Some fans who imagined chatting with Scarlett Johansson will be disappointed. OpenAI announced, Monday, May 20, the suspension of “Sky,” one of the tones that interacts vocally with Internet users in ChatGPT, after the actress accused the American company, and its general director, Sam Altman, of knowingly copied his voice, without his knowledge.
“We have heard the questions about how we chose the voices for ChatGPT,” OpenAI pointed out on the X network. Therefore, “we are working to suspend the use of Sky while we answer them,” specifies the business. “Sky’s voice is in no way an imitation of that of Scarlett Johansson,” OpenAI assured in an article posted on its blog, ensuring that it had been developed based on the voices of different actresses.
But the actress explained the process that led her to hire a lawyer to get her voice changed. “Last September, I received an offer from Sam Altman to hire me to be the voice of the current ChatGPT 4.0 system,” she said in a statement released late Monday. “He said he thought my voice would comfort people,” she detailed, stressing that she then “declined the offer.”
“My closest friends couldn’t tell the difference.”
“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, ‘Her’.” Scarlett Johansson had in fact embodied the voice of the artificial intelligence system in the film Her (Elle), from which the creators of ChatGPT have not hidden their inspiration.
The actress explains that she was then “forced to hire legal counsel, who wrote two letters to Mr. Altman and OpenAI, (…). Therefore, OpenAI reluctantly agreed to remove Sky’ voice.
“At a time when we are all struggling with “deepfakes” and protecting our own image, our own work, our own identity, I think these issues deserve absolute clarity,” she further lamented, saying they “look 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.
Departure of a co-founder of OpenAI
This announcement comes a few days after OpenAI announced it was disbanding its team whose mission was to mitigate the possible long-term dangers of overly intelligent AI. The announcement was marked by the departure of one of the company’s co-founders, Ilya Sutskever, as well as the team manager, Jan Leike.
“OpenAI must become a company that puts the safety of general AI above all other considerations,” Mr. Leike wrote Friday on we need to do more, that’s our goal.”
The company presented on Monday the new version of its flagship product, with GPT-4o, with improved performance and behavior that is intended to be closer to humans, also making it free for all users. “In the future, you should expect even more options as we plan to add voices to ChatGPT to better meet diverse user interests and preferences,” OpenAI added on its blog.