Black Widow Scarlett Johansson responds, saying OpenAI’s millionaire CEO Sam Altman would make an excellent Marvel villain.
“I guess he would — maybe with a robotic arm,” the “Black Widow” actor told The New York Times‘ Maureen Dowd in an article published Saturday.
Johansson made the comment while discussing her fight with Altman and his business, OpenAI. In May, the business debuted the updated GPT-4o model, which had a variety of speech selections.
In May, Sam Altman’s business unveiled its latest generative AI model, GPT-4o, which had a preset called Sky, which Johansson described as sounding “eerily similar” to her voice. The same day, Altman tweeted “her” which many interpreted as a reference to Johansson’s role as an AI operating system in Spike Jonze’s 2013 film “Her.”
Sam Altman’s business unveiled its latest generative AI model
Altman appeared to be laying the groundwork for the Twilight Zone scenario earlier this year: Johansson claims that the CEO approached her last September to be a voice actress for ChatGPT. Neither Altman nor Johannson’s agents returned requests for comment.
In her tweeted message Johansson expressed amazement, outrage, and disbelief that after denying the proposal, Altman would employ a voice so similar to hers that “friends and news outlets could not tell the difference.”
Altman supposedly approached her again two days before the demo was released. He said in a statement to Fortune this spring that Sky was not Johansson’s voice and was not “intended to resemble hers.” Sky has now been taken down.
The event left the actor with a terrible taste in her mouth about what was to come. “It’s like this dark wormhole you can never climb your way out of,” she told Dowd about this realm. “When you attempt to take anything down in one area, it pops up somewhere else.”
She mentioned that in other countries with “different legislations and rules,” someone’s “whole life can be completely ruined” by incidents such as vengeance deep fake porn. Johansson told Dowd that she “had actively avoided being a part of the conversation,” and that she was angry about being “wrapped up” in the incident.
However, the nature of this occurrence appears to have forced Johansson into the role of champion for AI regulation, as members of Congress called on her to testify before a cybersecurity panel in June.
When it comes to artificial intelligence, celebrities and Silicon Valley titans have clashed. Without controls, Hollywood faces a challenge from this new wave of technology.
The rising issue dominated last year’s Writers Guild of America (WGA) and Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) strikes. Everyone from Nicolas Cage to Ashton Kutcher has spoken out on AI’s possible impact on the arts.
Owning your own physical or audio likeness has become a prominent problem. Of course, when it comes to sex symbols, the situation becomes even more dire, as those who are deemed objects of the gaze already battle to manage their own image.
It’s all resulted in creepy crawly sci-fi situations, such as Sydney Sweeny having to react live to a demo of Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked copying her face—and Johansson before her, attempting to halt a replay of “Her.”
“I believe that technology advance quicker than our frail human egos can handle, and the repercussions can be seen everywhere, particularly among young people. “This technology is coming like a thousand-foot wave,” Johansson cautioned.
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