Days before OpenAI demonstrated its flirty new voice assistant last week, actress Scarlett Johansson said, Sam Altman, the company's chief executive, called her agent and asked him to consider licensing her voice for a virtual assistant.
It was his second request to the actress in the last year, Johansson said in a statement Monday, adding that the answer both times was no.
Despite those denials, Johansson said, OpenAI used a voice that sounded “eerily similar to mine.” He hired a lawyer and asked OpenAI to stop using a voice he called “Sky.”
OpenAI x.com/OpenAI/status/1792443575839678909″ title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>suspended his release from “Sky” over the weekend. The company said in a blog entry on Sunday that “ai voices should not deliberately imitate a celebrity's distinctive voice; Sky's voice is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson, but rather belongs to a different professional actress using her own natural voice.”
For Johansson, the episode has been a surreal case of art imitating life. In 2013, she provided the voice of an artificial intelligence system in the Spike Jonze film “Her.” The film told the story of a lonely introvert seduced by a virtual assistant named Samantha, a tragic commentary on the potential dangers of technology as it becomes more realistic.
Last week, Altman seemed to point out the similarity between OpenAI's virtual assistant and the movie in a x.com/sama/status/1790075827666796666″ title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>publish in x with the single word “she.”
OpenAI said it could not share the names of its voice professionals for privacy reasons. He said he had worked with unnamed directors and producers to develop five voices for his product: Breeze, Cove, Ember, Juniper and Sky. The vocals were recorded last summer in San Francisco.
OpenAI is at an important juncture as it prepares to make its voice assistants available to customers supported by its latest technology, known as GPT-4o. On Monday night, Altman said in a statement that “Sky's voice is not Scarlett Johansson's, and he was never intended to sound like hers.”
“We cast the voice actor behind Sky's voice before contacting Ms. Johansson,” he continued. “Out of respect for Ms Johansson, we have stopped using Sky's voice in our products. “We are very sorry, Ms. Johansson, that we have not communicated better.”
Ms. Johansson's statement was previously reported by x.com/BobbyAllyn/status/1792679435701014908″ title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>NPR's Bobby Allyn.
She is the latest high-profile person to accuse OpenAI of using creative works without permission. Over the past year, OpenAI has been sued for copyright violations by authors, actors, and newspapers, including the Authors Guild of America and The New York Times, which sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft.
It is the second time in recent years that Johansson has taken a public stance against a prominent company. In 2021, she sued the Walt Disney Company, accusing it of breaching her contract because she released the movie “Black Widow” simultaneously in theaters and on Disney+. Ms. Johansson, who played the Marvel character Black Widow in eight blockbuster films, reached an agreement with the company.
Before becoming a Marvel superhero, Johansson made a name for herself in the 2003 film “Lost in Translation” as a young woman who formed an unlikely bond in Tokyo with a movie star played by Bill Murray. She has constantly oscillated between slicker films from directors like Wes Anderson and Hollywood blockbusters like “The Avengers.” In 2020, she was nominated for two Academy Awards for “Marriage Story” and “Jojo Rabbit.”
In September, Johansson said, Altman first approached her to offer her voice for OpenAI's future assistant.
“He told me that he felt that by expressing the system, he could bridge the gap between technology companies and creatives and help consumers get comfortable with the seismic shift affecting humans and ai,” he said in his statement. “He said he felt my voice would be comforting to people.”
Last week, OpenAI unveiled that assistant during a swanky product event in San Francisco. Mark Chen, research leader at the company, he told the assistant I was nervous about doing a live demo. With the enthusiasm of a cheerleader, the assistant said, “Oh, are you doing a live demo right now? That's great!”
Chen then gave a lengthy demo, showing how OpenAI had combined the conversational skills of its ChatGPT chatbot with the sound of a voice assistant like the iPhone's Siri. OpenAI's assistant could simultaneously juggle audio, images and video to be able to answer a written math question and respond to questions.
Mr. Altman later wrote about the event in his personal blog, saying: “It seems like the ai in the movies; And I'm still a little surprised that it's real.”
Ms. Johansson said she had heard from friends, family and the public that the voice speaking to Mr. Chen sounded just like hers. Alissa Wilkinson, a film critic for The Times, wrote that the assistant's voice betrayed “a bit of Johansson's clear, low tone and a touch of vocal coldness.”
In an interview after the event, Mira Murati, CTO of OpenAI, said The edge that the similarities to Ms. Johansson's voice were incidental and that the voice was not designed to sound like the actress.
