May 21st 2024.
Scarlett Johansson, a well-known actress from Los Angeles, recently shared that she had turned down a request from OpenAI to lend her voice to their ChatGPT system. She expressed shock and anger at the fact that the company went ahead and used a voice that sounded almost identical to hers without her consent.
According to a report from variety.com, Johansson's lawyers had contacted OpenAI to have the voice of "Sky" - one of the new voices in their GPT-4o chatbot - taken down. This came after the company had introduced the Sky voice last week, which many noted sounded very similar to Johansson's AI companion in the movie "Her" from 2013.
OpenAI responded to the controversy by stating that they would "pause" the use of the Sky voice. They also clarified that the voice was not an imitation of Johansson's, but rather belonged to a different actress using her own natural speaking voice. However, Johansson was not satisfied with this response and called for legislation to protect individuals from having their likeness misappropriated without their consent.
Johansson revealed that she had been contacted by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman back in September 2023, but she had declined the offer for personal reasons. She was shocked and angered when she heard the released demo of the ChatGPT system, as it sounded so eerily similar to her own voice that even her closest friends and news outlets couldn't tell the difference. She also mentioned that Altman had insinuated that the similarity was intentional by tweeting the word "Her" - a reference to the movie in which Johansson had voiced the chat system Samantha.
In response to the backlash, Altman issued a statement clarifying that the voice of Sky was not intended to resemble Johansson's and that they had cast the voice actor before reaching out to her. He also apologized for not communicating better with Johansson and stated that they had paused using the Sky voice out of respect for her.
The controversy even made its way onto the season finale of "Saturday Night Live" where a joke was made about Johansson's husband, Colin Jost, who happens to be the co-host of Weekend Update. It seems that even in the world of AI, using someone's likeness without their consent can lead to some unexpected consequences.
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