Scarlett Johansson said she received an offer from ChatGPT to use her voice for its new system last year. After thinking about it, she declined. Yet, she said, OpenAI used a voice “eerily similar” to her own anyway.
In a statement to NPR on Monday, the actress shared that she was “shocked, angered and in disbelief” that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman used a voice so similar to her own for ChatGPT 4.0. that “my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference.
” OpenAI claimed they used the voice of an unnamed actress. In her statement Monday, Johansson revealed that she met with OpenAI about the opportunity back in September. At the time, the company CEO explained to her how using her voice could “bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable” with AI, she said.
Ultimately, she decided not to participate. Then, last week, OpenAI held a live demonstration of the ChatGPT voice “Sky,” which many believed sounded nearly identical to Johansson’s. Specifically, the voice seemed aligned with her voice in the film Her , which follows a man that falls in love with the female voice of his computer’s operating system.
In her statement, Johansson says Altman “insinuated that the similarity [of the voice] was intentional” when he tweeted the word “ her ” in reference to the film and the new ChatGPT model. “Two days before the ChatGPT 4.0 demo was released, Mr.
Altman contacted my agent, asking me to reconsi.