Hollywood star Scarlett Johansson has said she was left “shocked” and “angered” after OpenAI launched a chatbot with an “eerily similar” voice to her own.
The actress said she had previously turned down an approach by the company to voice its new chatbot, which reads text aloud to users.
When the new model, called Sky, debuted last week commentators were quick to draw comparisons between the chatbot’s tone and Johansson’s in the 2013 film Her.
OpenAI said on Monday that it would remove the voice, but insisted that it was not meant to be an “imitation” of the star.
However, Johansson accused the company, and its founder Sam Altman, of deliberately copying her voice, in a statement released on Monday evening.
The actress, who has been nominated for two academy awards, said she had been initially approached by Mr Altman about voicing the new chatbot in September.
But she eventually rejected the offer for personal reasons, she said.
Two days before the Sky chatbot was released, she added, Mr Altman contacted her agent, urging Johansson to reconsider her initial refusal to co-operate with the company.
Adding that she had been forced to hire lawyers, the actress said she had sent two legal letters to the company, to establish how the voice had been made.
Separately, the firm said it was “working to pause” the voice while it addressed questions about how it was chosen in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
In its blog post, OpenAI said the five voices used by its chatbot had been sampled from voice actors it partnered with.
Johansson’s legal threats come as the company faces several impending lawsuits.
In December, the New York Times said it planned to launch a lawsuit against the corporation over allegations that it had used “millions” of articles published by the media organisation to train its ChatGPT AI model.
And in September, authors George R R Martin and John Grisham also announced a plan to pursue a claim, over allegations their copyright had been infringed to train the system.
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