Ari Cohn: Well, for atarters, very different facts. The singer was singing a song Midler had previously recorded.

Remember when everyone was absolutely certain about the thing that totally happened and exemplified everything wrong with "AI culture" that ended up being...not what happened? www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records showwww.washingtonpost.com A different actress was hired to voice OpenAI’s “Sky” months before CEO Sam Altman contacted Scarlett Johansson, according to documents and the actress’s agent.

You know, the argument that it's a different voice didn't work so great when a certain company hired a backup singer for Bette Midler and instructed her to sound so similar that listeners basically couldn't tell the difference. Why should this be viewed any differently?

Well, for atarters, very different facts. The singer was singing a song Midler had previously recorded.

And in this situation, a vocalist was hired to perform a vocal affectation Johansson had previously recorded for film and Altman admitted to being a huge fan of and literally reached out to her about replicating. The medium hardly matters when the action (not accepting no + copycatting) is the same.

I don't think it's "part of her identity" in the way the 9th Circuit found to be the case for a singer.

Voice *is* part of your identity, and this is a clear effort to profit off of and use her creative labor and value, just with a voice actor instead of singer. It's also a violation of consent, from a company lead by a guy accused of not being candid and regularly critiqued over copyright attitudes.

The court did not say that voice is automatically part of everyone's identity. That's not how this works.

An iconic film role in which *only* *her* *voice* was used seems like it plausibly gets you over that threshold of identity. At least plausibly enough to get past a courthouse door.

To me it sounds like enough to get a jury deliberation.

This is such a ludicrous assertion to make in an era where AI voice mimics are literally scamming family members. People can be recognized and identified as the individuals they are by their voice, both written and spoken. That's a feature of personal identity.

But that's not how rights of publicity work

Why not?

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