#there is something just sooooooo classically tech about

[thelaurenshippen]

an interesting update to this - scarlett johansson released a statement and in it she says that open AI approached her about being the voice initially and then re-approached her two days before the demo went live (there's a whole thing with one of the voices I didn't talk about in my initial post, the linked article explains). and sam altman had previously said they "cast the voice actor behind Sky’s voice before any outreach to Ms. Johansson". once again, this is interesting to me for a few reasons:

obviously someone here is not being fully transparent. it'd be weird to cast a sound-alike and then reach out to the agent of the person you're trying to sound like. maybe that is what happened, maybe they realized they were gonna get slammed for casting someone so much like her so they decided to see if they could get her, but someone - or everyone - here isn't telling the truth about the order of what happened

the idea that open ai was approaching any name for these roles is...buckwild to me. it indicates a level of detachment from reality that seems bonkers even for these freaks. there's not a single big actor I can think of that would want this job and any agent worth their salt would know that. idk if you guys remember, but we had a pretty big strike about it last year, you know, with a union that hadn't gone on strike in 40 years.

I don't actually have any new evidence, but imo this bolsters my opinion that 400 submissions is a tragic showing for a company of this size looking for actors. actors do not want this shit (once again no shade to the actors who did choose to it (presuming they exist lol))

we know that tech bros (and men in general) are weird about scarjo. we know that ai companies want men to feel like their ai assistant wants to fuck them. there have been, as every article points out, several movies with this exact plot. having a scarjo-sound-alike would be enough for ppl to want to fuck their ai assistant. open ai trying to get the real scarjo is a classic case of the tech industry trying to buy cool. tech companies having been trying to do this for decades. zuck making facebook to rate girls, musk buying twitter bc people didn't find him funny...these guys control the internet and have reshaped society and they still need artists so badly. never forget that. never let them forget it.

open ai made a little post about how they chose their chatbot voices and two things stood out to me:

a) I am genuinely pleased and surprised that the voices come from specific real people that they hired and paid, rather than being built off of all of the data open ai has scraped. the voice for siri did one job for one company 20 years ago and now she is literally everywhere without ever being compensated by apple or even acknowledged as the voice. there's simply no way she was paid enough in that original job. whereas, open ai says "each actor receives compensation above top-of-market rates, and this will continue for as long as their voices are used in our products." this could mean literally anything (what market rate are we going above? does continue mean they get residuals or get paid for doing more sessions?) but, christ, at least the actors are doing it with full knowledge of what their voices are being used for and can decide for themselves if the compensation is enough

b) the post talks about working with "award-winning casting directors" to get the voices. first of all, yay for paying casting directors! we love to see it. but they also say the CDs received over 400 submissions in a week and they state that like a big number and it's just...not at all. and look, without knowing the intricacies of the casting process, it's hard to know what approach the CDs took - it's very possible they were selective from the jump and 400 is a lot from the pool they were tapping. 400 would be a lot if you were going to the agencies directly and asking for names, but there's just no way in hell open ai went after big stars for this. so it would've been a pool of unknowns. in which case, 400 is laughably small. even if you're not using the big casting sites like actorsaccess, I've worked on projects with CDs and their own internal systems where we've gotten over 100 submissions for a single role. I've posted roles on casting sites and received literally thousands of submissions in just a few days

look, I have a very limited perspective on this - I am not a casting director (imo, one of the most important and undervalued jobs in hollywood) and I, in fact, hate the process of casting with a passion. but 400 just seemed like such a tiny pool to pull from and, idk, it heartens me! it's heartening to think that there's very little interest from actors and agents to be doing this kind of stuff. and absolutely no shade to the actors who did--I want actors to get their bag however they want as long as it's, like, safe sane and consensual, you know? but there's something encouraging about thinking that open ai hired some big casting agency to get their foot into the voice acting door and people didn't come running