It’s time to talk about AI again! This time, it’s in context of another Scarlett Johansson lawsuit. People should just know that if you give her an opportunity, ScarJo will sue you, so stop giving her opportunities. 

 

The latest is this: Open AI, the tech company behind talkative Wikipedia ChatGPT, released ChatGPT 4.0 last week with a voice called “Sky” which a LOT of people said sounded an awful lot like ScarJo’s famous husky tones. Desi Lydic at The Daily Show called it a “horny robot baby voice”:

 

You can hear “Sky” in that clip, and I don’t think it sounds like ScarJo…most of the time. But there are a few moments that DO sound like her. More, when ChatGPT 4.0 launched, Open AI CEO Sam Altman tweeted this:

 

AND MORE, ScarJo released a statement to CNN, saying that Altman approached her last September about hiring her to provide a voice for their software. She declined, then Altman reached out last week to ScarJo’s rep (power broker Bryan Lourd, do NOT f-ck with him!), asking her to reconsider. Before she could do so, Open AI launched their new version of ChatGPT, including “Sky” as one of the voices. They have since taken “Sky” offline, after widespread mockery of the “flirtatious” and “overly familiar” voice straight from “a male developer’s fantasy”…but also because ScarJo’s lawyers sent Open AI two letters after the product launched. As a reminder, ScarJo’s lawyers previously won against Disney’s infamous legal department. Don’t f-ck with them, either!

 

There’s actually a legal precedent protecting famous individuals’ voices, not just their names and likenesses. Bette Midler sued Ford Motor Company in the 1980s after Ford used a vocal impersonator to sing one of Midler’s famous tunes when Midler herself declined to participate in an advertisement for the Mercury Sable. The US Appellate Court upheld that as a famous singer, a person’s voice is distinctive, just like their image, and you can’t impersonate their voice without their consent. (Yes, Elvis’s estate is going after impersonators.) So OpenAI was already on thin ice, though Sam Altman claims another professional actor was hired to provide “Sky’s” voice. Honestly, the voice isn’t so very similar, and had Altman not tweeted “her”, he might have a leg to stand on. But he pretty clearly wanted to evoke the 2013 film Her, in which ScarJo voiced an AI. 

 

It’s not enough to say, “Compensate people for training/voicing your AI,” apparently, we also have to say, “And don’t steal their voices, URSULA.” This isn’t even the wild west, these precedents and case law exist! Bette Midler sued Ford, Vanna White sued Samsung—these cases are thirty to forty years old, they’re whole ass adults with jobs at this point. Corporations KNOW they can’t just use a famous person’s likeness OR VOICE without consent (and compensation), yes, even tech companies. I’ve seen some “ScarJo choosing the old ways” comments about her legal threat to Open AI but JESUS CHRIST game this out! 

ScarJo already had to deal with having her phone hacked and intimate photos released, she’s already had a nerd build a sexbot in her likeness (it wasn’t made commercially, so she couldn’t do anything about it, though there are unlicensed ScarJo sexbots of varying quality available for purchase if you want to muck up your algorithms like I did researching this piece), now she has to protect her voice from being used as a sexy baby voice for a microchip. She is at the leading edge of protecting individuals from having their likenesses used without consent for someone else’s pleasure.

 

There are a lot of amazing things that machine learning and language learning models can do, but there is also a version of this where someone ends up in court because they f-cked a sex doll made to look like the person they’ve been stalking. There is a non-zero chance we for sure end up litigating whether or not people can make sex dolls and other sexual devices using a person’s image, voice, etc, without their permission. Right now, it’s affecting famous people more than anyone, so they’re the ones filing all the lawsuits, but it WILL leach into the rest of our lives eventually. 

It’s not “the old ways” versus AI, it’s your right to privacy, full stop. People like ScarJo, who are famous enough to be targets and rich enough to afford it, have to take the stand now to set the boundaries for the rest of us, because it is only a matter of time before regular people are suing each other over unauthorized sex doll creation. I will just keep saying this—AI is inevitable, and will, sooner rather than later, integrate into our lives in ways we can’t even imagine. But this technology also poses real ethical concerns around labor, privacy, bodily autonomy, never mind its environmental impact. 

Once again, I do not care if you like Scarlett Johansson, but she finds herself at the front of another important legal fight, because right now it’s just her—and Her—the tech bros are ripping off. But one day soon it will be you and me. And then we are going to need boundaries to deal with this technology and our privacy, or we really will be living in a dystopia. 

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