You may be exhausted from all the clickbait stories about artificial intelligence (AI) — its pros, cons, threats to jobs and humanity. But like it or not, AI is fast becoming a part of life in the exponentially evolving digital age and, as many of last year’s Hollywood strikers feared, it’s threatening the livelihoods of actors and producers in the film business, leading to a flood of lawsuits from performers, directors and entertainment companies.
The latest A-lister to take on AI is Scarlett Johansson, who in 2013, when our present reality seemed plausible but perhaps many more decades in the future, lent her voice talents to the character of an AI personal assistant named Samantha in director Spike Jonze’s critically acclaimed film Her. In that film, Joaquin Phoenix played the delightfully titled character of Theodore Twombly, a lonely future worker bee who falls for his phone’s AI operating system.
All very well and charmingly speculative until this week when pioneering AI company OpenAI launched a demo for its new ChatGPT 4.0 system that included a new voice assistant named “Sky”, which journalists and observers at the launch immediately noticed bore an uncanny resemblance to Johansson’s character’s voice in Her. The similarity was only emphasised by a tweet posted by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman after the demo, which consisted of one word: “Her.”
After the internet went into a frenzy, making comparisons between the film and Sky, the company eventually felt the need to clarify that, despite the increasingly obvious similarities, there was no connection between Sky’s voice and Johansson’s — publishing a blog post detailing the tool’s development to support its claim. “Sky’s voice is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson but belongs to different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice,” read the post, adding that because of privacy restrictions, the company was unable to share the real names of its voice talents.
That may have been the end of what looked like yet another privacy/copyright controversy involving actors and AI. But this week, Johansson came out against OpenAI and revealed that she had in fact been approached to provide the voice for Sky nine months ago. She had refused for “personal reasons” but was “shocked and angered” after hearing the voice in the demo, which, she said, “sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and family could not tell the difference”.
OpenAI has removed the voice but it may be too little too late. Johansson said that when she was initially approached by Altman, he sold the idea to her by claiming that her voice would “bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and AI”. Instead, Altman and OpenAI’s risky decision to go ahead with creating a voice that clearly resembles Johansson’s so closely, and without her participation, has now led to a threat of legal action from the actor and helped to fuel the robots vs humans fight.
Though ChatGPT 4.0 includes four other voices, which OpenAI says were created by a selection process involving more than 400 submissions and in collaboration with “award-winning casting directors and producers”, it’s Johansson’s voice/not voice that everyone is now fixated on and which may prove the site of another benchmark battle in the fight between creatives and AI companies.
As Johansson said in her statement, “In a time when we are all grappling with deepfakes and the protection of our own likenesses, our own work, our own identities, I believe these are questions that deserve absolute clarity.” She added that she looked forward to “resolution in the form of transparency and the passage of appropriate legislation to help ensure that individual rights are protected”.
That’s a sentiment echoed by the Screen Actors Guild, which this week thanked Johansson “for speaking out on this issue of crucial importance. We share in her concerns and fully support her right to have clarity and transparency regarding the voice used in developing the Chat GPT 4.0 appliance ‘Sky’.”
The other problem may be that despite the resemblance of Sky’s voice to Johansson’s, the characteristics of the voice seem to reflect a gendered identity that’s very much a male fantasy of the idea of a perfect woman. Sky offers personable, flirty responses and affects a fawning, ego-stroking attitude that did not go unnoticed with commentators, including The Daily Show comedian Desi Lydic who joked “you can really tell that a man built this tech. She’s like, ‘I have all the information in the world, but I just don’t know anything.’”
Just like Johansson’s character in Her, Sky is a lonely man’s “dream girl” in voice and temperament. The difference is that in the film, Johansson’s character, Samantha, doesn’t remain a fixed ideal vision of a subservient, giving-everything-asking-nothing-in-return woman. Rather, as New York Times columnist Alissa Wilkinson pointed out in an opinion piece this week, Samantha evolves and stops “being the perfect, compliant girlfriend — the fantasy of the yielding, attentive woman without needs of her own — and becomes her own being, one whose existence does not revolve around Theo”.
That kind of evolution and awareness may still not be part of our AI reality but it would make our relationship with technology even more complicated and uncertain than it already is, whatever its voice may sound like.
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