They stole it? Did they send a robot to surgically remove his vocal cords?
Sorry but you can’t own a voice. You can sue if it is implied that a voice is you, but you can’t own the voice. If you could, you’d run into all kinds of problems. Imagine getting sued because your natural voice sounds too much like someone with more money and lawyers than you. Of if you happened to look like a celebrity/politician.
My voice developed through a combination of my body structure, my upbringing, speech therapy and a lot of training to do VO work. I absolutely own it. I have worked very hard on it.
I own my voice the same way I own my legs.
I’m sorry but that isn’t true. A voice is a natural trait. There are other people with similar or identical voices out there.
Let’s just say you can “own” a voice. In that world, what happens when two people naturally sound similar? Who gets the rights?
Similar voices are not the same voice. You can analyze them and show that they are different.
So the answer is that the person who said it gets the rights. Because it’s their voice.
The idea that you don’t own something that is a unique part of you is ludicrous.
“You can’t own your own voice”
Talking out of your dystopian ass, aren’t you?
Ok, so how would that work? What does happen if you happen to sound like someone else? Who gets the rights to that voice?
In this case, it is likely that they wanted to use his voice if the videos done in collaboration went particularly well. So the fact that it’s hus voice has a specific reason to be. This could hold as a claim, I think.
So you’d be ok with someone taking your fedia.io account and just posting whatever they wanted? I mean it’s just an account it’s not you is it?
Sure, but you can use someone’s likeness to fraudulently tie them to some product you’re pushing. The burden here is if the average person familiar with the voice would mistake it for support, and if the creator likely intended for that to happen, and I think that standard has been met here given the response by the CEO and the allegations by Jeff Geerling’s audience.
If you just happen to look or sound like a celebrity/politician, that’s a different story because fraud requires intent. Now, if you used your likeness to imply support by that celebrity/politician for some cause or product, and you don’t disclose that you’re not them, then we’re back in fraud territory.
In this case, there seems to be clear evidence that there was intent to mislead viewers to improve views. That’s fraud.
Yes, that was the distinction I was trying to make. These cases are fact dependent. I’m willing to admit that in this specific case there might have been both the intent to imply endorsement by a specific person and that practical result.
But as you can see in the other comments where I’m getting reamed, owning a voice outright is a pretty popular (if currently legally dubious/impossible) concept.
Oh so I guess piracy is fine if it’s citizens getting robbed huh? Funny how that works.
Sony will pirate from anyone who isn’t Sony. Same with Time-Warner. Same with Columbia. Same with every studio, every label, every publishing house.
Absolutely no-one in the industry takes piracy seriously until it’s their own stuff being pirated by someone else.
Moreover, they all are used to Hollywood accounting, in which lawyers try to justify not paying someone for work whenever they can.
Hollywood. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villany.
A fantastic example is the Verve’s Bitter Sweet Symphony.
It samples a few seconds of a Rolling Stones song. For this, the former Stones manager Allen Klein sues them. The Verve gives up all royalties for the whole song. So the Stones are getting that money, right? No, Klein had the ownership of the piece in question go to himself.
Klein dies in 2009, and the rights to everything finally revert to the Stones in 2019. They think the whole sampling thing with the Verve is stupid, and relinquish the song’s rights back to them.
For about 20 years, it was not only morally OK to pirate that song, but morally obligatory. The execs of the industry don’t give a shit about the artists.
We are going to need much stronger image rights for individuals in the AI age.
There’s no way to stop the technology itself (although current development may plateau at some point), so there must be strong legal restrictions on abusing it.
Do you want the rich to be richer? Because that’s how you make the rich richer. People like Scarlett Johanson will be able to license their likeness for millions or billions. Of course, we would have the same rights; the same rights to own a mansion and a yacht. Feeling lucky?
That’s the kind of capitalism that Marx rages against: Laws that let people demand money without contributing labor.
You do realize that the vast majority of voice actors are not famous right? These are people working in a highly competitive labor market that has one of the few influential unions in the US outside of trades. Most of these AI companies aren’t going after Johansson and the like if they have to pay instead of steal. They’re going for those who are less established and trying to get a break, making them easier to exploit.
You do realize that the vast majority of voice actors are not famous right?
Yes, that’s the point. You are not defending voice actors by demanding likeness rights.
I am not sure why this is so difficult to understand. Maybe there is some confusion about the technology. You only need a few seconds of audio to clone a voice. You don’t need hours of audio from a professional. That’s why the tech can be used for scams. Likeness rights won’t create jobs for voice actors. Only free money for famous people. You can also generate random voices.
Leading AI voice companies like Elevenlabs require you to have permission to clone a voice. But how can they check if their customers are being truthful? In practice, it simply means that famous people, whose voices are known, may not be imitated. Likeness rights, by their nature, can only be enforced, with any kind of effectiveness, for the rich and famous.
OpenAI tried to hire Johansson. When she declined, they hired a different, less famous actress. Maybe they did that to defend against lawsuits, or maybe it gives better results. If they had engineered a nonexistent voice, it would be almost impossible to make the case that they did not imitate Johansson. But still, everyone is talking about that poor famous, rich person who got ripped off. What about the actress who actually provided the voice? I guess she can look for another job, because Johansson owns that voice type.
one of the few influential unions in the US
You mean Ronald Reagan’s old outfit? Do you even know who Ronald Reagan was?
There’s no future where this affects me in the slightest. Okay, so jeff Goldblum can get a few more shekels for renting his voice. This doesn’t affect me: that’s his JOB, whether they stole his likeness and paid him, paid him and cloned his voice, or paid him to do the speaking. It’s the same thing, imho.
Talk to me when people who don’t have their voice recorded get an unfair leg-up for selling it. I’ll be okay with it then, too, but let me know.
And it’s a landlord’s job to collect rent. It’s Elon Musk’s job to maximize shareholder value.
It’s ok if you watch out for numero uno. I’m not expecting more. But you are wrong to think that this doesn’t affect you. You can’t opt out of society. You won’t be able to avoid products with licensed voices. Your taxes will be paying for enforcement against “pirates”. And most importantly, every new privilege for the rich and famous changes society. With every step, the elite becomes more entrenched and the bottom more hopeless. It’s a matter of enlightened self-interest. If we only reject what directly hurts us individually, then the elites will simply build themselves a new feudalism.
The real risk is the voice being sold to Disney or Sony Music, and then youtube videos are getting removed because of similarities.
Voice tones aren’t all that unique in most cases and there’s too much room for abuse imo. The Scarjo and open ai scandal is a good example of this. The voices weren’t that similar and I’m just not interested in having celebrities own whole spectrums like that.
Yeah, the genie is out of the bottle on this one. I can do voice cloning with consumer hardware and available models. That can’t be undone, but good legal protections would be nice.
That said, the Johanson case is a bad example because it really didn’t sound much like her at all. It was a chipper yound white lady sound, but to my ear sounded nothing like Johanson. It did sound kinda like a character she voiced, but I would not gave confused the two. They cloned the voice of someone they paid to give a similar inflection as the voice from Her. That’s far removed from cloning Johanson herself. It is closer to people making music “in the style of”.
Capitalism: steal first, apologize with no real repurcussions later
Sadly, it was Grace Hopper who said “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.”
Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (9 December 1906 – 1 January 1992) was a U.S. Naval officer, and an early computer programmer. She was the developer of the first compiler for a computer programming language; at the end of her service she was the oldest serving officer in the United States Navy.
That brings me to the most important piece of advice that I can give to all of you: if you’ve got a good idea, and it’s a contribution, I want you to go ahead and DO IT. It is much easier to apologize than it is to get permission.
- The future: Hardware, Software, and People in Carver, 1983
Except she probably wasn’t referring to identity theft; just how to handle dumb shits in management.
Yeah, there’s some key qualifiers in there
if you’ve got a good idea, and it’s a contribution
Identity theft is neither a good idea or a contribution to society
