Actress Scarlett Johansson is threatening to take legal action against the makers of ChatGPT, OpenAI, over what she says is a copy of her voice being used by the AI company.
Johansson is alleging that Sam Altman and his company based the voice of ChatGPT’s “Sky” on hers and that it was so similar her friends could not tell the difference.
According to a statement from Johansson to USA Today, Altman allegedly asked her to be the voice of his AI system, and even though she turned him down, he copied her voice anyway.
“Two days before the ChatGPT 4.0 demo was released, Mr. Altman contacted my agent, asking me to reconsider,” Johansson wrote. “Before we could connect, the system was out there.”
The request is believed to have been made because of the role that Johansson played in the 2013 film “Her,” where she was the voice of an artificial intelligence assistant.
Altman has denied the allegations from Johansson, saying that his company supports stronger protections against deepfakes.
“The voice of Sky is not Scarlett Johansson’s, and it was never intended to resemble hers,” Altman said in a statement on Monday. “We cast the voice actor behind Sky’s voice before any outreach to Ms. Johansson. Out of respect for Ms. Johansson, we have paused using Sky’s voice in our products. We are sorry to Ms. Johansson that we didn’t communicate better.”
OpenAI released a demo of its latest version of ChatGPT last week, which included “Voice Mode,” giving users the option of having an emotive AI answer their questions. Among the voices users could select was “Sky.”
“When I heard the released demo, I was shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference,” Johansson said. “Mr. Altman even insinuated that the similarity was intentional, tweeting a single word ‘her’ - a reference to the film in which I voiced a chat system, Samantha, who forms an intimate relationship with a human.”
On Sunday, OpenAI wrote in a blog post that Sky’s voice “is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson but belongs to a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice.”
“In a time when we are all grappling with deepfakes and the protection of our own likeness, our own work, our own identities, I believe these are questions that deserve absolute clarity,” she wrote. “I look forward to resolution in the form of transparency and the passage of appropriate legislation to help ensure that individual rights are protected.”