Johansson says that she refused in the fall when she was asked to be the voice actor for artificial intelligence. OpenAI’s CEO denied that Johansson’s voice had been used.
Anna Näveri,
Riikka Kajander
22:10•Updated 22:11
Actor Scarlett Johansson accuses the company that created the Chat GPT artificial intelligence app of using his voice without permission.
The US media NPR reportsthat Johansson’s legal team demands answers from OpenAI as to why and how the company has developed a voice assistant that sounds like Johansson in its latest version of the Chat GPT application.
OpenAI presented last week its new version, GPT-4o, with which you can chat out loud, instead of just typing messages.
Soon, however, OpenAI announced that it was withdrawing the voice assistant named Sky from the application.
Johansson’s statement was released a few hours after Sky’s withdrawal. In her statement, Johansson claimed that Sky sounds like her.
“I was shocked and angry”
Johansson told NRP in a press release on Monday that the CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman asked him in September to be the voice of Chat GPT. Johansson says that she refused the offer after much consideration.
According to Johansson, two days before the introduction of the new AI version, Altman approached his PR team asking to reconsider.
According to Johansson, he didn’t have time to return to the matter before OpenAI already presented its new application.
– I was shocked and angry and couldn’t believe that Altman was aiming for a voice that sounded so frighteningly similar to mine that my closest friends or the news couldn’t tell it apart from my voice, Johansson described in the release.
The director of OpenAI denies
CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman said Monday in the news agency’s statement to Reuters, that Sky’s voice was completely based on another actor’s voice and is not an imitation of Johansson’s speaking voice.
– Sky’s voice is not Scarlett Johansson’s and it was not intended to resemble her, Altman claimed.
According to Altman, another actor had already been hired for the voice before Johansson was contacted.
Altman eventually apologized to Johansson for his company not “communicating better”.
The actor’s legal team said that the artificial intelligence voice resembling Johansson’s voice was removed after the lawyers contacted Altman and Open AI and asked them to clarify the course of events.
In his statement, Johansson points out that nowadays people increasingly have to fight to protect their essence and identity in the midst of deep fakes.