OpenAI plans to halt the use of one of its ChatGPT voices after some users said it sounded like Scarlett Johansson, who famously voiced a fictional AI assistant in the 2013 film Her.
In a post on the social media platform X, OpenAI said it is “working to pause” Sky — the name of one of five voices that ChatGPT users can chose to speak with.
The company said it had “heard questions” about how it selects the lifelike audio options available for its flagship artificial intelligence chatbot, particularly Sky, and wanted to address them.
OpenAI was also quick to debunk the internet’s theories about Johansson in an accompanying blog post detailing how ChatGPT’s voices were chosen.
“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,” the company wrote.
San Francisco-based OpenAI said it could not share the name of its voice actors for privacy reasons and did not comment further on why it decided to pause Sky’s use.
OpenAI first rolled out voice capabilities for ChatGPT, which included the five different voices, in September, allowing users to engage in back-to-forth conversation with the AI assistant.
The company used the voice Sky during its highly publicised event last week to debut the capabilities of the new ChatGPT-4o artificial intelligence model.
The capabilities conjured up comparisons to the Spike Jonze’s dystopian romance Her, which follows an introverted man (Joaquin Phoenix) who falls in love with an AI-operating system (Johansson), leading to many complications.
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman appeared to tap into this by simply posting the word “her” on the social media platform X the day of GPT-4o’s unveiling.
‘I was shocked, angered and in disbelief’
Altman later said in a statement to Reuters: “The voice of Sky is not Scarlett Johansson’s, and it was never intended to resemble hers. We cast the voice actor behind Sky’s voice before any outreach to Ms Johansson.”
Johansson said Altman had approached her last September and offered to hire her to voice a ChatGPT voice — an offer she declined.
“Nine months later, my friends, family and the general public all noted how much the newest system named ‘Sky’ sounded like me,” she said in a statement.
“When I heard the released demo, I was shocked, angered and in disbelief that 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 added Altman had “insinuated that the similarity was intentional” by tweeting “her”, a reference to the 2013 film.
The Hollywood star said that she had hired legal counsel to ask about the process of creating the voice.
-With Reuters
