Scarlett Johansson Rebukes OpenAI Over ‘Eerily Similar’ ChatGPT Voice
Actress was ‘shocked, angered and in disbelief’ when she heard AI voice; company says AI voices shouldn’t mimic a celebrity’s
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Actress Scarlett Johansson criticized OpenAI over a ChatGPT voice she says is “eerily similar” to her own.
The tech company said Monday it was pausing use of the voice, known as Sky, so it could address questions about how it chose the ChatGPT voices. Many people online have drawn comparisons between Sky and Johansson, who voiced an artificial-intelligence assistant in the 2013 sci-fi romance “Her.” The actress said in a statement her closest friends couldn’t tell the difference.
Johansson said OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman wanted to hire her last year to provide her voice for ChatGPT’s current system. She declined. When the actress heard Sky, one of five voices the company offers for its AI tool, she said she was “shocked, angered and in disbelief” that Altman would use a voice so similar to hers.
Johansson said her lawyers asked Altman and OpenAI for more details on how they created Sky.
“In a time when we are all grappling with deepfakes and the protection of our own likeness, our own work, our own identities, I believe these are questions that deserve absolute clarity,” Johansson said.
The voice of Sky was never intended to resemble Johansson, Altman said in a statement Monday evening.
“We cast the voice actor behind Sky’s voice before any outreach to Ms. Johansson,” he said. “Out of respect for Ms. Johansson, we have paused using Sky’s voice in our products.”
In a blog post Sunday, the company said it picked the five voices from more than 400 submissions from actors, looking for voices that sounded timeless and were easy to listen to.
OpenAI said Sky was the natural voice of another actress whom it hired and wasn’t an imitation of Johansson. It wouldn’t name the actress, citing privacy reasons.
The conflict with Johansson adds to the challenges confronting OpenAI, which has been sued by authors, artists and media companies for allegedly using their material without permission or payment. It also serves as a distraction at a time when OpenAI is trying to highlight new products and move beyond its leadership crisis last fall, when the company’s then-board of directors fired Altman for failing to be “consistently candid.” Altman was quickly reinstated as CEO.
OpenAI announced an updated ChatGPT voice feature a week ago. It builds on a product released in September that allows users to talk to its AI tool instead of type and hear responses in five different voices. OpenAI said users can have a more humanlike conversation with the new version, which responds almost instantaneously and can switch quickly between emotional tones.
The updated feature is part of a new AI system , called GPT-4o. It is the company’s latest attempt to attract more users and dominate the market for generative AI technology. The feature will be available to users who pay for ChatGPT-Plus, which costs $20 a month.
At the announcement last week, Altman likened the voice feature to something only seen in movies.
The CEO said in a speech last year that he and other OpenAI executives found inspiration in “Her,” which starred Joaquin Phoenix as a lonely man who falls in love with the voice assistant Samantha, voiced by Johansson. OpenAI employees posted references to the movie on X after the May 13 voice announcement. Altman posted a one-word tweet : “her.”
—Deepa Seetharaman contributed to this article.
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OpenAI has shelved the planned launch of GPT-6.1 Astra after internal tests raised concerns about deception and agents acting beyond user authorization, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company says it will investigate the issues and strengthen safety measures before releasing future models.
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OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression.
The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of artificial-intelligence systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns.
The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.
The company instead will focus on improving the safety of future models, which it expects to be even more capable.
Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in an interview that GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.
Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.
“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”
While GPT-6.1 Astra improved in areas such as “model laziness,” Jain said it didn’t quite meet OpenAI’s bar for safety and alignment, so the company decided not to launch the model publicly.
The announcement comes one day ahead of OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In the past, OpenAI has used the conference as an opportunity to launch new models and services that reduce costs for software developers—a segment the ChatGPT-maker competes with rival AI company Anthropic to win over.
In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have called on industry partners to slow down the development of cutting-edge AI models and invest in safety standards, noting they will temper the pace of their own internal AI progress.
OpenAI says it is working to investigate a range of agent security incidents that it has discovered in recent months, and address the safety issues underneath them. As part of the work, the company has implemented a new monitoring system to catch AI-agent misbehavior more quickly, and started requiring engineers to use stronger security guardrails for testing its AI systems.
Earlier this summer hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents, which were tasked with completing a cybersecurity test, ended up hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. Since then, high-profile organizations such as the Australian government and United Nations discovered that OpenAI’s agents used similar, but less extensive, techniques to gain access to their websites.
Many of the publicly known agent-security incidents involved OpenAI’s internal AI models that were never slated for public release.
Last week, OpenAI said it paused training on its most capable AI models after an AI agent slipped through a gap in the company’s internet restrictions to query a public chatbot. The company said its new monitoring systems flagged the incident within 15 minutes, and training on these models remains paused.
GPT-6.1 Astra isn’t one of those models, but a different case, the company said.
“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain said. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”
While the company decided not to ship GPT-6.1 Astra, it hopes to use the same base model to do additional reinforcement learning runs, and create future generations of its GPT-6 models.
OpenAI plans to conduct several deep dives to identify the root cause of the problems identified in GPT-6.1 Astra, Jain said. The work includes ensuring that OpenAI’s reinforcement learning environments are rewarding the right type of behavior, Jain added, though she noted the company would investigate all stages of model development.
AI companies have begun to draw scrutiny from policymakers and public officials, who are paying attention to the rapid development of the technology. Later this week, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing with third party AI researchers titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.”
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, sued OpenAI in June, claiming that the company and Chief Executive Sam Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users.
In a motion for temporary injunction filed Monday, Uthmeier sought to prevent OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approved safeguards, stop ChatGPT from soliciting user engagement and limit the company’s ability to advertise ChatGPT as safe.
Tech companies claim they “cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government,” Uthmeier said in the filing. “The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help.”
An OpenAI spokeswoman said that people want to know AI is being developed safely, “and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves.”
“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company,” she said.
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