“Her” is one of the films that you should definitely enjoy in the original language. Hollywood star Scarlett Johansson speaks the voice of the invisible artificial intelligence; without her, the main character would hardly fall in love with an operating system. So what could be more obvious than giving exactly this voice to an artificial intelligence that actually exists? Technically no problem, there is the voice from this and many other films. The people from OpenAI, the company behind Chat-GPT, are also said to have asked Johansson. But she refused.
And she was amazed when she heard what the voice that OpenAI demonstrated at the presentation sounded like: like hers. Even her closest friends and even journalists couldn’t have noticed any difference. The actress wrote two letters to OpenAI and company CEO Sam Altman through her lawyers, she said in a statement reported by National Public Radio (NPR).
On the one hand, OpenAI hastened to reply that the AI voice called “Sky” was not created using Johansson sound snippets, but was spoken by another actress. It was never the goal that the voice should sound like Johansson’s. On the other hand, OpenAI has withdrawn the artificial voice for now; it can no longer be selected in Chat-GPT 40, the latest version of its generative artificial intelligence. In addition, after the presentation, in which the focus was on the software’s ability to hold an open conversation, OpenAI boss Sam Altman himself drew a comparison with the scifi film on Platform X and explicitly mentioned the title “Her”.
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And now? Scarlett Johansson is “shocked and angry,” as the legal letters say. The circumstances would have to be clarified. It’s “about protecting our image, our own work, our own identities.” Especially in times when society is confronted with deceptively real AI fakes (deepfakes), transparency and effective laws are necessary to protect the personal rights of individuals.
The possibilities that AI has made possible to bring dead actors to life, and even to possibly completely replace actors or stunt people in the future, drove actors and screenwriters to the first joint strike in the history of Hollywood in 2023.
This was finally decided by the Council of Ministers this Tuesday The EU AI law does not provide for any explicit regulation in a case such as Johansson’s. The European legislators were caught off guard by generative AIs such as Chat-Chat-GPT and had to subsequently incorporate copyright issues. The Federal Ministry of Justice considers the voice or the image of a person as not covered by copyright. However, personal rights could be violated.
First, however, the courts will probably deal with the case of the possibly cloned celebrity voice. It’s about the principle, but of course also about a lot of money.