OpenAI pauses use of GPT-4o 'Her' voice due to similarity to Scarlett Johansson: 'so eerily similar… my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference'
The latest version of ChatGPT will talk to you. It sounds eerily similar to a human being, too. That's swiftly become a problem for the company behind it, OpenAI, which has announced it will be removing one of ChatGPT's voices for sounding too similar to Hollywood actor Scarlett Johansson.
«We are working to pause the use of Sky,» OpenAI said in a post on X.
The company has also published a blog post on how it created the voices for the chatbot's Voice Mode. It includes the key characteristics it was aiming for with each of the five voices used in the program, which include a sense of timelessness, being approachable, and being easy to listen to. And yet the voice assistant feature still makes for awkward watching.
The post says that professional voice actors were used for each of the voices: Breeze, Cover, Ember, Juniper, and Sky.
Also mentioned is how OpenAI believes «AI voices should not deliberately mimic a celebrity's distinctive voice.»
Sky, however, does sound a lot like another famous AI, and in turn its celebrity voice actor. The emotive AI assistant in Her, a movie directed by Spike Jonze, voiced by Scarlett Johansson.
CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, has been keen to suggest similarities to the movie Her. During the new voice mode's announcement, as a part of GPT 4o, Altman posted a short but suggestive post on X that simply read: «her».
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herMay 13, 2024
According to Johansson, speaking to NPR, Altman had also hoped to go one further than merely sounding similar. Altman had reached out to Johansson to try to secure the actor's permission to use their voice for the ChatGPT feature, seemingly to recreate the Her experience. The actor said Altman believed Johansson's voice would be «comforting to people».
Johansson ended up rejecting the offer, citing personal reasons. Altman then tried to reconnect two days prior to the feature's announcement. Before him and
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