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Lawyers' Views on Voice Dust-Up Between Scarlett Johansson and OpenAI

By Isha Marathe
June 01, 2024

Actress Scarlett Johansson has threatened the generative software company OpenAI with legal action. And intellectual property lawyers have many thoughts about who might win, whether there's even a legal claim to be made and what it all means.

Here's a quick rundown of what happened: In May, Johansson released a statement to NPR, saying that Sam Altman, OpenAI's founder and CEO, had approached her multiple times to lend her voice to the AI developer's newest voice assistant. According to her statement, she rejected the offers.

Then two days before the release of GPT-4o, OpenAI's new multi-modal large language model, which includes a default voice assistant named "Sky," Altman purportedly asked Johansson to reconsider. Before she could answer, however, GPT-4o — a model able to accept text, audio, image and video and to generate any combination of text, audio and image output — was released on May 13, along with the "Sky" voice, which many instantly assumed to be Johansson's. It was specifically reminiscent of the 2013 Spike Jonze movie Her, which incidentally is the story of a heartbroken man who falls in love with an AI-powered operating system, named Samantha, voiced by Johansson (in a movie where she, notably, does not appear onscreen).

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