Hollywood actress, Scarlett Johansson has been left shocked and angered after Sam Altman and his company OpenAI launched a chatbot with a similar voice to hers despite her turning down an approach by the company to voice its new chatbot.
The actress is now threatening the company with legal action.
Johansson, who was the voice of the artificial intelligence assistant in the 2013 science fiction movie “Her,” said ChatGPT’s “Sky” voice is so eerily similar to hers that her closest friends could not tell the difference.
According to the statement shared hours after the company said it was taking down the voice, the actress says she was “shocked, angered and in disbelief” over how “eerily similar” the voice of Sky sounded to herself and has now been “forced to hire legal counsel” with her legal team sending OpenAI two letters asking the company to detail the process by which the voice was developed.
“Last September, I received an offer from Sam Altman, who wanted to hire me to voice the current ChatGPT 4.0 system,” Johansson wrote, adding that Altaman said he felt her voice would be “comforting to people”
“After much consideration and for personal reasons, I declined the offer. Nine months later, my friends, family, and the general public all noted how much the newest system named “Sky” sounded like me.”
Johansson further shared that just two days before the company unveiled the ChatGPT voice, Altman again contacted her team, asking her to reconsider.
While OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that Her (the science fiction movie), which features Johansson as an AI voice assistant named Samantha, is his favorite movie, and posted the word “her,” following the announcement of the new ChatGPT version —denies that Sky’s voice imitates Johansson’s, saying it belonged to a different professional actress.
“The voice of Sky is not Scarlett Johansson’s, and it was never intended to resemble hers,” said Altman in a press statement. “We cast the voice actor behind Sky’s voice before any outreach to Ms. Johansson. Out of respect for Ms. Johansson, we have paused using Sky’s voice in our products. We are sorry to Ms. Johansson that we didn’t communicate better.”
In a blog post published on Sunday, OpenAI also denies the imitation allegations saying that the voice was developed from the voice of another actress using her natural speaking voice and declined to reveal her identity citing privacy concerns.
“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 natural speaking voice,” the company wrote.
Dan Stein, head of AI voice licensing company Voice-Swap told BBC News, “To use someone’s voice without permission feels particularly invasive at a time when distrust of AI and concern over its potential harms are rampant.”
He adds “Whether OpenAI trained their new Sky voice using audio from Scarlett Johansson or a sound-a-like, the fact remains that she refused permission, and her identity was exploited regardless. It sets a dangerous precedent for copyright and consent if the most prominent company in the field behaves in this way.”
The spat with Johansson comes at a tricky time for OpenAI, which is facing litigation from media companies, authors, and artists for allegedly using their materials without consent or compensation.
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