OpenAI took down Sky’s voice “out of respect for Ms. Johansson,” as Altman put it, adding, “We are sorry to Ms. Johansson that we didn’t communicate better.”
The double sexism of ChatGPT’s flirty “Her” voice
Is OpenAI gaslighting Scarlett Johansson?
But if OpenAI didn’t do anything wrong, why would it take down the voice? And how much “respect” does this apology really convey, when Altman insists in the same breath that the voice has nothing to do with Johansson?
“He felt that my voice would be comforting to people”
From Apple’s Siri to Amazon’s Alexa to Microsoft’s Cortana, there’s a reason why tech companies have been giving their digital assistants friendly female voices for years. From a business perspective, it’s smart to give your AI that voice. It likely improves your company’s bottom line.
That’s because research shows that when people need help, they prefer to hear it delivered in a female voice, which they perceive as non-threatening. (They prefer a male voice when it comes to authoritative statements.) And companies design the assistants to be unfailingly upbeat and polite in part because that sort of behavior maximizes a user’s desire to keep engaging with the device.
But the design choice is worrying on an ethical level. Researchers say it reinforces sexist stereotypes of women as servile beings who exist only to do someone else’s bidding — to help them, comfort them, and plump up their ego.
According to Johansson, conveying a sense of comfort was exactly Altman’s goal in trying to license her voice nine months ago.
“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 AI,” Johansson wrote. “He said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people.”
It’s not just that Johansson’s breathy, flirty voice is soothing in itself. Johansson voiced Samantha, the AI girlfriend in the romance Her, a story that’s all about how an AI could connect with, comfort, and enliven a lonely human. Notably, Samantha was also far more advanced than anything modern AI companies have put out — so advanced, in fact, it evolves beyond its human user — so associating the new ChatGPT with the film probably helps as well.
There’s a second layer here, one that has to do with a woman’s consent. Despite Johansson’s clear “no” to Altman’s request last year, he used a Johansson-like voice and then, when she complained, told the world that the actress is wrong about the voice being intended to resemble hers.
I wasn’t sure what to call that, so I asked ChatGPT about this type of scenario more generally. Here’s how the chatbot replied:
This is part of a pattern at OpenAI. Can the company be trusted?
The Johansson controversy is the latest in a string of events causing people to lose trust in OpenAI — and specifically in its CEO Altman.
Last year, artists and authors began suing OpenAI for allegedly stealing their copyrighted material to train its AI models. Meanwhile, experts raised the alarm about deepfakes, which are becoming more worrisome by the day as the world approaches major elections.
Then, last November, OpenAI’s board tried to fire Altman because, as they put it then, he was “not consistently candid in his communications.” Former colleagues then came forward to describe him as a manipulator who speaks out of both sides of his mouth — someone who claims that he wants to prioritize deploying AI safely, but contradicts that in his behaviors. Since then, employees have been increasingly coming to the same conclusion, to the point that some are leaving the company.
“I gradually lost trust in OpenAI leadership,” ex-employee Daniel Kokotajlo told me, explaining why he quit his job last month.
“It’s a process of trust collapsing bit by bit, like dominoes falling one by one,” another person with inside knowledge of the company told me last week, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Some employees have avoided speaking out publicly because they signed offboarding agreements with nondisparagement provisions upon leaving. After Vox reported on these agreements, Altman said the company has been in the process of changing them. But the public might well ask: Why would OpenAI have had such restrictive provisions if it wasn’t doing anything that it was keen to keep out of the public eye?
And at a time when several of OpenAI’s most safety-conscious employees are jumping ship because they don’t trust the company’s leaders, why should the public trust them?
In fact, according to a new poll from the Artificial Intelligence Policy Institute, nearly 6 in 10 Americans say the release of the souped-up ChatGPT makes them more worried about AI’s growth, while just 24 percent say it makes them excited. What’s more, 52 percent of Americans now hold an unfavorable opinion of OpenAI.
At this point, the burden of proof is on OpenAI to convince the public that it’s worthy of trust.