(San Francisco) A voice that closely resembles that of Scarlett Johansson: ChatGPT will change its tone, announced the company OpenAI, which the actress accuses, as well as its general director, Sam Altman, of having voluntarily and unknowingly copied his voice.
“We have heard the questions about how we chose the voices for ChatGPT,” OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT, said on Monday on X.
Therefore, “we are working to suspend the use of Sky [qui interagit vocalement avec les internautes] while we respond,” the company said.
“Sky’s voice is in no way an imitation of that of Scarlett Johansson,” however assured OpenAI in an article posted on its blog, assuring that it had been developed based on the voices of different actresses.
But the actress accuses OpenAI and its general director, Sam Altman, of having deliberately copied her voice, without her knowledge, forcing her to hire a lawyer in order to obtain the modification.
“Last September, I received an offer from Sam Altman, who wanted to hire me to be the voice of the current ChatGPT 4.0 system,” she said in this press release late Monday.
“He said he thought my voice would comfort people,” she detailed, stressing that she then “declined the offer”.
“Shocked”
“When I heard the demo released, I was shocked, angry and in disbelief that Mr. Altman had developed a voice that sounded so eerily like mine that my closest friends and the media couldn’t do the difference,” says the actress.
She adds that “Mr. Altman even implied that the similarity was intentional, by tweeting a single word, ‘she’.”
Scarlett Johansson had indeed played the voice of the artificial intelligence system in the film Herfrom which the creators of ChatGPT have not hidden their inspiration.
The actress explains that she was then “forced to hire legal counsel, who wrote two letters to Mr. Altman and OpenAI, […]. Therefore, OpenAI reluctantly agreed to remove the “Sky” voice.
“At a time when we are all struggling with “deepfakes” and protecting our own image, our own work, our own identity, I think these issues deserve absolute clarity,” she further lamented, saying he “impatiently” waits for “appropriate legislation to help ensure the protection of individual rights” to be adopted.
OpenAI, for its part, detailed how it worked, with professional actors, to create several digital voices, which it called Breeze, Cove, Ember, Juniper and, therefore, Sky.
New voices coming
This announcement comes days after OpenAI announced it was disbanding its team whose mission was to mitigate the possible long-term dangers of overly intelligent AI.
The announcement was marked by the departure of one of the company’s co-founders, Ilya Sutskever, as well as the head of the team, Jan Leike.
“OpenAI must become a company that puts the safety of general AI above all other considerations,” Leike wrote on X on Friday.
Sam Altman expressed his regret at seeing him leave, adding that he “is right, we have to do more, that’s our goal.”
The company presented on Monday the new version of its flagship product, with GPT-4o, with improved performance and behavior that is intended to be closer to humans, also making it free for all users.
“In the future, you should expect even more options as we plan to add voices to ChatGPT to better meet diverse user interests and preferences,” OpenAI added on its blog.