“Scarlett Johansson on Suing OpenAI for Personality/voice Right Infringement”, 2024-05-20 (; backlinks):
Last September, I received an offer from Sam Altman, who wanted to hire me to voice the current ChatGPT 4.0o system. He told me that he felt that by my voicing the system, I could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and Al. He said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people.
After much consideration and for personal reasons, I declined the offer.
9 months later, my friends, family and the general public all noted how much the newest system named ‘Sky’ sounded like me.
When I heard the released demo, I was shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference. Mr. Altman even insinuated that the similarity was intentional, tweeting a single word ‘her’—a reference to the film in which I voiced a chat system, Samantha, who forms an intimate relationship with a human.
Two days before the ChatGPT-4o demo was released, Mr. Altman contacted my agent, asking me to reconsider. Before we could connect, the system was out there.
As a result of their actions, I was forced to hire legal counsel, who wrote two letters to Mr. Altman and OpenAI, setting out what they had done and asking them to detail the exact process by which they created the ‘Sky’ voice. Consequently, OpenAI reluctantly agreed to take down the ‘Sky’ voice…
[NPR journalist: “Last week, OpenAI CTO Mira Murati told me the Sky voice was not patterned after ScarJo.
“I don’t know about the voice. I actually had to go and listen to Scarlett Johansson’s voice”, Murati said.
In response, Sam Altman has now issued a statement saying “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. Out of respect for Ms. Johansson, we have paused using Sky’s voice in our products. We are sorry to Ms. Johansson that we didn’t communicate better”, Sam Altman wrote.”]