Scarlett Johansson is “shocked, angered, and in disbelief” that OpenAI used a voice that sounded “eerily similar” to her own after she declined to work with the startup.
“Last September, I received an offer from Sam Altman, who wanted to hire me to voice the current ChatGPT 4.0 system,” Johansson wrote in a statement reported by NPR.
She added that Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, contacted her agent again and asked her to reconsider a partnership just days before the company released a demo of the new ChatGPT voice.
ChatGPT-4o, which was released last Monday, has five distinct voices that were “carefully selected through an extensive process spanning five months” from over 400 submissions, OpenAI said in a blog post on Sunday. The company said it started working with “professional voice actors, talent agencies, casting directors, and industry advisors” in early 2023 to choose the voices: Breeze, Cove, Ember, Juniper, and Sky.
That last option, “Sky”, has been available since OpenAi launched a voice mode for ChatGPT in September, although the similarities to Johansson’s voice weren’t widely noticed until last week. The similarity led to a wave of criticism, headlines, and a joke from her husband, Colin Jost, on Saturday Night Live.
But why Scarlett Johansson? Well, Altman is known to be a big fan of her work, namely the 2013 film Her, which stars Johansson as an Ai virtual assistant named Samantha. After OpenAI’s event last week, Altman posted the word “her” on X, formerly known as Twitter, seemingly referencing the movie.
Now, because of OpenAI’s actions, Johansson said she was “forced” to hire legal counsel, who wrote to the company and Altman and asked them to detail the process for creating the “Sky” voice. OpenAI on Monday paused the voice, which Johansson says was done after her lawyers contacted the company.
“We 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,” OpenAI said Monday, before Johansson’s publicist provided NPR with the statement.
Altman later told CNBC that the company is acting “out of respect for Ms. Johansson.”
“In a time when we are all grappling with deepfakes and the protection of our own likeness, our own work, our own identifies, I believe these are questions that deserve absolute clarity,” Johansson added.
-Britney Nguyen contributed to this article.