The ongoing dispute between the actress Scarlett Johansson on the one hand and OpenAI and its MFWIC Sam Altman on the other highlights a broader problem concerning rights, property, and rights in property.
The dispute itself concerns Altman’s attempt to get Johansson to participate in and lend her voice to OpenAI’s development of a talking assistant, ultimately named Sky. Johansson declined to participate, Sky was developed and offered to the public—and Sky sounds remarkably like Johansson.
[Johansson’s agent and of Artists Agency co-chairman Bryan] Lourd and the actress spent the morning fielding calls and emails from friends and associates, some of whom worried that OpenAI had simply appropriated Johansson’s voice without permission.
And
Emails to the actress from friends and associates streamed in asking if she’d participated in the OpenAI project.
The question extends far beyond this glorified NIL dispute, though.
Altman says that
Artists should also be able to opt out of allowing AI systems to mimic their work….
And in Tennessee,
Governor Bill Lee (R) signed into law the Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Securities (ELVIS) Act in March, which makes people’s voices protected personal rights.
No. Altman is dead wrong. Artists—and anyone else—should not have to affirmatively act to opt out of anything. Those who want to use an attribute of someone, their voice, their likeness, their DNA, should have to convince that someone to opt in.
The Tennessee law is on the right track, but it stops woefully short. People’s voices, or any other of their attributes, are not personal rights to be protected, or not, by the vagaries of government.
These attributes are not merely a facet of a person’s civilly-granted property. People’s attributes are their personal property, imbued in them by their Creator, an aspect of their unalienable Right to their pursuit of Happiness. Here’s John Adams:
All men are born free and independent, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights, among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.
A person’s personal attributes are inextricably intertwined with—unalienable from—those certain rights that are essential to our lives and our liberties. Technological advances have no impact on that beyond enhancing that person’s own Happiness.
That understanding badly wants renewal today.