WASHINGTON: Scarlett Johansson has successfully pressured OpenAI to remove a voice from its popular ChatGPT chatbot that seems like her. The American star received an offer from OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman in September regarding voicing an audio feature for ChatGPT. However, she rejected the offer, but was shocked after hearing demos OpenAI released last week featuring a voice named Sky — a voice she believed sounded “similar” to her.
As per media report, OpenAI had pulled the voice on Sunday. The decision followed people stating that it sounded unsettlingly like the voice of the star, known for roles including the Marvel superhero Black Widow and an Artificial Intelligence (AI) virtual assistant in the 2013 movie Her, and Johansson stated that she had also demanded its removal.
However, the Sky voice is not new; it is one of five with various tones that OpenAI rolled out in September when the firm first introduced its voice feature for ChatGPT, which lets customers talk to the chatbot and receive a human-sounding reply.
In a statement, Sam Altman has said the Sky voice “is not Scarlett Johansson’s, and it was never wanted to resemble it.” He said that the firm cast the actor for the Sky voice before approaching Johansson, saying, “We are sorry to Johansson that we did not communicate better.
It is also not the first time that women have felt they, or their likeness, was utilized in technology without their permission. For decades, an image published in a magazine in 1972 of a Swedish woman named Lena Forsen was used in image-processing research, as Wired detailed in a 2019 piece. Recently, academic publishers such as IEEE took a major decision to stop accepting papers for publication that contain photo of Lena Forsen.
The story also brings up new questions regarding how and why women in particular are highlighted in hopes of making people comfortable with technology — questions tech firms must grapple with if they continue to push people to use ever-more-capable Artificial Intelligence assistants.
