Hey readers,
It's Sigal Samuel here.
If a guy told you his favorite sci-fi movie is Her, then released an AI chatbot with a voice that sounds uncannily like the voice from Her, then tweeted the single word "her" moments after the release … what would you conclude?
It's reasonable to conclude that the AI's voice is heavily inspired by Her.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, did all of the things mentioned, and his company recently released a new version of ChatGPT that talked to users in a flirty female voice — a voice that distinctly resembles that of Scarlett Johansson, the actress who voiced the AI girlfriend in the 2013 Spike Jonze movie Her.
Now, Johansson has come forward to object, writing in a statement that the chatbot's voice sounds "so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference."
Altman's response? He claims the voice "is not Scarlett Johansson's and was never intended to resemble hers."
That is, at first blush, an absurd claim.
While the voice may not literally be trained on or copied from Johansson's — OpenAI says it hired another actor — there's plenty of evidence to suggest that it might have been intended to resemble hers. In addition to Altman's professed love of Her and his "her" tweet, there are the new revelations from Johansson: Altman, she says, reached out to her agent on two separate occasions asking for her to voice the chatbot.
When the first request came in last September, Johansson said no. A second request came in two days before the new chatbot's demo, asking her to reconsider. "Before we could connect, the system was out there," Johansson stated, adding that she had hired a lawyer to demand an explanation from Altman.
OpenAI published a blog post saying that it went through a months-long process to find voice actors last year — including the voice for "Sky," the one many people find similar to Johansson's — before introducing some voice capabilities for ChatGPT last September. According to Altman, "We cast the voice actor behind Sky's voice before any outreach to Ms. Johansson." September, mind you, is the month that Johansson says Altman first requested to license her voice.
If OpenAI did indeed cast the actor behind Sky before any outreach to Johansson, it still does not necessarily follow that Sky's voice was never intended to resemble Johansson's. Nor does it necessarily follow that the AI model behind Sky was only ever fed the hired actor's voice, with no use whatsoever being made of Johansson's voice. I raised these questions to the company. OpenAI did not reply to a request for comment in time for publication.
OpenAI took down Sky's voice "out of respect for Ms. Johansson," as Altman put it, adding, "We are sorry to Ms. Johansson that we didn't communicate better."
But if OpenAI didn't do anything wrong, why would it take down the voice? And how much "respect" does this apology really convey, when Altman insists in the same breath that the voice has nothing to do with Johansson?
"He felt that my voice would be comforting to people"
From Apple's Siri to Amazon's Alexa to Microsoft's Cortana, there's a reason why tech companies have been giving their digital assistants friendly female voices for years. From a business perspective, it's smart to give your AI that voice. It likely improves your company's bottom line.
That's because research shows that when people need help, they prefer to hear it delivered in a female voice, which they perceive as non-threatening. (They prefer a male voice when it comes to authoritative statements.) And companies design the assistants to be unfailingly upbeat and polite in part because that sort of behavior maximizes a user's desire to keep engaging with the device.
But the design choice is worrying on an ethical level. Researchers say it reinforces sexist stereotypes of women as servile beings who exist only to do someone else's bidding — to help them, comfort them, and plump up their ego.
According to Johansson, conveying a sense of comfort was exactly Altman's goal in trying to license her voice nine months ago.
"He told me that he felt that by my voicing the system, I could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and AI," Johansson wrote. "He said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people."
It's not just that Johansson's breathy, flirty voice is soothing in itself. Johansson voiced Samantha, the AI girlfriend in the romance Her, a story that's all about how an AI could connect with, comfort, and enliven a lonely human. Notably, Samantha was also far more advanced than anything modern AI companies have put out — so advanced, in fact, it evolves beyond its human user — so associating the new ChatGPT with the film probably helps as well.
There's a second layer here, one that has to do with a woman's consent. Despite Johansson's clear "no" to Altman's request last year, he used a Johansson-like voice and then, when she complained, told the world that the actress is wrong about the voice being intended to resemble hers.
I wasn't sure what to call that, so I asked ChatGPT about this type of scenario more generally. Here's how the chatbot replied:
