OpenAI Pauses Scarlett Johansson-like voice for ChatGPT

| Updated on 9 December 2024

The voice model released by OpenAI for its GPT-4o chatbot is eerily similar to Scarlett Johansson. The voice named Sky is being put on Pause for now, OpenAI said in a statement. 

“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 gives a statement about the same. 

In a blog post, OpenAI said Sky Voice is now being paused after the company used it during the launch of its new multimodal AI model, GPT-4o, last week. 

OpenAI further adds “To protect their privacy, we cannot share the names of our voice talents.”

Scarlett also took to social media to give out a statement regarding the same. She said, “Last September, I received an offer from Sam Altman, who wanted to hire me to voice the current ChatGPT 4.0 system.”

She declined the offer “after much consideration and for personal reasons” and was shocked when she heard the demo.

Altman says that the voice of the Sky is not of Scarlett Johansson, and it was never intended to resemble hers. 

The company said, “Since then, we are encouraged by the way users have responded to the feature and the individual voices. Each of the voices — Breeze, Cove, Ember, Juniper and Sky — are sampled from voice actors we partnered with to create them.”

Last week, OpenAI revealed a new and much faster AI model named, GPT-4o

Alap Naik Desai

Tech Journalist

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