Director Spike Jonze’s 2013 drama — starring Joaquin Phoenix as a man who falls in love with an AI voiced by — “certainly more than a little bit” inspired the team at OpenAI. Those are the words of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in response to a question from Marc Benioff at the Dreamforce 2023 conference back in September. Benioff had asked Altman to name his favorite sci-fi movie, at which point Altman singled out , a movie that’s back in the news this week thanks to ChatGPT’s ‘Sky’ voice option sounding suspiciously like Johansson — with it also emerging that Altman tried to get the actress to contribute her voice to the chatbot and then moved forward anyway with a near-copy after she declined.
OpenAI has now removed that voice option from ChatGPT in the wake of Johansson both lawyering up and revealing her side of Sky’s backstory, which includes Altman not only wooing her but approaching her again just days before OpenAI’s event last week during which the voice of Sky was featured prominently. Not that anyone probably assumes the resemblance of the chatbot’s voice to Johansson is coincidental — after all, Altman himself cryptically tweeted “Her” by way of underscoring the significance of Sky to ChatGPT-4o — but here he is just a few months ago raving about Her as his favorite sci-fi movie (skip to 24:14): Sign up for the most interesting tech & entertainment news out there. By signing up, I agree to the and have reviewed the “The number of thing.