What happened
It was reported that on 13 May 2024 OpenAI demonstrated a new version of ChatGPT that could talk out loud, and that one of its voices, called Sky, struck many listeners as sounding like the actor Scarlett Johansson. Around the same time, the company’s chief executive posted a single word, “her”, a reference to the 2013 film in which Johansson voices an AI assistant.
Johansson then said in a public statement that the chief executive had approached her in 2023 to voice the assistant, that she had declined, and that she was shocked and angered to hear a voice that sounded so like her own. OpenAI said Sky had been voiced by a different professional actor using her own natural voice, that this actor had been cast before the company approached Johansson, and that it had not set out to imitate her. It paused the Sky voice within about a week, saying it did so out of respect for Johansson’s concerns.
A later voice analysis, commissioned by NPR and carried out at Arizona State University, reported that Sky sounded more similar to Johansson’s voice than to hundreds of other voices it compared. Reporting noted that this does not establish that OpenAI copied her voice or set out to, and the company’s account stood.
What an auditable version would have shown
An auditable process would have answered the questions everyone was asking after the launch. It would show who chose the voice actor, whether anyone raised concerns that the voice sounded like a real person, whether that person had been asked for permission, what their response was, and who decided to launch the feature anyway. Instead of arguing about consent after the fact, the company would have had a clear record showing exactly what happened and why.
Where the gap was
The problem was that consent appears to have become something to deal with after the launch instead of before it. Whether or not the voice was actually based on Scarlett Johansson, OpenAI had reportedly approached her, she declined, and the released voice was widely compared to hers. That should have triggered a simple question before release: do we have the right to launch something that could reasonably be seen as using this person’s likeness or voice? That question should have been answered before the product went live, not afterwards.
What governance should have looked like
If a product uses a voice or likeness that could reasonably be associated with a real person, permission shouldn’t be an afterthought. It should be a release requirement. Before launch, there should be a clear record showing who approved the voice, whether consent was needed, whether it had been obtained, and who accepted the decision to proceed. That doesn’t just protect the individual. It protects the company as well. When questions arise later, they can be answered with evidence instead of public arguments.
An AuthorityGate is designed to hold a release until the permission behind a likeness is in place and recorded, so a feature does not ship on the assumption that consent can be sorted out later. A ConductRecord of who was cast, who was asked, and what they answered turns consent from a public argument into a matter of record.
The reference implementation of AuthorityGate and ConductRecord is open source. It lives at github.com/saffronandindia/headlights-oss, Apache 2.0 licensed, free for any company to install. The repository is public now.
Sources
- OpenAI pulls its ChatGPT voice that sounds like Scarlett Johansson in the film ‘Her’ (CNBC)
- Scarlett Johansson reacts to the OpenAI Sky voice: ‘shocked’ and ‘angered’ (Variety)
- How the voices for ChatGPT were chosen (OpenAI)
- Voice analysis shows a striking similarity between Scarlett Johansson and the ChatGPT voice (NPR)