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Scarlett Johansson Says She Was ‘Shocked’ and ‘Angered’ Over OpenAI’s Use of a Voice That Was ‘Eerily Similar to Mine’

Actor Scarlett Johansson said she turned down OpenAI‘s request for her to lend her voice to a conversational ChatGPT system — and that she was “shocked” and “angered” that the company went ahead and used a voice that sounded very similar to hers anyway.

Johansson, in a statement provided to Variety, said her lawyers contacted OpenAI to have the voice of Sky, one of the new voices in the GPT-4o chatbot, pulled down.

OpenAI last week introduced the Sky voice, which sounded very like that of Johansson’s disembodied AI companion in Spike Jonze’s 2013 movie “Her,” in a demo of GPT-4o. The company earlier Monday said it would “pause” the use of the Sky voice. “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,” OpenAI said.

Johansson said she had been contacted by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in September 2023 about the company hiring her to provide the voice for ChatGPT 4.0. She said she declined for “personal reasons.”

“When I heard the released demo, I was shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference,” Johansson said. “Mr. Altman even insinuated that the similarity was intentional, tweeting a single word ‘her’ — a reference to the film in which I voiced a chat system, Samantha, who forms an intimate relationship with a human.”