Actress Scarlett Johansson says that just days before OpenAI demonstrated its new flirtatious voice assistant last week, the company's CEO, Sam Altman, called her agent and asked her to create a virtual assistant. He said he was asked to consider audio licensing.
Johansson added in a statement Monday that this was the second request made to the actress in the past year, and the answer was no both times.
Despite that denial, Johansson said OpenAI used a voice that was “eerily similar to mine.” She hired a lawyer and asked OpenAI to stop using the voice she calls “Sky.”
OpenAI paused the release of Sky over the weekend. “AI voices should not intentionally imitate a celebrity's distinctive voice. Skye's voice used her own natural speaking voice, not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson,” the company said in a blog post on Sunday. It belongs to another professional actress.”
For Johansson, the episode is a surreal case of art imitating reality: In 2013, she voiced an AI system in Spike Jonze's film “Her,” about a lonely, introverted woman who becomes seduced by a virtual assistant named Samantha, and it's a tragic commentary on the pitfalls of technology as it becomes more real.
Last week, Altman seemed to be nodding to the similarities between OpenAI's virtual assistant and the movie by saying “she” in a post on X.
OpenAI said it cannot share the names of the audio experts for privacy reasons. The company said it worked with unidentified directors and producers to develop five product voices: Breeze, Cove, Ember, Juniper and Sky. The audio was recorded in San Francisco last summer.
OpenAI is at a critical juncture as it prepares to make voice assistants available to customers with the support of a new technology known as GPT-4o. “Skye's voice is not Scarlett Johansson's and was never intended to resemble her,” Altman said in a statement Monday night.
“We cast a voice actor to voice Skye before we contacted Mr. Johansson,” he continued. “Out of respect for Mr. Johansson, we have discontinued using Sky's voice in our products. We apologize to Mr. Johansson for not communicating with him better.”
Johansson's remarks were earlier reported by NPR's Bobby Allyn.
She is the latest high-profile figure to accuse OpenAI of using her creative work without permission. Over the past year, OpenAI has been sued for copyright infringement by authors, actors, and newspapers, including the Writers Guild of America and the New York Times, which claims that OpenAI and its partners A lawsuit was filed against Microsoft.
This is the second time in recent years that Johansson has publicly expressed her stance against a prominent company. In 2021, she filed a lawsuit claiming that the Walt Disney Company violated her contract by releasing the film Black Widow simultaneously in theaters and on Disney+. Ms. Johansson, who has played the Marvel character Black Widow in eight blockbuster movies, has reached a settlement with the company.
Before becoming a Marvel superhero, Ms. Johansson made a name for herself in the 2003 film “Lost in Translation,” playing a young woman in Tokyo who forms an unlikely bond with a movie star played by Bill Murray. She has consistently moved between more artistic work by 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.''
Johansson said Altman first contacted her in September about providing a voice for OpenAI's future assistants.
“He said he felt that by speaking out about systems, I could bridge the gap between tech companies and creators and help consumers feel comfortable with the seismic shifts around humans and AI. ” she said in a statement. “He said he felt my voice would comfort people.”
OpenAI announced its assistant at a sophisticated product event in San Francisco last week. Mark Chen, the company's head of research, told his assistant that he was nervous about doing a live demo. The assistant said with the cheeriness of a cheerleader. That's amazing! ”
Chen then gave a lengthy demonstration showing how OpenAI combined the conversational skills of the ChatGPT chatbot with the sounds of voice assistants like Siri on the iPhone. OpenAI's assistant can juggle audio, images, and video simultaneously, allowing it to answer written math questions and answer questions.
Altman later wrote about the event on his blog: “I'm still a little surprised that it was real.”
Johansson said she had heard from friends, family and members of the public that the voice speaking to Chen sounded just like her own. Times film critic Alyssa Wilkinson wrote that the assistant's voice betrayed “Johansson's clear bass and a touch of gruffness.”
In an interview after the event, OpenAI's chief technology officer, Mira Murati, told The Verge that any similarities to Johansson's voice were coincidental and that the voice was not designed to sound like the actress.