OpenAI suspended its ChatGPT narrator that sounded similar to Scarlett Johansson’s voice on Monday following backlash from the actress that included her deploying legal counsel.
“Sky,” the name the company gave the voice, was recently released. OpenAI advertised the product at an event last week, after which members of the press and observers immediately found a likeness between “Sky” and the character of the AI virtual assistant played by Johansson in the movie Her.
Johansson said she received an offer from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to voice the new ChatGPT 4.0 system last September.
“He told me that he felt that by my voicing the system, I could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and AI,” she said in a statement. “He said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people.”
Nine months after the star rejected the opportunity, Johansson heard from friends and relatives that “Sky” sounded eerily like her. Outraged, Johansson hired lawyers who wrote letters to Altman and OpenAI asking how “Sky” was developed, prompting them to drop the voice.
“Mr. Altman even insinuated that the similarity was intentional, tweeting a single word ‘her’ — a reference to the film in which I voiced a chat system, Samantha, who forms an intimate relationship with a human,” the celebrity said.
In a statement published Sunday, OpenAI explained how it partnered with the voice-acting industry over many months to create “Sky” but did not use Johannson’s voice.
“We believe that AI voices should not deliberately mimic a celebrity’s distinctive voice—Sky’s voice is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson but belongs to a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice,” the company wrote. “To protect their privacy, we cannot share the names of our voice talents.”
In March, Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, which he helped found in 2015, and against Altman, alleging that the corporation and its leader abandoned their original mission to advance the flourishing of humankind with artificial intelligence and have instead neglected that for maximizing profits. In the suit, Musk noted that OpenAI’s certificate of incorporation promises that the company “will benefit the public,” and that it is not “organized for the private gain of any person.”
Musk has criticized his old project for progressive ideological bias, demonstrated by a reported unwillingness of the ChatGPT algorithm to generate narratives sympathetic to Republicans such as former president Trump. In a 2023 interview with Tucker Carlson, Musk said “there’s certainly a path to AI dystopia, which is to train AI to be deceptive.”
The New York Times also filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for copyright infringement, arguing that the creators of ChatGPT used millions of NYT articles to train its AI platform. The suit argues that the tech company should be held accountable for billions of dollars in damages.
Johansson claimed that two days before the ChatGPT 4.0 demo launch, Altman contacted her agent to ask her to reconsider being the voice of the narrator. “Sky” was released before Johansson could follow up, she said.
“In a time when we are all grappling with deepfakes and the protection of our own likeness, our own work, our own identities, I believe these are questions that deserve absolute clarity,” she said. “I look forward to resolution in the form of transparency and the passage of appropriate legislation to help ensure that individual rights are protected.”