Actress Scarlett Johansson said that she was “forced to hire legal counsel” to demand the removal of an artificial intelligence voice for OpenAI’s chatbot that sounded too much like her. In a statement on Monday, the actress said she received an offer from OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman in September about voicing an audio feature for the company’s popular ChatGPT chatbot. She said she decided not to participate in the project “after much consideration and for personal reasons.
” In Altman’s offer, “He told me that he felt that by my voicing the system, I could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and AI,” she said. Last week, OpenAI released new audio tools and staged demonstrations that included a voice called 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,” Johansson said. In a statement, Altman said the Sky voice “is not Scarlett Johansson’s, and it was never intended to resemble hers.” Altman also said that the company cast the voice actor for the Sky voice before approaching Johansson.
“We are sorry to Ms. Johansson that we didn’t communicate better,” he said. Johansson, famous for roles such as the Marvel superhero Black Widow, played an AI virtual assistant in the 2013 film Her.
OpenAI’s connection to that movie was made more.
