Sky can laugh, sing and speak with astonishing ease about any topic. But Sky is not actually a person. She is, technically, what is known in the technology industry as a “voice assistant.” Its design, which makes use of artificial intelligence (AI), was presented last week by OpenAI, the company that develops the also revolutionary ChatGPT.
(In context: OpenAI pauses Sky’s voice in ChatGPT for resembling Scarlett Johannson’s)
Despite his skills, it wasn’t his advanced interactions that captivated audiences. It was his voice, with a disturbing similarity to the famous actress Scarlett Johansson, which unleashed an earthquake in the industry. The company, in fact, had to take the tool off the market while it resolves legal issues with the Hollywood star.
And, on the one hand, Johansson never authorized the use of her voice. And, on the other hand, it seems that the times when robots had synthetic voices – like Alexa or Siri – are behind us. The fact that they are already imitating the voice of a famous person with disturbing ease brings vital existential questions to the table.
I was shocked, infuriated, and unbelievable that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and the media couldn’t tell the difference.
It is, in any case, a debate of lights and shadows with surreal overtones from a novel by Isaac Asimov. And if it weren’t for the fact that Johansson herself starred in the 2013 film ‘Her’, in which she plays the voice of Samantha, an operating system similar to Sky in which a man falls in love with his virtual assistant, we would say that this is just a science fiction debate.
Sam Altman
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Copyright, the risks of increasingly human AI and the dark desire of Sam Altman
But Altman had already put his idea into action. The head of the company said a few months ago that ‘Her’, directed by Spike Jonze, was his favorite film. For the executive, the story in which Theodore – played by Joaquin Phoenix – fell in love with his virtual assistant (Samantha), had something foreboding and attractive that he wanted to replicate with ChatGPT.
Scarlett Johansson.
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And during the days before the launch of Sky, the director of OpenAI wrote on the social network X: “her.” A simple and concise “her” that translates “she” in Spanish and is a clear allusion to the movie ‘Her’. But not only the film, also Samantha, the protagonist in the film, and Sky, the protagonist who had come to life with the launch of her company.
“I was shocked, infuriated and unbelievable that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and the media couldn’t tell the difference,” the actress said via a statement addressed to the United States public broadcasting service (NPR, in English). Many users even complained on social media that Sky sounded too sexual and flirtatious.
Behind all this there is a huge debate about copyright. And the algorithms used by artificial intelligence are often designed using text, images, audios and videos available on the Internet.
Huge amounts of information are used to program tools like Sky or ChatGPT. The more data they have, the better their ability to interact with humans. However, This may include copyrighted material such as Johansson’s voice.
ChatGPT.
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But while artificial intelligence rides at a speed at which many fear it could replace hundreds of thousands of jobs, others also see an ethical and philosophical dilemma.
Nadella, one of the most influential executives in the world, expresses it and sees Sky as a problem of genesis: Can virtual tools be endowed with a human personality?
OpenAI’s Sam Altman apologized to Scarlett Johansson after she pointed out uncanny similarities between her voice and ChatGPT’s new synthetic voice. Here’s why the movie star suspects there’s more to Sky than just inspiration from ella’s 2013 film ‘Her de ella’: pic.twitter.com/iw1BlcOiox
— DW News (@dwnews) May 22, 2024
“Watching Sky’s presentation, I thought about recent evidence that young people (and, I suspect, older people who don’t yet admit it) are increasingly interested in relationships with virtual beings. The appeal is obvious: humans are messy, smelly, difficult, and disruptive, as well as fabulous, beautiful, loving, and amazing. It is easier to be with a robot that imitates a human but will not disappoint you, a low investment with a high return,” writes critic Alissa Wilkinson.
Joaquin Phoenix, protagonist in the film Her.
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Analysts believe that there cannot be an eagerness to demonize this technology that has already shown its virtues, but AI “is probably arriving faster than we can process it,” Sharon Zhou, co-founder of a technology company, told the agency. AFP. “If there’s going to be something more powerful than us and smarter than us, what does that mean for us?” she asked. “Does it dominate us or do we dominate it?”
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