The Patriot Post® · Stealing Faces and Voices

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been the subject of concern for creatives. It can take a person’s voice, it can use a person’s likeness, it can write a novel based on other novels, and it can even take over the jobs of real reporters for a famous sports magazine.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is the latest person in the doghouse for one of the new voice additions to the ChatGPT chatbot. OpenAI released five new voices — Breeze, Cove, Ember, Juniper, and Sky — as part of a demonstration for the next generation of ChatGPT. The voice option dubbed “Sky” prompted actress Scarlett Johansson to seek legal counsel. Why? Because the voice sounded enough like her own to fool her family and friends.

Johansson had been approached by Altman back in the fall hoping that she would agree to provide her voice for the new AI chatbot. He told the actress that it would be “comforting” to hear her voice because people already identified it with AI due to her role in the 2013 movie “Her.” Johansson declined the offer and heard nothing more from Altman and OpenAI until a few days before the ChatGPT demo of “Sky,” when they asked her to reconsider.

As she herself said in a statement, “Before we could connect, the system was out there. As a result of their actions, I was forced to hire legal counsel.”

Johansson and her legal team are seeking to know how that voice was created and requested that “Sky” be taken down while the legal aspect of this conflict is sorted out. Besides approaching the actress for the use of her voice, Altman also posted “her” on social media before the launch, drawing a similarity between the new voice and the movie voice. Seems suspicious.

For its part, OpenAI did take down “Sky,” albeit reluctantly. “Out of respect for Ms. Johansson, we have paused using Sky’s voice in our products,” said Altman. “We are sorry to Ms. Johansson that we didn’t communicate better.”

New York Post writer Kirsten Fleming summed up the situation very astutely. She wrote: “The arrogance of Silicon Valley’s tech overlords is as wide and endless as the ‘Sky.’ We’ve seen over and over again that they are greedy pirates, capable of plundering intellectual property and the unique gifts of creative artists, photographers, musicians and writers. The material they use to inform AI operating systems is essentially stolen booty, scraped from anyone and everyone.”

Johansson is merely the latest controversy in this new frontier of technology. Influencers have had their likeness stolen and used for deepfake commercials. Ordinary middle and high school girls have had their likeness stolen and manipulated to make deepfake porn. Bad political actors are using the tech to create hate crime hoaxes or to manipulate information leading up to the next election.

AI is either rendering people a little less independent or hijacking their reputations, images, and voices for nefarious purposes. Johansson, like many others, is clamoring for regulations and laws to protect creative intellectual properties. As AI’s deficits begin to outweigh its benefits, something will need to be done. The only question is, how many casualties will be left in the dust before the crackdowns begin?