Scarlett Johansson was unhappy that an Open AI chatbot used a voice eerily similar to hers after she refused their requests to use her voice. Photograph: Dia Dipasupil/Getty ImagesIn the film Her, a lonely writer called Theodore Twombly falls in love with the disembodied voice of Samantha, a digital assistant played by the actor Scarlett Johansson. “I can’t believe I’m having this conversation with my computer,” Twombly tells Samantha. “You’re not.
She called for greater transparency and appropriate legislation to ensure that individual rights were protected. OpenAI paused the use of the voice, which it later explained belonged to another, unnamed actor.‘We hope the worst has passed’: Ukraine’s farmers plough on through wartime dangersThe incident might have struck officials attending the latest AI Safety Summit in Seoul last week as a diverting celebrity tantrum.
In recent weeks, Jan Leike resigned as head of a safety team at OpenAI following the departure of Ilya Sutskever, one of the company’s co-founders and chief scientist. On X, Leike claimed that safety at the company had taken a back seat to “shiny products”. He argued that OpenAI should devote much more bandwidth to security, confidentiality, human alignment and societal impact. “These problems are quite hard to get right, and I am concerned we aren’t on a trajectory to get there,” he posted.
Both companies say missteps are inevitable when releasing new technologies and they respond quickly to their mistakes. Still, it would instil greater confidence if the leading AI companies were more transparent., published last week by Stanford University.