In a scathing statement, Scarlett Johansson claimed that when she turned down an invitation to voice chat GPT, OpenAI brazenly imitated her distinctive tone anyway.
Last week OpenAI revealed a new conversational interface for ChatGPT with an expressive, artificial voice that resembles the AI assistant in the sci-fi film Her, played by Scarlett Johansson.
On Monday, Johansson released a statement claiming she was forced to overturn after her lawyers demanded OpenAI explain how the new voice was created.
Johansson’s statement, aired on Wired by her publicist, claims that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman asked her to provide a new voice for ChatGPT last September but she declined. She describes being surprised to see a demo of a new voice the company sent to ChatGPT last week that sounded like her.
“When I heard the demo for the release, I was shocked, outraged, and convinced that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that so closely resembled mine that my close friends and newsmen would,” the statement said. Institutions cannot tell the difference.” It notes that Altman appeared to encourage the world to link the demo to Johansson’s performance by tweeting “it” about the film on May 13.
Johansen said his agent was contacted by Altman two days before last week’s demo and asked to reconsider his decision not to work with OpenAI. After seeing the demo, she says she hired legal counsel to write to OpenAI asking for details on how she created the new sound.
The statement claims that this led OpenAI to announce in a post on X on Sunday that it had decided to “discontinue the use of the company name Sky” for artificial voice. The company also posted a blog post outlining the process used to create the sound. “Sky’s voice is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson but a different professional actress who uses her natural speaking voice,” the post said.
Skye is one of several artificial voices that OpenAI gave ChatGPT last September, but at last week’s event, she showed off a much more lifelike voice with emotional cues. The demo featured a version of ChatGPT running through a new AI model called GPT-4o that appeared to flirt with an OpenAI engineer in a way that many viewers were reminded of Johansson’s performance in it. gave
“Sky’s voice is not Scarlett Johansson’s, and was never intended to resemble her,” Sam Altman said in a statement provided by OpenAI. He claimed that the voice actor behind Sky’s voice was hired before the company approached Johansson. “Out of respect for Ms Johansson, we have stopped using Sky’s voice in our products. We apologize to Ms Johansson for not communicating better.
The dispute with Johansson added to OpenAI’s current battles with artists, writers, and creators. The company is already defending several lawsuits alleging it improperly used copyrighted material to train its algorithms, including suits by The New York Times and George R.R. Martin. Authors including
Generative AI has made it much easier to create realistic artificial sounds, creating new opportunities and threats. In January, New Hampshire voters were bombarded with robocalls containing a deeply fake voice message from Joe Biden. In March, OpenAI said it had developed a technology that could clone someone’s voice from a 15-second clip, but the company said it would not release the technology because of how it could be misused.
