We all saw superstar actress Scarlett Johansson in the 2013 movie ‘Her’ where she was an artificially intelligent virtual assistant and a user ended up falling in love with her. So, the idea of using Johansson’s voice for AI isn’t that far-fetched. However, all should be done with the consent of all parties involved, which wasn’t the case here. So, what happened exactly? Was what took place intentional and worth the hype, or was it a mere misunderstanding?
What Went Down with Superstar Actress Scarlett Johansson
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reached out to Scarlett to see if he could use her voice for a new ChatGPT assistant as he found her voice comforting to users and for personal reasons, she refused. He reached out to her again a few days before the demo release but Johansson says that voice was released before they could connect. The shocking revelation was ‘Sky,’ a ChatGPT assistant that sounds just like superstar actress Scarlett Johansson.
Sam Altman did say his favorite movie was ‘Her.’ He also invited comparisons by posting the word “Her” on X, formerly known as Twitter, after the company announced the new ChatGPT version. Johansson was left profoundly flabbergasted and enraged when the news outlets and her closest friends couldn’t tell the difference between her voice and that of ‘Sky.’ Especially since she clearly stated that she doesn’t want her voice to be used in this project. Which led her to hire a legal team to ask Altman how the company had created the voice.
Sam Altman’s Side of the Story
After his insinuations about the movie ‘Her’ and his tweet about the movie right after he announced the new ChatGPT version, he contradicts himself by claiming that there is no relation between this and the resemblance between Johansson’s voice and that of ‘Sky.’ He stated that ‘Sky’ was done by a voice actor who they kept anonymous for privacy reasons.
After all this havoc, Sam Altman was forced to pause the use of ‘Sky’ “out of respect for Ms. Johansson,” and he apologized for not communicating better. The new addition to ChatGPT is a voice mode function, which lets users interact with ChatGPT, a widely used artificial intelligence software, by speaking to it. Additionally, it acts as a text-to-speech tool that reads answers to user prompts in one of five different voice options, including ‘Sky’ which is temporarily down.
Superstar Actress Scarlett Johansson Feud with OpenAI: Afterthought
The superstar actress does have a right to question the process behind the creation of ‘Sky’ since the voices are indeed “eerily similar,” and hiring legal counsel was necessary for this. We do hope, though, that the ‘Sky’ issue will be resolved soon and that it’s all a mere misunderstanding because if ‘Sky’ really is Scarlett Johansson’s voice, and not another voice actor as they claim, that will scream huge trouble for OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman. Stay tuned for more updates as we see the events of this conflict unfold.
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