Scarlett Johansson's Lawsuit Threat Exposes OpenAI's Eroding Trust Problem

OpenAI and its founder/CEO Sam Altman have a growing credibility and trust issue, which could mushroom into a legal and regulatory problem. Actress Scarlett Johansson explicitly refused to have her voice used - so OpenAI used it anyway. She threatened to sue and the company backed down in the face of a public relations nightmare.

The core problem is tech arrogance, especially prominent now in AI, which Silicon Valley and its investors see as another digital goldmine so are ruthlessly overriding any individuals who raise concerns which might get in the way of profit. This, as much as fears about economic impacts, may result in greater demand for more regulation and legal protection, a revealing unintended consequence of tech contempt for public opinion. JL  

Andrew Ross Sorkin and colleagues report in the New York Times:

The spat is another sign of emerging distrust in OpenAI. Johansson explicitly linked her dispute to “deepfakes and the protection of likeness, our own work, our own identities." The actress, who provided the voice for an A.I. assistant in the movie “Her,” made clear that she did not do the same for OpenAI and demanded that the company stop using the sound-alike, which it now has. She is the latest high-profile person to accuse OpenAI of using creative work without permission. It’s another sign of eroding trust in OpenAI, which has taken fire from creatives and former employees who publicly accused the company of caring more about doing business than ensuring its product is safe for humanity.

The actress, who criticized the use of a soundalike voice for ChatGPT, is the latest to raise concerns about the artificial intelligence start-up’s practices.

OpenAI’s Scarlett Johansson problem

Days before OpenAI demonstrated its new, flirty voice assistant last week, the actress Scarlett Johansson said, Sam Altman, the company’s chief executive, called her agent and asked that she consider licensing her voice for a virtual assistant.

It was his second request to the actress in the past year, Ms. Johansson said in a statement on Monday, adding that the reply both times was no.

Despite those refusals, Ms. Johansson said, OpenAI used a voice that sounded “eerily similar to mine.” She has hired a lawyer and asked OpenAI to stop using a voice it called “Sky.”

OpenAI suspended its release of “Sky” over the weekend. The company said in a blog post on Sunday 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.”

When OpenAI unveiled the latest version of ChatGPT last week, a chatbot that can listen to spoken questions and respond verbally, many users had one question: Is that Scarlett Johansson?

The actress, who provided the voice for an A.I. assistant in the movie “Her,” has now made clear that she did not do the same for OpenAI — and she demanded that the company stop using the sound-alike. It’s another sign of eroding trust in OpenAI, which has taken fire from creative industries and former employees.

“I was shocked, angered and in disbelief,” Johansson said in a statement on Monday, days after OpenAI’s product announcement kicked off debate about one of ChatGPT’s new virtual assistant voices, which is called Sky. The company wouldn’t confirm who provided the vocals, though Sam Altman tacitly encouraged the comparison, plugging the announcement with a single word — “her” — on social media and writing that the new ChatGPT “feels like A.I. from the movies.” (OpenAI’s chief technology officer, Mira Murati, said that was a coincidence.)

In her statement, Johansson shed more light on the matter:

Last September, I received an offer from Sam Altman, who wanted to hire me to voice the current ChatGPT 4.0 system. He told me that he felt that by my voicing the system, I could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and A.I. He said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people.

Altman tried again two days before the ChatGPT product announcement, she added, but released the service before they could connect. Johansson — no stranger to waging war against big companies — suggested that she was ready to take legal action

 

OpenAI backed down. While Altman said after Johansson’s statement that the actor behind the Sky voice had been cast before he reached out to the movie star, his company was pausing the use of Sky.

“We are sorry to Ms. Johansson that we didn’t communicate better,” he added.

The spat is another sign of eroding trust in OpenAI. Johansson explicitly linked her dispute to the fight over “deepfakes and the protection of our own likeness, our own work, our own identities.” (Though the fight in this case was over a sound-alike, not over an A.I.-generated copy.)

It was also reminiscent of fears among Hollywood writers, news publications, authors and others about A.I. being trained on their work without their permission — or compensation — or replacing humans. (The Times and other newspapers have sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement.)

And the controversy emerged after some former OpenAI employees publicly accused the company of caring more about doing business than about ensuring its products don’t harm humanity.

She is the latest high-profile person to accuse OpenAI of using creative work without permission. Over the past year, OpenAI has been sued for copyright violations by authors, actors and newspapers, including the Authors Guild of America and The New York Times, which sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft.

It is the second time in recent years that Ms. Johansson has taken a public stand against a prominent company. In 2021, she sued the Walt Disney Company, accusing it of breaching her contract because it released the film “Black Widow” simultaneously in theaters and on Disney+. Ms. Johansson, who has played the Marvel character Black Widow in eight blockbuster films, reached a settlement with the company.

Before becoming a Marvel superhero, Ms. Johansson made a name for herself in the 2003 film “Lost in Translation” as a young woman who formed an unlikely bond in Tokyo with a movie star played by Bill Murray. She has consistently bounced between more artful fare from directors such as Wes Anderson and Hollywood blockbusters like “The Avengers.” In 2020, she was nominated for two Academy Awards for “Marriage Story” and “Jojo Rabbit.”

In September, Ms. Johansson said, Mr. Altman first reached out to her about providing her voice for OpenAI’s future assistant.

“He told me that he felt that by my voicing the system, I could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and A.I,” she said in her statement. “He said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people.”