Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Amal Clooney weighs in on the war in Gaza, Jean Liu changes roles at the ride-hailing company she cofounded, and Scarlett Johansson thought ChatGPT's new voice sounded like her, too. Have a lovely Tuesday.
- Owning her voice. Scarlett Johansson is taking on OpenAI. The demo of ChatGPT's new voice assistant Sky last week led many to joke about the 2013 movie Her, in which Johansson voices an artificial intelligence system that falls in love with a human. One of ChatGPT's five new voices sounded strikingly like the actress in that role, according to many listeners.
Turns out, Johansson thought Sky sounded like her too. And, she said in a statement yesterday, the similarities appeared after OpenAI asked her to be the new voice of ChatGPT—twice.
"I was shocked, angered and in disbelief that [OpenAI CEO Sam] Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference," she said. She turned down OpenAI's first offer and didn't have time to respond to the second, she said. She said that her attorneys contacted OpenAI before the tech company announced it would take down the Sky voice on Sunday. OpenAI released a statement Monday evening saying the voice actor behind Sky’s voice was cast before any outreach to Johansson and was never meant to resemble her. Chief technology officer Mira Murati last week told NPR that the voice was "not based on the movie or a sci-fi story."
If OpenAI thought it could skirt by with a loosely inspired approximation of Johansson's voice, as her statement and Altman's recent tweet of the word "her" suggests, it messed with the wrong actress. Johansson—frequently the highest-paid actress in Hollywood—has taken on a business giant before. In 2021, she sued Disney for breach of contract over the direct-to-streaming rollout of her Marvel film Black Widow. They settled later that year.
The fixation on Johansson as the voice of our AI-fueled future is troubling for other reasons. Virtual assistants have long featured female voices, from cars' GPS features to Apple's Siri. Critics say that a reliance on female voices reinforces stereotypes of women as helpers, there to meet people's every need. Indeed, Altman told Johansson that her voice would be "comforting" to people in his initial pitch, she said in her statement. (OpenAI's five initial Sky voices included a mix of male and female voices.)
And, Johansson pointed out in her statement, the incident transpires as creatives seek to protect their likenesses and work in Hollywood from AI replacements—and as women around the world wrestle with the consequences of nonconsensual deepfake images. If Johansson's voice even tangentially contributed to the development of ChatGPT's new bot, Johansson has made clear that she didn't consent. And that should worry us all.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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