Scarlett Johansson is angry. It must be said that ChatGPT’s voice sounds exactly like his own. The conversational agent using artificial intelligence will therefore change tone, announced the company OpenAI, which the actress accuses, as well as its general director, Sam Altman, of having voluntarily and without her knowledge copied her voice.
“We have heard questions about how we chose voices for ChatGPT,” OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT, said on Monday on X. Therefore, “we are working to suspend the use of Sky (which interacts vocally with Internet users) while we respond to them,” the company said.
The actress hired a lawyer
“Sky’s voice is in no way an imitation of that of Scarlett Johansson,” however, assured OpenAI in an article posted on its blog, ensuring that it had been developed based on the voices of different actresses.
But the actress accuses OpenAI and its general director, Sam Altman, of having deliberately copied her voice, without her knowledge, forcing her to hire a lawyer in order to obtain the modification.
“Last September, I received an offer from Sam Altman, who wanted to hire me to be the voice of the current ChatGPT 4.0 system,” she said in a press release late Monday. “He said he thought my voice would comfort people,” she explains, stressing that she then “declined the offer.”
“When I heard the demo released, I was shocked, angry and in disbelief that Mr. Altman had developed a voice that sounded so eerily like mine that my closest friends and the media couldn’t do the difference,” says the actress. She adds that “Mr. Altman even insinuated that the similarity was intentional, by tweeting a single word, ‘she’.” Scarlett Johansson had indeed played the voice of the artificial intelligence system in the film Herfrom which the creators of ChatGPT have not hidden their inspiration.
The threat of deepfakes
“At a time when we are all struggling with “deepfakes” and the protection of our own image, our own work, our own identity, I think these questions deserve absolute clarity,” she laments, saying to wait “looking forward” to the adoption of “appropriate legislation to help ensure the protection of individual rights”.
OpenAI, for its part, detailed how it worked, with professional actors, to create several digital voices, which it called Breeze, Cove, Ember, Juniper and, therefore, Sky.