previous cases, efforts to imitate Johansson's voice are sheAltman's repeated efforts to hire Johansson, as well as his tweets about the film, make him “a pretty strong candidate for Johansson,” Laemmle said.
Jeffrey Bennett, general counsel for the SAG-AFTRA performers' union, which played a key role in establishing publicity rights in California and across the country, has been pushing for federal laws for speech and publicity rights similar to the federal protections for copyright.
“I'm excited that there's a bigger conversation happening about this issue right now,” Bennett said. “We've been trying to use the bullhorn to be loud about this issue for quite some time. We've been talking about the spread of 'deepfakes,' and now it's starting to affect everyone. Now this is really controversial. We need a federal solution.”
