Scarlett Johansson versus OpenAI: Human rights at stake
Johansson wrote. Johansson got herself a lawyer, and OpenAI has since taken down the Sky voice. The company said it “was never intended to resemble" Johansson’s, but Altman had already shown his hand.
On the day the demo was released, he tweeted “her," the title of a movie in which Johansson voices an intelligent chatbot. And during the event, one of the engineers asked ChatGPT to tell a bedtime story about love and robots (weird, but okay), which is pretty much the plot of the film. It seems that even chatbots can’t escape gender bias.
OpenAI’s Sky is just the latest example in a long history of female-voiced assistants—including Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana. They reliably and politely put together shopping lists, set alarms to make sure you get where you need to be on time, make your phone calls, and even entertain your children. They’re doing the kind of labour we expect women to take on both at work and at home, all while teaching the next generation that this is what women do.
Altman treated Johansson as he would his AI assistant, assuming she would happily do his bidding without pushback. He sorely miscalculated; Johansson, one of the world’s highest paid actresses, is not going to put together anyone’s shopping list. Her anger and willingness to fight for what she’s owed is refreshingly at odds with the kind of stereotypes that OpenAI and its brethren perpetuate.
It’s not the first time Johansson has taken on a company that has defied her. In 2021, she sued Walt Disney Company, alleging that the company had breached her Black Widow contract by releasing the action movie on its streaming platform while it still played in theatres. Johansson, who was supposed to get a cut of box office ticket
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