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Sam Altman just loves to be a sociopath and then brag about it. His latest?
https://x.com/sama/status/1790075827666796666
"Her".
In case you've been living under a rock, this is in reference to the 2013 movie in which Scarlett Johansson plays the voice of an AI girlfriend. And it's also a reference to Open AI's new product, Chat GPT 4o, whose voice sounds just like... you guessed it, Scarlett Johansson.
This is no mistake. Open AI actually approached Ms. Johansson and asked her permission to use her voice. When she said no, they said fuck it and did it anyway.
https://x.com/BobbyAllyn/status/1792679435701014908
If Elon Musk is chaotic neutral, Sam Altman is increasingly proving himself to be lawful evil. It's not a good look.
No, they used another (consenting) actress's voice who happens to sound a lot like Scarlett Johansson.
Scarlett Johansson doesn't have an IP right to "female voices that sound vaguely like Scarlett Johansson." As long as they can produce the receipts to show that this is actually what happened, she'd have no case.
That Altman referenced "Her" does not really bear on this. You can like or dislike the world portrayed in Her. Personally I found it a pretty uplifting vision of what a near-singularity future could look like, at least up to a few minutes before the ending. And you can like or dislike the voice that they demoed. Personally I can't stand it, and the sultry, flirty, overtly sexy affect really doesn't appeal to me. (But I'm a homo, so presumably I'm not the target audience, and maybe I'd be a big fan of some Josh Hartnett soundalike with an analogously please-fuck-me inflection, I dunno.) But neither has anything to do with whether Scarlett Johansson has somehow been wronged. She hasn't.
In any event, my distaste for the voice apparently was widely enough shared that they nixed it. But that just reflects a decent product sensibility and indicates nothing about this incredibly stupid attempt at a gotcha by you or all of the anti-progress Redditors who are joining you in hate-jerking over this as we speak.
That's what OpenAI claims, whether it's true or not doesn't matter from a PR perspective now. I think it makes sense for them to nip in the bud and just end with this small controversy rather than make it an even bigger deal with actual lawsuits flying around (and perhaps having to reveal something they don't want to during discovery).
I would think enough people did like the voice that it would be worth keeping it around, especially since it's not like the other AI voices are any more popular or liked.
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