OpenAI says it 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, and at the time futuristic, AI assistant in the acclaimed 2013 film Her.
In a post on the social media platform X on Monday, May 20, OpenAI said it is "working to pause" Sky – the name of one of five voices that ChatGPT users can choose 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. It said it could not share the name of its voice actor for privacy reasons.
But Johansson issued a statement to social media on Monday saying that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had approached her in September asking her if she would lend her voice to the system, saying he felt it would be "comforting to people" not at ease with the technology. She said she declined the offer.
"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," Johansson wrote.
She said OpenAI "reluctantly" agreed to take down the Sky voice after she hired lawyers who wrote Altman letters asking about the process by which the company came up with the voice. San Francisco-based OpenAI did not comment further on why it still decided to pause Sky's use.
The development comes amid mounting fears around deepfakes and AI in general, with the entertainment industry in particular voicing concerns around the emerging technology's capability to perfectly mimic a public personality's likeness or voice. Protections against AI were a major sticking point in last years twin writers' and actors' strikes that hobbled Hollywood.
OpenAI first rolled out voice capabilities for ChatGPT, which included the five different voices, in September, allowing users to engage in back-and-forth conversation with the AI assistant. "Voice Mode" was originally just available to paid subscribers, but in November, OpenAI announced that the feature would become free for all users with the mobile app.
Strangely flirtatious AI
ChatGPT's interactions are becoming more and more sophisticated. Last week, OpenAI said the latest update to its generative AI model can mimic human cadences in its verbal responses and can even try to detect people's moods.
OpenAI says the newest model, dubbed GPT-4o, works faster than previous versions and can reason across text, audio and video in real time. In a demonstration during OpenAI's May 13 announcement, the AI bot chatted in real time, adding emotion – specifically "more drama" – to its voice as requested. It also took a stab at extrapolating a person's emotional state by looking at a selfie video of their face, aided in language translations, step-by-step math problems and more.
GPT-4o, short for "omni," isn't widely available yet. It will progressively make its way to select users in the coming weeks and months. The model's text and image capabilities have already begun rolling out, and it is set to reach even some of those that use ChatGPT's free tier – but the new voice mode will just be available for paid subscribers of ChatGPT Plus.
While most have yet to get their hands on these newly announced features, the capabilities have conjured up even more 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 (voiced by Johansson), leading to many complications.
Altman appeared to tap into this, too – simply posting the word "her" on the social media platform X the day of GPT-4o's unveiling.
Many reacting to the model's demos last week also found that some of the interactions struck a strangely flirtatious tone. In one video posted by OpenAI, a female-voiced ChatGPT compliments a company employee on "rocking an OpenAI hoodie," for example, and in another the chatbot says, "Oh stop it, you're making me blush" after being told that it's amazing.
That's sparked some conversation on the gendered ways critics say tech companies have long used to develop and engage with voice assistants, dating back far before the latest wave of generative AI that has advanced the capabilities of AI chatbots. In 2019, the United Nations' culture and science organization pointed to "hardwired subservience" built into default female-voiced assistants (like Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa), even when confronted with sexist insults and harassment.
"This is clearly programmed to feed dudes' egos," The Daily Show senior correspondent Desi Lydic said of GPT-4o in a segment last week. "You can really tell that a man built this tech."