This made me think a little too, but then I started thinking about how people talk. Even if a person’s tone is similar, the mannerisms are still drastically different. The voice actor had to spoof Scarletts voice well enough to even fool Scarletts friends.
While I haven’t read Altman’s tweets (or tweets from someone else at OpenAI?) personally, rumor has it he knew what he was doing with a specific voice actor. The intent was to spoof her voice. The intent is probably more damning than the actual act, TBH.
To summarize, there are a few nuggets here: They approached SJh first with a specific reason to use her voice; Some asshat bragged about spoofing the voice on Twitter; There was clear intent of generating a likeness of SJh.
(Thinking about the broke actors for a second… /s) Their face and voice are at the core of their career, similar to how company branding is makes a company unique. While I am not a lawyer, it seems there are some parallels with trademark and copyright law here.
“Accidentally” using a voice that sounds like SJh would be a really poor argument now as well.