Scarlett Johansson refused the invitation to voice ChatGPT, she claims after that OpenAI mimicked her voice.
The preceding week, OpenAI unveiled a new conversational interface for ChatGPT with an artificial tone almost identical to that of the AI assistant portrayed by Scarlett Johansson in the sci-fi movie Her.
Johansson filed a case on Monday to undo the change. Her lawyers demanded clarification from OpenAI about the creation of the new voice.
Johansson’s statement, conveyed to WIRED by her publicist, claims that last September, CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman invited her last December to provide ChatGPT’s new voice which she denied. The previous week, she described being bewildered to see OpenAI demo a voice that was remarkably similar to hers.
The statement further relayed.“When I heard the demo, I was blown away, I felt disappointed and angry that Mr. Altman would create such a similar voice to mine that even my close friends and family members couldn’t distinguish. It appears like, on the 13th of May, Altman tweeted “her” on the release of ChatGPT’s new voice which made people think the voice was similar to Scarlet Johansson.
According to Johansson’s statement, Altman contacted her agent two days before the preceding week’s demo and asked if Johansson wanted to rethink her decision about denying the offer from OpenAI. After she saw the demo, she hired a lawyer to write to OpenAI inquiring how the new voice was created.
The statement further says that as a result, OpenAI announced on X that it had decided to “pause the use of sky, the company’s name for the artificial tone. Moreover, a blog post was also posted by the company that highlighted the process of the creation of the new voice. The post revealed that “Sky’s voice is not the mimicry of Johansson’s voice but it belongs to another actress using her natural voice”
The sky is one of the artificial tones that OpenAI provided to ChatGPT last September, however, the event that took place last week displayed a voice that sounded more realistic than before. The demo witnessed a version of ChatGPT that was powered by a new AI model called GPT-4o interacting with an OpenAI engineer in a flirtatious way. It appeared that viewers were reminded of Johansson’s performance in Her.
In a statement, Sam Altman said “ It was never our intention to create a voice similar to Johanssan’s” He further said that the voice used behind Sky was hired even before the company approached Johansson. “With due respect, we’ve paused using Sky’s voice in our products and we apologize to Ms. Johansson for poor communication”
This conflict gave rise to already existing battles of OpenAI with other artists, and creators. The company is currently involved in multiple pursuits where people are claiming that OpenAI used copyrighted material to train its AI algorithms, including suits from The New York Times and authors including George R.R. Martin.
It has gotten simpler to create artificial tones that sound realistic due to the generative AI, as a result, new doors are unlocked. In January, voters in New Hampshire were under fire by robocallers featuring a deepfaked voice message from Joe Biden. In March, OpenAI declared that it had introduced a new technology that could mimic anyone’s voice from a 15-second clip, but the company felt concerned about how it could be misused and decided not to release it.
