It’s often said that imitation is the best form of admiration, but Sam Altman and OpenAI may have gone too far. The eccentric pioneer of artificial intelligence made no secret that the film “Her” was a great inspiration for his new model, GPT-4o, a revolution in the way we interact with AI.
Like in Spike Jonze’s film, ChatGPT’s new AI is able to speak in a “human” manner,understand user emotions such as sadness or joy using the mobile ,camera; From this information, you can present the results and functions differently, taking into account the context of the situation.
But that wasn’t the only “inspiration” OpenAI took from the film. A detail that has not gone unnoticed is The new voice of ChatGPT, called “Sky”, which bore an uncanny resemblance to the voice that Scarlett Johansson gave to the film’s artificial intelligence; to the point that it initially looked like OpenAI was going to announce the actress at the conference, which never happened.
Today, thanks to a public complaint from Johansson herself, we know that this was the original plan. The popular actress shared some statements with the American media in which she revealed that Sam Altman contacted her last September give voice to the new ChatGPT system; Altman praised her voice, saying it could serve as a “bridge between tech companies and creatives” and could put “consumers at ease” in times of great change with the AI.
Johansson decided to reject the offer, and it seemed like that was the end of his involvement in the project; However, nine months later, his friends warned him about the incredible resemblance of “Sky’s” voice. A similarity that seems intentionalknowing that it was not the press or users who pointed this out, but Sam Altman himself, who published a message on X (former Twitter) with the word “she” during the GPT presentation conference -4o.
Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI
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Johansson also revealed that Altman tried until the last minute to obtain the rights to the voice of the actress, since she contacted her agent only two days before the presentation. This indicates that Altman was aware of the similarity in Sky and Johansson’s voices and wanted a settlement to avoid possible lawsuits.
Scarlett Johansson says when she heard the demo she felt “shocked, angry and in disbelief” for the fact that Sam Altman was looking for a voice so “eerily similar” to his own, to the point that he claims his closest friends couldn’t tell the difference.
Johansson announced that she had been forced to hire legal counsel to seek explanations from OpenAI. We already know the company’s reaction; Yesterday, OpenAI announced that it would “pause” the use of Sky’s voice, although the company denied that it was a “Scarlett Johanson impersonation”, but rather the voice of an actress whose name she did not publish “to protect her”. confidentiality.”
This scandal very well reflects one of the major problems of generative Artificial Intelligence: that must “learn” from the creations of humans, whether books, articles, videos or voice to generate convincing results. How these models learn is a controversial point, particularly due to the use of “copyrighted” material. OpenAI itself was the protagonist of a major controversy last April, when it was discovered that it had trained its AI with YouTube videos, breaking the rules and “stealing” material from the creators of the videos.
