[buu700]

I'm also curious, legally speaking, is it an issue even if Sky's actress does sound like Scarlett? What if OpenAI admits they intentionally chose someone who sounded like Scarlett? Does it matter whether she was using her natural speaking voice or intentionally mimicking Scarlett's voice and mannerisms?

This seems similar to the latest season of Rick and Morty. Whether justified or not in that particular case, it rubs me the wrong way a bit in principle to think that a production can fire someone only to hire someone else to do a near-perfect copy of their likeness. If (as in the OpenAI case) they'd gone further and trained an AI on the impressions of Justin's voice, would that have been considered an AI impersonation of Justin with extra steps?

All of which is to say, this seems like a pretty interesting legal question to me, and potentially broader than just AI.

[sowbug]

The fired actor would have already signed away any claim to the character's likeness. The likeness the company cares about is that of the character, not of the actor portraying the character. The actor never owned the character, so the actor shouldn't be miffed that someone else gets the part for future performances.

[buu700]

That's probably the case. Having said that, there are also a lot of one-off side characters which use Justin's distinctive voice style, although I can't remember specifically whether that was the case in the latest season, and I'm not aware that detailed information about their internal agreements is public knowledge either way. I was speaking more about the general principle, not strictly that particular situation. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like there are some interesting overlapping legal and moral dilemmas in all of the discussions about both situations, regardless of what the specific facts of the OpenAI and R&M cases may be.

[sowbug]

Yes, I can see a plausible argument that a character is so intertwined with a well-known real-life persona that a company can't replicate a character without borrowing some of the persona's value. One might also make the case that the actor developed so much depth in an initially thin character that they deserve more credit than just acting the part.

I don't personally subscribe to the notion that the recent legal invention of intellectual property is a moral right. Capitalism has been doing just fine as a productivity motivator. We don't need to capitalize expression of ideas, let alone pure ideas. I accept the tradeoff of the temporary monopolies of copyright and patent, and I appreciate that trademark and trade secrets disincentivize bad behavior. But I have no desire to try to find new boxes to store new kinds of intellectual property, like Scarlett Johansson's right to monopolize performances of a character in an app that remind people of her performance of a character in a movie. Such a kind of property right is not necessary.

[vitaflo]

See Midler vs Ford, Glover vs Universal or Stefani vs Activision for prior cases in this area. Courts usually side with the person being imitated.