HE can INVITES hundreds of millions of users and spit out answers, images and videos with just a few words, but the technology isn't all roses – it also has some legal thorns.
Scarlett Johansson recently hired legal counsel after ChatGPT creator OpenAI used a voice she called “strangely similar” to her own. the last AI chatbot. Johansson said she turned down the company's offer to voice the same chatbot more than a year before release, and stated she was “shocked, angry and in disbelief” when she heard OpenAI's public demo.
After Johansson's legal counsel sent letters to OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, company he paused “out of respect for Mrs. Johansson.”
But does Johansson have a case? Neil Elana business litigation attorney who is now senior counsel at law firm Stubbs Alderton & Markiles, LLP, based in Los Angeles, said The entrepreneur that it would be based on several factors, including how similar the voice is and whether there was any possible authorization, even if just implied.
“It looks like there was no authorization, but there could potentially be a case of implied authorization,” Elan said.
Elan, whose areas of expertise include copyright, trademark and publicity issues, notes that we do not know the communication between the parties.
“Ultimately it comes down to how similar the work is and what the process was that went into it,” Elan said of AI-related intellectual property cases.
“If I can't plagiarize a famous speech and take credit for it, neither can HE,” he said.
How OpenAI created the AI voice can also help determine whether or not there is a legal issue.
OpenAI already has DECLARING that he used another professional actress' voice, not Johansson's – but that may not make a difference.
“Even if someone else's voice is used, the output is a voice like Scarlett Johansson's,” Elan said. “Why does it sound so similar?”
Connected: Emory University funds, suspends student for AI tool: Lawsuit
Johansson's push against OpenAI is not the first legal action taken against the company. authors including Paul Tremblay and Sarah Silverman claim their books were part of datasets used to train AI without their consent.
New York Times ignorant OpenAI in December on copyright infringement and other news organizations such as The Intercept have Following costume.
More than 200 musicians signed a letter last month about the “predatory” and “catastrophic” use of AI in the music industry. Over 15,000 authors signed a statement last year asking big AI CEOs at OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and IBM to credit and compensate writers before training AI with their work.
The issue of where big AI firms get their training data has also been at the forefront of the AI conversation, with a April report revealing that the latest text-to-video AI models may have been trained on YouTube videos without the creators being aware of it.
Connected: OpenAI reportedly used more than a million hours of YouTube videos to train its latest AI model
So does this mean that non-celebrity creators are out of luck when it comes to unauthorized use of their voice or likeness? Not exactly, but the commercial image or voice of a non-celebrity doesn't have the same value as a public figure, Elan says.
While companies and businesses cannot use someone's voice without consent, there probably wouldn't be a strong case for monetary damages if unauthorized use occurred.
“The monetary price may not justify such a case,” Elan said, adding that people still “have the right to protect their likeness.”