Scarlett Johansson played the role of an AI voice in Spike Jonze’s prophetic 2013 film Her. In the film, the program, Samantha, is a digital assistant to Joaquin Phoenix’s character who holds realistic call-and-response conversations with him despite only existing through his computer operating systems. As AI technology continues to grow at an immeasurable rate, life is now imitating art as OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4o announcement showcased a new voice mode that included a character named Sky, who many have associated with Johansson’s signature raspy pipes. OpenAI founder Sam Altman would even post “her” on social media during the demo presentation.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, OpenAI has stated that they will be pausing the use of Sky’s voice due to the resemblance to the famous actress. The company stated, “We’ve heard questions about how we chose the voices in ChatGPT, especially Sky. We are working to pause the use of Sky while we address them.” They would go further in-depth in a blog post where they addressed people’s concerns and explained their voice casting process, “We believe that AI voices should not deliberately mimic a celebrity’s distinctive voice — Sky’s voice is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson but belongs to a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice. To protect their privacy, we cannot share the names of our voice talents.”
OpenAI stated that they put out a casting call in early 2023 for voice models and received over 400 submissions. The list would eventually be narrowed down to 14 finalists. The company adds that they settled on five final voices when they stated, “We spoke with each actor about the vision for human-AI voice interactions and OpenAI, and discussed the technology’s capabilities, limitations, and the risks involved, as well as the safeguards we have implemented. It was important to us that each actor understood the scope and intentions of Voice Mode before committing to the project.”
The actors flew to San Francisco for the recording sessions that ChatGPT would integrate into its technology later this year. They expounded, “We support the creative community and worked closely with the voice acting industry to ensure we took the right steps to cast ChatGPT’s voices. Each actor receives compensation above top-of-market rates, and this will continue for as long as their voices are used in our products.”
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