Scarlett Johansson shuts down OpenAI's cursed Her remake

Always eager to glom onto dystopic sci-fi ideas for marketing, Silicon Valley will have to figure out a way to do so without Scarlett Johansson

By Matt Schimkowitz  |  May 21, 2024 | 12:55am
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Scarlett Johansson shuts down OpenAI's cursed Her remake
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Scarlett Johansson must be the only actor AI companies know. Months after taking legal action against another sketchy tech firm that used a deepfake of Johansson to sell worthless junk, the two-time Oscar nominee remains undefeated. Per NPR, OpenAI is “working to pause” the latest iteration of ChatGPT because, yeah, it sounds exactly like Scarlett Johansson.

Last week, OpenAI presented the latest ChatGPT version, GPT-4o, or “Sky,” to its friends and lovers. Now armed with the ability to giggle and flirt with its users, ChatGPT attempted to convince potential customers that maybe their computer wants to be their girlfriend. It’s just like the movie where Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with his operating system. Well, it would be just like Her had Johansson not put the kibosh on it.

OpenAI tried to be above board on this one. In a statement to NPR, Johansson says she received an offer from OpenAI’s allegedly psychologically abusive CEO Sam Altman to voice Sky nine months ago. Johansson claimed he told her that “her voice could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and AI.” Presumably mimicking the patterns of everyday human speech, raising and lowering the pitch and volume of his speech to appear empathetic and engaged, Altman said her voice “would be comforting to people.”

It was a nice offer from a guy so confident in “the best world ever” that he preps for doomsday, but Johansson declined. Considering she was in the middle of two industry-wide strikes regarding the investment and hype surrounding AI, becoming the voice of ChatGPT wouldn’t have been a smart move. So imagine her surprise when, months later, her friends, family, and the general public “all noted” how much the new system sounded like her.

“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,” said Johansson, who went on to criticize Altman’s brazen posting habits. “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.”

But then OpenAI tried to be above board again. Two days before the presentation, Altman contacted Johansson, asking her to reconsider. “Before we could connect, the system was out there.”

Despite, well, everything, OpenAI denies using Johansson as inspiration for the voice. The company heroically “believes that AI voices should not deliberately mimic a celebrity’s distinctive voice,” it said in a statement. “Sky’s voice is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson but belongs to a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice.” “Deliberately” is doing some significant legal lifting in that statement.

Not that anyone expects anything resembling honorable behavior from obscenely wealthy Silicon Valley execs, but this is an Elon-level low for Altman. The entire AI infrastructure is built on plagiarism, taking the breadth of our decaying internet and reducing it to feed for hallucinating learning models that still don’t do anything of value. It seems pretty obvious what happened: OpenAI built a whole system around her voice and assumed she would get on board thanks to money, of which Johansson has plenty. But this will all likely continue until private capital gives up on AI and moves on to the next rapidly inflating bubble.

This isn’t the first time Johansson battled AI. Last year, she took legal action against some SPAM apps for using her likeness. Rest in peace, Lisa AI: ‘90s Yearbook & Avatar, one of the many valuable advances from the world of artificial intelligence. They are the music makers, and they are the dreamers of the dream.

Read Johansson’s complete statement below:

 
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