CAA CEO Bryan Lourd opened up concerning the dispute between OpenAI and one in every of his star purchasers, Scarlett Johansson.
In a Monetary Occasions interview, Lourd additionally stated that generative synthetic intelligence may very well be a supply of actual alternative for purchasers, at the same time as the largest AI corporations like OpenAI don’t totally perceive the world of creatives.
Final month, OpenAI pulled its “Sky” chatbot voice from ChatGPT, after customers famous that it sounded eerily much like Scarlett Johansson. The star subsequently launched a press release revealing that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had tried to recruit her to voice one of many chatbots, however she had declined, and that she was “shocked” and “angered” when she heard the Sky voice.
“To Scarlett’s credit score, she shouldn’t be afraid to inform the reality and to face up for herself,” Lourd informed the FT. “Whenever you change into somebody as globally recognised as she is, the accountability turns into about others as a lot as it’s about your self. This was larger than her — it’s about all artists, not simply actors and never simply voiceover artists.”
He stated that Altman, who had beforehand acknowledged being fan of the 2013 Spike Jonze movie Her through which Johansson portrays an emotive AI voice, doesn’t perceive the world of creatives or Hollywood.
“He lives in a special world and has a special understanding of what artists do and what they personal, actually and ethically and morally,” Lourd stated. “To OpenAI’s credit score, they took [the voice] down after I requested them to take it down. I don’t assume they did that out of the goodness of their coronary heart. I believe they took it down as a result of they realised how difficult a scenario they’d created and stepped into.”
Reasonably, he famous that OpenAI was within the midst of talks with studios on numerous offers, with COO Brad Lightcap main negotiations.
“They didn’t need dangerous press,” Lourd stated.
However regardless of the unfavorable tales round using AI to create a voice much like his consumer, Lourd truly sounded optimistic when it got here to the tech’s use and worth to Hollywood.
“The explanation the leisure enterprise has lasted so lengthy is that it’s truly thrived on disruption and the evolution of expertise,” he stated. “It’s within the DNA for folks right here to be alarmed at first after which to embrace it and go in direction of it. There’s nothing however alternatives round AI.”
Lourd’s personal company, CAA, has created a “CAA Vault,” which homes digital replicas of its purchasers likenesses and voices (at the very least people who select to take part), for potential use in movie, TV and business work … absolutely compensated, in fact.