Scarlett Johansson against OpenAI: 'He copied my voice for ChatGPT'

We were told that machines will exterminate us, as in The Terminator, and we kind of believed it. We were told that algorithms will work for us, and we kind of hoped. We saw the first lawsuits, over copyright issues, brought by content producers against artificial intelligence producers, and we were a bit surprised. The thing that no one could have predicted was that, at the centre of the disputes between Hollywood celebrities and the companies developing the coolest technology of the moment, sooner or later there would end up being... the voice.

The case in point is the dispute that pits Scarlett Johansson - one of the most celebrated and celebrated actresses of her generation - against OpenAI, the ultra-wealthy ChatGPT developer. You all know her: she is The Girl with the Pearl Earring, the Marvel's Black Widow, but also the voice actress in Her (2013), Spike Jonze's dystopian film in which Joaquin Phoenix - not exactly the last of the dummies - fell in love with the voice assistant (also) by virtue of her irresistible voice. And so Sam Altman, the irrepressible founder of OpenAI, must have had some kind of light bulb switched on: finding himself launching the 'spoken' version of his chatbot GPT-4o, last September he thought it best to ask Johansson to put her vocal chords at the disposal of humanity. The actress declined the invitation and the thing would have died there, were it not for the fact that nothing ever really dies when we talk about artificial intelligence.

And so it turned out that the chatbot was released: 'When I heard the demo released,' Scarlett Johannson said, 'I was shocked, angry and incredulous that Mr Altman had chosen a voice so similar to mine that my close friends and the media were unable to distinguish it'. The Hollywood star stated that OpenAI would "reluctantly" agree to remove the voice of Sky (this is the name of the voice assistant that would sound like Scarlett) after a series of warnings from her lawyers.

OpenAI had so far denied any intention to imitate Johannson's timbres and cadences, indeed: in a public statement the company emphasised that artificial intelligence voices 'should not deliberately imitate the distinctive voice of a celebrity' and that Sky's voice belongs to an unspecified 'professional actress' who is obviously not Scarlett Johannson.

"Sky's voice is not Scarlett Johansson's and was never meant to resemble hers," Altman said. "Out of respect for Ms Johansson, we have suspended the use of Sky's voice in our products. We are sorry to Ms Johansson for not being able to communicate this better." OpenAI first launched ChatGPT's voice functionality in September, comprising five different voices including the one in dispute. The 'voice mode' was initially only available to paid subscribers, but in November OpenAI announced that the feature would become free for all users with the mobile app.