The artificial voice, named Sky, received backlash for being overly familiar and flirtatious, which critics said seemed to reflect a male developer’s fantasy. “We’ve heard questions about how we chose the voices in ChatGPT, especially Sky,” OpenAI said in a post on social media. “We are working to pause the use of Sky while we address them.”
Johansson mentioned that Altman offered to hire her last September to voice the ChatGPT 4.0 system. She declined the offer for “personal reasons.” Two days before the ChatGPT 4.0 demo was released, Altman contacted her agent, asking her to reconsider, but the system was released before they could connect.
Johansson has hired legal counsel, and OpenAI “reluctantly agreed” to take down the “Sky” voice after receiving letters from her counsel. She emphasized the importance of clarity in issues related to deepfakes and the protection of personal likeness. Johansson wrote, “I look forward to resolution in the form of transparency and the passage of appropriate legislation to help ensure that individual rights are protected.”
OpenAI clarified that the voice in question is not derived from Johansson’s but belongs to a different professional actress. Altman reiterated this stance, saying, “The voice of Sky is not Scarlett Johansson’s, and it was never intended to resemble hers.” He also apologized for the lack of communication with Johansson.
OpenAI aims to create approachable AI voices that inspire trust and are natural and easy to listen to. The ChatGPT voice mode using Sky had not been widely released, but videos of it went viral online. Some critics derided Sky’s voice as too easy to listen to, and it even inspired a segment on The Daily Show, where it was described as a “horny robot baby voice.”
Altman acknowledged the parallels users were drawing with Johansson when he posted on social media on the day of the product’s announcement, hinting at the similarity. Johansson stated that this post insinuated “the similarity was intentional.”
“Her” is a 2013 film in which Johansson voices an AI assistant with whom the protagonist falls in love, only to be heartbroken when the AI admits to loving hundreds of other users and becomes inaccessible.
