In the headlines today is the news that Scarlett Johansson has lawyered up after accusing cutting-edge US-tech company OpenAI of copying her voice for its newest chatbot.
Last week, OpenAI revealed GPT-4o, its “new flagship model which can reason across audio, vision, and text in real time”. The reveal was accompanied by a host of videos demonstrating its capabilities, but what generated the most conversation was the lively voice the chatbot possessed in the very first, and most widely circulated, video – a voice reminiscent, if not imitative, even, of Ms Johansson’s.
Internet users were quick to leap on this, one person writing beneath OpenAI’s post on X, “This is literally Scarlett Johansson. How!?” Another wrote, “she literally sounds like Scarlet Johansson what is this timeline”.
Puzzlement wasn’t the only emotion present in the comments, though; rapturous excitement was present too at the prospect of ‘AI girlfriends’.
“WE ARE ALL GETTING GIRLFRIENDS BOYS,” wrote one X user, another writing, “Ladies need to up their game. AI girlfriends are going to be awesome”.
If Ms Johansson was perusing the reaction to OpenAI’s announcement, she must have felt a powerful sense of déjà vu, listening to what sounded like her voice playing the same role – a disembodied AI assistant, essentially – as she had played in a 2013 science fiction film, Her. She couldn’t be blamed for drawing this connection, either, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeting not-so-cryptically the word “her” the day of the reveal. The critically-acclaimed movie follows a man who develops a relationship with ‘Samantha’ (voiced by Ms Johansson), an AI assistant.
Written and directed by Spike Jonze, the idea occurred to him in the early 2000s after reading an article about a website that allowed users to exchange messages with an AI programme.
In a statement released by Ms Johansson just yesterday, she says that she turned Mr Altman down last September when he offered to hire her to provide her voice for the current ChatGPT 4.0 system. According to Ms Johansson, Mr Altman said that her contribution in this way “could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and Al”.
“He said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people,” her statement reads.
However, after “much consideration and for personal reasons,” Ms Johansson declined the offer. Imagine her shock, then, when nine months later, her “friends, family and the general public all noted how much the newest system named ‘Sky’” sounded like her.
She said that she was “shocked”, “angered” and “in disbelief” when she heard the demo, because Mr Altman had pursued “a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference”.
“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,” Ms Johansson said in her statement.
Ms Johansson said that Mr Altman contacted her agent two days before the ChatGPT 4.0 demo was released, asking her to reconsider. Before they could “connect”, however, Ms Johansson said that the system was out there.
Because of OpenAI’s course of action, she said that she was “forced” to hire legal counsel, who wrote two letters to Mr Altman and the company stating what they’d done and asking for their accounting of the process by which the ‘Sky’ voice was created. After this, they “reluctantly agreed” to take down the 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 finished her statement, adding that she looks forward to transparency and legislation to “help ensure that individual rights are protected”.
OpenAI, for its part, told the BBC that the ‘Sky’ voice is not Scarlett Johansson’s and was “never intended to resemble hers”. The company also released a blog post in which it sought to explain how its chatbot voices were chosen.
Long story short, they say that the five voices were sampled from voice actors they partnered with, and that they believe that AI voices “should not deliberately mimic a celebrity’s distinctive voice”.
“Sky’s voice is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson but belongs to a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice. To protect their privacy, we cannot share the names of our voice talents,” the AI company wrote.
Unfortunately for OpenAI, this seems – to this writer – like one of those awkward situations in which a denial is just further fuel to the speculating fire. It’s possible that Mr Altman posted the title of a movie in which Scarlett Johansson voices an AI assistant with the honest intention of indicating that AI was reaching relationship-able levels of sophistication. The voice’s likeness to her’s though, after she’d turned down the offer, makes the association somewhat difficult to deny, though.
Now, I’m neither interested in celebrity gossip nor in making use of AI personally, if I’m honest, but I am interested in the human propensity for putting tools to bad use and for taking the path of least resistance.
To use but one example, our knack for putting tools to poor use has seen the internet become a staging ground like no other for a pornographic assault upon the eyes of the world, while our laziness has created a demand for it – porn provides an easier pay-off than a real relationship, after all, with the sacrifice and hard work that’s so often required there.
The enthusiasm with which a certain segment of the internet frothed at the bit for AI girlfriends sent a shiver down my spine, accompanied by conjured images of men sitting alone at home chatting with a Scarlett Johansson-sounding programme while the world and all of its terrible beauty passes them by. The aesthetic reasons outlined above for repulsion are enough even without bringing practical matters like collapsing birth rates and soaring loneliness into the picture.
In this particular fight then, I must confess to finding myself an ally of Scarlett Johansson and her concerns over the Stateside tech bros and their relentless, morbid drive for the next cool thing. AI girlfriends do sound like something straight out of a sci-fi novel – or movie – but how often do those stories have happy endings?