American actress Scarlett Johansson is not angry. According to NPR, her lawyers sent two letters to OpenAI asking the company to detail the process by which it developed the voice of its personal assistant in the latest version of ChatGPT, dubbed “Sky,” and which the actress said , looks strangely like his own. After the start-up organized a live demonstration of its new capabilities last week, many observers compared the voice to that of the actress in Spike Jonze’s 2013 science fiction film, Her, in which a lonely man falls in love with the female voice on his computer.
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.
Scarlett Johansson, through her agent, claims to have been contacted “last September by Sam Altman”, boss of OpenAi to lend his voice to ChatGPT, an offer that the actress claims to have declined “after careful consideration”. “When I heard the demo released, I was shocked, angry and in disbelief that Mr. Altman persisted with a voice that sounded so eerily like mine, to the point that my closest friends and the media could not not make a difference.” The actress further accuses: “Two days before the release of GPT-4o, Mr. Altman contacted my agent again, demanding that I reconsider my decision. Before we could get back in touch, the system was out.” She adds that “Mr. Altman even insinuated that the similarity was intentional, tweeting a single word, “her.”
OpenAI must have taken the matter seriously enough, because it announced Monday that it was working on a modification of the digital voice supposed to interact with Internet users. “We have heard the questions about how we chose the voices for ChatGPT,” OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT, said on Monday on X (formerly Twitter). Therefore, “we are working to suspend the use of Sky while we respond,” the company says. “Sky’s voice is in no way an imitation of that of Scarlett Johansson,” OpenAI however assured in an article posted on its blog, ensuring that it had been developed based on the voices of different actresses.
In order to remedy this, OpenAI plans to temporarily suspend Sky, the company added on its X account (ex-Twitter): “we have heard the questions about how we chose the voices for ChatGPT, in particular for Sky “. The company detailed how it worked, with professional voice actors, to create several digital voices, which it called Breeze, Cove, Ember, Juniper and, therefore, Sky.
This announcement comes 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 head of the team, Jan Leike. “OpenAI must become a company that places the safety of general AI above all other considerations,” Jan Leike wrote on Friday on X.
Concerns that echo those expressed by Scarlett Johansson: “As we find ourselves grappling with “deepfakes” and the protection of our own image, our own work, our own identity, I think these issues deserve absolute clarity », Affirms the actress, who says she expects “transparency” on the subject and “the adoption of a suitable law” which protects the rights of individuals.